To coincide with the release of the desktop Office 2010 beta, Microsoft is finally embracing the web office with today’s release of Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps beta, a web version of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that augments or even replaces the desktop version of Microsoft Office.
With Google and Zoho adding new features and winning customers from the venerable Microsoft Office suite, putting Office on the web is a move that is long overdue. It has the potential to offer users a better way to collaborate with their employers, clients and project teams. Read the rest of this entry »
As of today, Microsoft Office 2010 has officially left Technical Preview and is now in public beta, meaning that anybody can download it and take it for a spin. I was able to get an early look at the beta and want to relay some of the changes you can expect in this upcoming release. Microsoft is really stepping up its game with this release, and even though there are scattered reports of performance issues, I am not seeing them on my Vista test machine.
We covered the release of the Office 2010 Technical Preview and the Office Web Apps Technical Preview. This beta smooths out some rough edges in the Technical Preview releases and adds some new features: Read the rest of this entry »
Perhaps the greatest treasure in the recent MacHeist nanoBundle (which was covered by Simon in a recent post) is ShoveBox. It’s a clippings organizer that lets you capture, view, organize and edit data that is elegant in its simplicity. This very usable application resides in the menubar, making it accessible at all times regardless of what application you are using.
Capture Information in ShoveBox
Living online, we can get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of “stuff” that we need to keep track of — URLs, images, notes, quotes, snippets of information, the list goes on. With ShoveBox, you can easily capture all of that stuff into the application and keep it organized and easy to find when you need it. It’s designed to fit effortlessly into your workflow, making it ideal for users who aren’t productivity or organizational ninjas. Read the rest of this entry »
Corporate email is becoming increasingly less effective for project communications in today’s geographically dispersed work teams. It’s gradually being displaced by solutions like Microsoft SharePoint, instant messaging and even social media tools.
Following the lead of Twitter, microblogging has began to enter the enterprise with Yammer and Present.ly leading the way. 
Over on GigaOM, Jennifer recently wrote a post entitled “Social Network Use in the Office Could Spur Better Enterprise Technology” about the value of social media inside the enterprise and some of the benefits for companies.
The next step is taking corporate microblogging tools mobile. Both Yammer and Present.ly offer iPhone apps (available for free download from the iTunes App Store): Read the rest of this entry »
When I made the jump to the iPhone 3G it was most definitely a platform play for me. As a web worker who can be on and off client sites all day, I still want access to my personal web properties, especially my blogs, which serve as a professional face for me online. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the banes of many writers’ existence (including my own!) is inheriting a slew of documents where the people working on them previously haven’t paid much heed to document versioning, leaving you trying to make sense of a mishmash of documents. On more than one occasion, I’ve been left hoping for a tool that would enable me to compare documents in bulk so I can get a mess of a documentation library under control before I can begin the real work on a project.
While word processors like Microsoft Word often include a one-to-one compare documents feature, what if you inherit a whole library of documents? Enter CompareMyDocs.com, a new web-based service from Nordic River, the makers of TextFlow, a version management tool. It enables you to compare multiple .rtf, .doc, and .docx documents. Read the rest of this entry »
As Google is issuing Wave invites in a steady trickle, those fortunate enough to have an account are trying to figure out how this new tool might fit into their workflow and help them better communicate and collaborate with their teams and clients. Read the rest of this entry »
My previous post “6 Tips for Using Google Wave on your First Project” was really about the initial experience a client and I had with Google Wave, and some the early lessons we learned. While I would rank both of us as web-savvy early adopters, suffice it to say my wish list for Google Wave features has been growing fairly rapidly. Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
