Your Online Office

A host of new free or low-cost online competitors are trying to nibble away at Microsoft's $11.8 billion office pie by pulling together productivity suites with online document storage and innovate sharing and collaboration features.

The new options can prove useful for group efforts,and the price is certainly right.

But none of these packages have the features set to truly challenge office - for now.

Google recenlty launched its free Google docs & Spreadsheets services (docs.google.com).

Creating a new interface for its previously seperate word processing and spreadsheet applications.

Thinkfree (Thinkfree.com) and Zoho (zoho.com),in their more extensive suites,also offer powerpoint-like presentation programs.

Like Google,Thinkfree and Zoho are free for individual users and allow you to save documents in a variety of formats,including HTML.

A fourth contender,gOffice (goffice.com),charges a minimal amount per month for its limited word processing and spreadsheet programs,with a presentation app to come.

Document-creation applications have been available online for some time.

But by bringing such tools together as suites and offering downloadable business packages,these companies are obviously making a distinct effort to entice users away from Microsoft's ubiquitous software.

Beyond OfficeTHE SITES CLEARLY have some thinkg Microsoft currently does not:the ability to create easily shareable documents,spreadsheets and calendars on any Internet-connected PC,regardless of OS - and without you having to install expensive software.

After creating or editing your doc or worksheet in Google's offering,for example,you can use one click publishing to put it on public display at a unique Google-created URL.

Or you can collaborate by sending an e-mail to work-mates containing a link to edit a particular document.

Both Thinkfree and Zoho offer similar sharing options.

As suites,these services also offer useful central document repositories you can access from any system with an Internet connection.

Google gives you space for 1000 documents and 100 spreadsheets,while Thinkfree and Zoho both offer 1GB of space free,and add more for a monthly charge.gOffice stands apart by saving only to your hard drive,with no plans for online storage.

All suites largely mimic Office's interface with familiar menues and toolbars,and create a desktop-app feel with Ajax (asynchronous javascript and XML).

Largely credited as the magic behind the more interactive "Web 2.0" approach the popular Ajax style of Wen programming means that users don't have to wait for a page refresh after making changes, and it can also enable right-click menus specific to the online application instead of to the Web browser.

Although ThinkFree uses Ajax for quick editing,it loads a slower and more resource-hungry Java Virtual Machine for its more feature-rich "power editing" mode.

All the services permit quick rollbacks to previous versions of files,and Zoho can show the differences between versions without fully reverting.

All can with varying degrees of success-upload and import Office files,as well though formatting and text placement often don't line up correctly for imported documents (particularly for spreadsheets and document charts).

"The sharing that the Internet offers is an awesome opportunity to do things we aren't doing well today." notes Chris Capossela,vice president for Microsoft's Business Division Product Management Group.

Microsoft says that it has plans to create an online version of its entry-level Works package,but the company's opportunistically named Office Live Website doen't actually offer any Office applications.

The online suites that do stick around will no doubt continue to evolve quickly.

However,Microsoft is not standing still and Office 2007 will have its own new collaborative online tools for both enterprise and consumer users.

Free is a big draw,but for serious work Microsoft needn't feel nervous about losing Office users just yet.