Online applications

Go online – get it free!
Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

Many of today's most common applications are available free online. Not as free downloads, but rather as free web-based applications. A Web application is an application that is accessed with a Web browser over a network such as the Internet or an intranet.

Almost everyone these days is familiar with a web-based application in the form of web-based email, the most prominent examples of which are Hotmail and Google Mail (Gmail). Aside from email, however, the four most commonly used applications today, are probably

Word Processor
Spreadsheet
Calendar/diary
Image editor

For most people, this means owning a copy of Microsoft Office and a copy of Photoshop and, whilst there are free or low-cost alternatives to this (possibly the subject of another article!), pretty much all of the core functionality offered by these applications can be got for free online

Online alternatives

Calendaring: Yahoo Calendar http://calendar.yahoo.com
Word processing: Google Docs & Spreadsheet http://docs.google.com
Spreadsheet: Google Docs & Spreadsheet http://docs.google.com
Image editing: Snipshot http://snipshot.com

At first glance, the business case for this seems obvious then: you can reduce your I.T infrastructure costs by encouraging your employees to use free online tools in place of traditional applications. But are there any disadvantages?
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Compatibility
Crucially, any alternative to MS Word would have to offer compatibility with the Word format in both directions (opening & saving). Google's Docs & Spreadsheets tools do just that. Take a typical Word doc, perhaps sent to you by a colleague, upload it to your online account, open, edit, share, save and download it to you PC again, preserving the Word document compatibility. In fact, your colleague will probably never know that you did not use Word!
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Usability
Are web applications sophisticated enough in functionality yet friendly enough to allow users to take advantage of that functionality? Despite what you might think, a Web interface places very few limits on an applications user interface or functionality. Technologies such as Java, JavaScript, CSS, Flash and others, have allowed developers to build sophisticated screens and methods such as drawing on the screen, drag and drop and generally create an interactive experience that does not differ greatly from what users have come to expect in a traditional application.
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Security, storage & backup
It may be a little un-nerving for companies to store files in an online account but the reality is that they are probably safer there than on your PC. Consider the following:

A high-end web server is an expensive piece of kit, housed in a secure, often guarded environment with protection against fires, floods and, crucially, cleaners. They will also include integrated backup, hardware redundancy and firewalls as thick, metaphorically speaking, as the walls of a nuclear bunker.

Your PC, on the other hand is probably a relatively cheap consumer product, with one hard disk, located in your office, with little or no backup, no redundancy and a basic firewall. Even if it is a 'Server', with multiple drives and automated backup, kept separate from the other 'Client' computers, of a higher spec and better maintained, how much redundancy does it really have? Where is the backup kept? What contingencies are there for fire or theft? These are important questions that anyone who depends on their files for a living should address. If you use an online application, however, you might not need to. If you are downloading the files you create to your PC, or your network, you are instantly creating a significant level of redundancy and backup, one that would be expensive to replicate within your own I.T infrastructure.
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Accessibility & collaboration
Have you ever sent a colleague, client or supplier a document and they couldn't open it? Do they use the same program as you? Do they use the same version as you? A significant advantage of Web applications is they should work the same for any user, across browsers and across operating systems. This opens up the opportunity for you to be able to access and edit your files from any computer, anywhere. It should also mean that you can share these files easily with anyone you like, regardless of what version of Word they use. Most online applications will offer a simple path to sharing, collaboration and publishing your files and these advantages offer ways of creating and managing documents that the traditional applications like MS Word are struggling to catch up with.
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Achilles heel?
Hold onto your copy of MS Office, there is one tiny flaw in the plan!

My Internet connection is down!

I can't get online, so I can't access my emails and I can't access my work!

What all this means is that the future of web applications depends on the reliability of the network that people use to access those applications. For myself, I have probably experienced a total of half a day's downtime in the last year, so I'm not too worried. There are Wi-Fi connections springing up everywhere and anyway, I download any files that are 'in progress' to my laptop, so I can continue working. I'll upload them later…

Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.