Real Time Collaboration and Web 2.0 tools, tips, and reviews

I totally agree Jeff. In fact this was the thinking behind our latest product at Jotspot -- Jotspot Tracker. We believe spreadsheets changed the world by putting amazing tools on everybody's desktop. But they don't work really well in a collaborative environment. Our thinking was take a spreadsheet and make it work well online, not try and duplicate a desktop spreadsheet. Check it out if you get a chance.

Thank you for the comment, Scott. I did check out Tracker, and in fact, I'm using it now for a collaboration project at work. I'll post the results of our efforts in a new blog entry.

I wish you had the same ammount of critisim towards microsoft also, because it is their need to "protect" their formats what makes difficult for those who work with ajax and such to integrate them to online apps...
Yes you will be able to integrate your spreadsheets into an online document, it is not imposible (php excel parser could be integrated into one of this solutions), also you should take a look at google spreadsheets (which does a great job at importing excel files).

If one thing will come out from all of theese apps is that many people can get to the same solution working different ways... Also that those people should unite efforts on making those things interoperate in a way that i could use a google spreadsheet in a Writeboard using just a reference to the file (that would get picked up and parsed by an API)...

Good article, while I would reccomend Writely (Now Google Documents) and the rest of the Google suite to my readers, I am still weary of a few points.

Some of the bugs and the lack of integration are key issues for me as I'm one of those people who copies tables and pictures into my documents 'willy-nilly' and Writely won't take images out of the clipboard. Not only this, but it won't allow me to search my documents, schedule them into my Google Calendar, collaborate with contacts in my Gmail account or add pictures from my Picasa photos.

Sure Ajax is difficult and they need to make it work for millions of computers worldwide, but a multi billion dollar multinational company must have the resources to develop an effective solution eventually...

Keep up the good articles,

Robert.

Microsoft is taking sign-ups from those interested in beta testing the English-language version of Office Live Workspace starting October 1. The actual invitation-only beta isn’t likely to launch for another month, according to Rajesh Jha, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office Live. The beta and the final versions of the service (at least for saving/accessing up to 1,000 documents) will be free, the Softies said. No word on how much, if anything, Microsoft plans to charge once users have more than 1,000 Word, Excel and PowerPoint files they want to store online.