Yahoo! has acquired Zimbra, a leader in email and collaboration software. Zimbra also provides a product for offline access called Zimbra Desktop. Another key aspect of Zimbra has been that it has open sourced all its products, including the Desktop. Though the deal seems to be mostly about messaging, this can help Yahoo! enter the online office space.
This, at the same time when Mozilla has decided to spin off an email and Internet communications company with Thunderbird at its core. A while back, Mozilla had declared that it was looking for avenues to separate out Thunderbird’s development. This news is a better followup on that. The technology behind Thunderbird is solid, cross platform and is even spewing out new email clients. Here’s looking forward to more thunder.
Alongside, Google has spruced up its online office offering by adding the presentation power through Presently.
In yet another development, the open source desktop office suite, OpenOffice has released version 2.3. I would really love to read one of these releases that talk about collaboration between offline and online office suites. I think a practical office suite should let met work on my documents on my machine and then let me sync it with an online version. I hope this happens soon.
In my opinion, we will see some more action. It will be interesting to see if it heads towards browsered or webified applications.
September 18th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Nice article.
Sun is even making available its commercial version Staroffice via google pack.
http://indyankk.blogspot.com/2007/09/get-sun-microsystems-staroffice-for.html