My favorite part of any tech conference is the new product demos. At the Office 2.0 Conference, a parade of execs came to the stage to show off their Web-based business tools.

My top picks

Wufoo makes it easy to create online forms. Want to put a survey on your site? Collect e-mail addresses? Poll your users? Check out this tool; it looks fantastic. Pricing is based on the number of records collected.

Smartsheet is a "team task manager." It works a lot like a group spreadsheet, but there's more here. This tool lets you roll subprojects into bigger projects and makes it easy to request status updates from team members, including recurring updates (it will bug a person once a week, for example). The e-mail that users get is a form, and when they fill it out, it updates the Smartsheet project list. Looks like a very clean and useful tool.

Trovix is a recruiting and hiring tool. For each job opening, the user puts in some text in various fields (education, experience, and so on), and the system analyzes resumes and puts the most promising candidates at the top of the stack. The matching system does some language analysis; it doesn't just match keywords. Trovix reads PDF and Word files, so applicants don't have to submit their resumes into a Web form.

FreshBooks is an online invoicing service. It will also send invoices by snail mail if you want. New features include the capability for users to benchmark their collections performance (average revenue, time to get paid, and so on) against others' in their particular industry. I like this tool a lot; I covered it for the first time in August.

The rest

Approver helps you manage the approval cycle for work documents. Very simple (which is good). I covered it earlier this week.

Vyew makes very cool--and free--collaboration and conference software. It makes it easy to share a presentation or a screen with others. New features to come include the capability to save presentations locally, for later offline editing, or as PowerPoint presentations. See my previous coverage.

Caspio makes site-building tools for the enterprise and small business. There are a lot of tools in this space (see recent coverage of SiteKreator and CogHead), but it's a big market: Every business needs a Web site. Caspio's database control looks an awful lot like Microsoft Access, but it runs completely over the Web. It looks like a very capable service.

Enterprise software giant BEA is showing a prealpha version of a tool to "collaboratively build business applications." Looks like a nice tool to build new apps on top of existing BEA installations. There's a blogging tool on this application, too, although how that integrates in with the application builder wasn't completely clear.

Synthasite is also a site builder. There are several prebuilt templates to get you started, but there's also the capability to let you build a site from scratch. It looks like a credible competitor to FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

SiteKreator. Oh look, another site-building tool. This one is also good. The Office 2.0 Conference site was built on it. I've covered the tool before.

Preezo is an online presentation tool--a Web-based PowerPoint competitor. The Demo looked great, but this is going to be a very crowded market. Preezo should launch in two weeks.

Koral is a content management system. Business users drop files into a Koral dropbox, and the system then suggests tags for them. To see files, users can use a Netvibes-like front page or search for tags, authors, or full text. Users can subscribe to tags or authors, too, which is interesting for businesses. Enterprise document management is a big market--and a big problem in most companies--and this looks like a fresh solution.

TechDirt is launching its Insight Community. It's an ad-hoc analyst network, where enterprises can reach out to blogger experts to get their opinions. Bloggers get paid for their private opinions, and TechDirt takes a cut of the action. Not a bad idea, especially considering the number of really smart bloggers out there who are not making a dime for their efforts.

Etelos is building a "store" where businesses can select various online applications, but it doesn't actually host them. Customers can select a third-party host on the Etelos service or host the apps on their own servers. Sounds like SalesForce.com's AppExchange, with a similar push to get third-party developers to build apps on the platform. The company's aversion to hosting applications itself is a little odd.

System One is a business wiki platform. The cool thing about it is that it collates related data and files (blogs, Web pages, e-mails) for each page and lists them at the bottom of every page.

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Here's where the posturing meets reality. Almost. I just saw four demos at the Office 2.0 conference, showing how new online products can enhance the way we really work. The upshot: It's all good, baby...if you have a lot of time to wait for your apps and data to come over the network.

First up, Sharemethods, showing a "multiway mashup," combining several online tools, including Google, Salesforce.com, iNetWord, and Thumstacks. It was an impressive display of how you can mush different online applications together--a word processor, a presentation tool, sales management, and other tools. This demo reminded me of a Microsoft pitch: a made-up company doing tasks that were invented to show off technology. Realistically, most companies will start with smaller projects.

Still, the demo shattered one of my big misconceptions: That it is nearly impossible to get online productivity tools from different vendors to work together. Enterprises, it turns out, can make mashups, too.

Up next: iNetOffice, which makes an online word processor, iNetWord, designed to be mashed into other applications. It's a great pitch for business technologists wondering how they're going to apply Web 2.0 technologies to their careers.

T.J. Kang took over to show us ThinkFree, which I've referenced quite a bit in the past few posts. The company makes an impressive online office suite. At the conference, T.J. started by showing a request he received in Gmail...but wait! Gmail is down for him. So much for online productivity.

Gmail came back in a minute and T.J. proceeded with his demo. I really like ThinkFree, but network slowness really made the demo drag. T.J.'s request to the audience, "It would probably help if you all stopped using the network," points out one of the biggest weaknesses with Office 2.0.

Next up: Zoho's Sridhar Vembu. Zoho also makes online productivity suites and today is announcing Zoho Virtual Office. "Our servers are swamped," Sridhar says. Uh-oh. And like ThinkFree, Zoho was taking too much time to load demo pages, like a spreadsheet of an employee appraisal. Nonetheless, the demo did show some cool capabilities, like how one spreadsheet can update another.

And here's gOffice, which is--surprise--another online suite. gOffice is "just me," presenter Kevin Warnock said. It's a very impressive effort for a one-man show, but it doesn't have the features or integration of the other apps. It's not even full WYSIWYG. Warnock focused his efforts on output. Basically, gOffice is the front end to the LaTeX typesetting tool. If you need professional typesetting, check it out. Otherwise, as Kevin says, the other apps offer users much more. Kevin is, in fact, trying to figure out what to do with his company. If you have ideas, look him up.

Last up, Joyent's David Young. Joyent offers not just online apps, but an XDrive-like online storage system. See my previous coverage of this suite. Announced at the conference, a new program called Jill's Team that places an assistant--an actual person, starting at $450 a month--on your team. This person will work with your team over the phone and the Web and do assistant-like things, such as ordering lunch and looking into travel options. Because, you know, Office 2.0 goes only so far.

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GigaOm blogger Om Malik is asking the people on his panel, "Office 2.0: Where Are We?" where they are on the Office 2.0 scale. Are they old-school Office 1.0 (PC-based apps) users, or all-online, Office 2.0 gurus?

Ismael Ghalimi, the conference organizer, says he's at Office 1.95. The Web let him down when he had to print conference badges.

Karen Leavitt, of WebEx, who says her company is the 800-pound gorilla of Web 2.0, says she's at Office 1.73.

Mark Suster is CEO of Koral, a content collaboration company. He's at 1.75. And he points out that people around the world work very differently. The way we do things in California is very different from the way workers in Europe, Asia, or Wisconsin do. That's a really important point.

Rajen Sheth, of Google, is trying to bring Google technologies to business. He says he's at 1.9999. That's interesting, since I think Google office apps still have a long way to go. Plus he still uses Outlook. Rajen, if you believe, take the plunge!

Suster points out that, in business, there are big issues associated with adopting Web 2.0 products, since they don't offer companies as much control as they're used to having. This is an ongoing argument, actually--the PC blew up the "glass house" of business computing. Web-based products are just continuing this creative destruction.

Sheth and Malik are big proponents of Web-based tools, since they make globally distributed workgroups effective. Plus, Malik says, when people are not all crammed together in a central office: "No politics."

A very smart aside from Israel: "The killer app is online recruiting." How true, since the next generation of workers is already online in ways that we old fogys are not. The Work 1.0-style resume may be dead.

Me, although I write about Web-based applications all the time, I confess that I'm probably at Office 1.25. I still use Microsoft Word and Outlook, and I store all my files on my local hard disk. I use Web tools for collaboration, and I am eager to move to Office 2.0 apps, but it's hard to break my old habits.

Where are you on the Office 2.0 scale?

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Dan Farber and Esther Dyson look to the future of office apps.
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ZDNet's Dan Farber is interviewing brainiac Esther Dyson at the Office 2.0 Conference. The question kicking off the show: "What is Work 2.0?"

"It's less about spreadsheets and word processing," and definitely not just about sticking it to Microsoft by using online productivity applications, Esther says. "And anyway," she adds, "the biggest anti-Microsoft force is inside Microsoft: Ray Ozzie."

Esther sees the benefit of online working in what IBM calls, "activity management," using networked technologies to coordinate schedules and tasks and to synchronize your work with your colleagues.

Online applications also level the playing field--the little guys are greatly aided by tools that let them collaborate more easily with each other and with customers. Larger companies, Esther says, have more social and political overhead (not as much trust among employees, or company to company) and are less able to take advantage of these new tools.

Despite the clear advantages of online applications, there are some open issues, primarily the reliability of all the little companies that are now angling for our business. Do we trust these new companies to keep our data safe and secure? That's a really important question, and I'll be looking at the new products shown here with this in mind.

Is Esther living the Office 2.0 dream? "I'm probably Office 0.8," she says. There's not enough reliable connectivity in her life for her to rely on online applications. But there is potential: "If Office 2.0 is going to be successful, it's going to be about the ease of collaboration. And that's not just about collaborative editing; it's about managing tasks."

I previously wrote a column for Esther's newsletter, Release 1.0.

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Google Docs and Spreadsheets puts all your files in one place.
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The word processor interface has been cleaned up a bit.
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Google just launched the feature I was kvetching about yesterday when I covered Zoho: an integrated file system for its productivity applications. Until now, documents created in Writely and in Google Spreadsheets lived separately. But in the new, publicly available Google Docs and Spreadsheets, at docs.google.com, all the documents you create in either Docs (no more "Writely") or Spreadsheets are displayed in one interface, where you can tag your files and sort them however you want. It's a big improvement.

Google is also bringing the user interfaces and the feature sets of the two applications closer together. Both look very similar, and both have similar common functions, such as import and export. But it's clear that the Google apps were built by separate teams. Little differences give it away: The collaboration function is a separate page in Docs, but a right-hand panel in Spreadsheets. Spreadsheets also has a built-in chat feature to complement its real-time group editing capability. Docs has no chat (although it does have group editing). On the other hand, Docs lets you see a list of all the revisions other users have made; Spreadsheets does not.

Most importantly, although you can see all your files in one place, the two applications aren't really integrated. You cannot embed a spreadsheet into a document, for example. That's lame.

Today's release of Google Docs and Spreadsheets is a step forward, and I trust that Google will continue to improve the feature set, usability, and integration of these two products. At a preview for bloggers earlier today, we heard about some future plans such as integration with Gmail (when you get a word processing file or a spreadsheet as an attachment, you'll have the option to open the file in Docs and Spreadsheets). The team is also working on APIs, so other programmers can access the functionality of the applications. Also, Google is going to "take a shot" at a disconnected version, for users who want to access files when they are offline. And they're working on other applications, too.

I like Google's online applications despite their early-stage flaws and omissions. They're easy to use, and their collaboration features, while basic, set them apart from standard office applications. People looking for clean and simple online applications will find Google Docs and Spreadsheets useful. Those who need a more fully developed online suite right now should check out Zoho and ThinkFree. This market is moving fast; it's being reported on TechCrunch that Zoho will launch a more complete and very tightly integrated online productivity suite, Zoho Virtual Office, at the Office 2.0 Conference.

Screenshots courtesy of Google. We'll have a hands-on review soon.

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The Approver dashboard tells you which docs need your attention
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For each document, you can see whose approval is still pending
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At the Office 2.0 Conference that starts tomorrow, we're going to see several new Web-based business tools, from big and ambitious office suites to smaller, focused problem solvers, such as Approver. This little service was built to address the typical office frustration of collecting comments and approvals on documents.

Approver sends e-mail messages to the people you need to review your documents and points them to a Web page for each document. Documents can be attached to the online Approver record if you wish, or you can send your recipients URLs pointing to files, or create text in Approver itself. The service will then track who has approved your document by the deadline you set, and it will send reminders to the laggards.

The tool attempts to make simple what is actually a complex social interaction, and some nuance gets left behind--on purpose, it turns out. For example, you can leave as many comments on documents as you want, without actually approving a file, but there's no actual reject option. Approver creator Jeffrey McManus told me he's trying to do a little bit of social engineering and encourage dialogue. That's really swell, but I bet he'll have to add the big red stamp of rejection to the product as more people start asking for it.

I also think the dashboard view of documents pending approval could convey more information. Again, McManus is working on it; he showed me a prototype that looks pretty good (I approved it).

The real thing McManus needs to do, and which he is actively working on, is to make Approver into a platform that works within existing document creation systems, such as Microsoft Office, or Writely, or Zoho. The Approver concept will work best when it's integrated into workflow, not separate from it.

But even today, in its very early stage, Approver is a clear-headed and cost-effective solution to a nagging workflow issue. It's certainly a better tool for tracking the document approval cycle than e-mail, and it's worth trying. The service is free for the first document, $40 a year thereafter.

CNET is a sponsor of the Office 2.0 Conference.

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Zoho SSO: all your Zoho logins can now be merged
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The online application company Zoho announced on Friday that has launched a single sign-on (SSO) feature. Now you can integrate all of the Zoho applications that you've signed up for separately into one account. For example, if you signed up for the word processor Zoho Write using your corporate e-mail as your ID and the presentation app Zoho Show on Gmail, you'll now be able to merge all the accounts together and you'll stay signed on as you move from app to app.

This is getting some play in the Web 2.0 blogs. But for the end user, it's not that big a deal, mostly because Zoho doesn't yet collect in one place all the files you create in its separate apps. If you start a file in the spreadsheet app, for instance, it won't show up in the word processor.

File-based organization, as opposed to Zoho's current app-based organization, is coming soon, Zoho architect Raju Vegesna told me. That's good, because that's what users really need. It's what we already have on our PCs and Macs--files separate from applications. The online suite ThinkFree gets it right: your account page shows you everything you've created using the company's suite of applications. Google, though, does not. Writely can't see data created in Google Spreadsheets, and vice versa.

This is one of the issues that I'll be discussing at a panel I'm moderating at the Office 2.0 Conference this week (CNET is sponsoring the event). It promises to be a very interesting conference, and I'll be blogging from there.

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