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For a while now Microsoft have touted their flagship suite of Infromation Worker tools ‘Microsoft Office’ as more than just a set of tools to do documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Moving Office into the space of business intelligence, collaboration, document management, forms and information discovery has been something in Microsoft’s strategy since Office 2003 came on to the scene. Moving the Office platform on still further with the Office 2007 System continues to keep Microsoft ahead in the Information Worker space for enterprise scale corporates.

For smaller orgnisations the Office suite, despite its intuitive nature can be unwieldy, bloated and quite expensive.

Some small companies such as Carson Systems have experimented with try to ditch Microsoft Office and adopt either free tools such as Google Spreadsheet, free text editors such as TextPad on the Mac, the straightforward email capbilities of Apple’s Mail.app and calendaring from Google. Their experiment tells an interesting story whereby they tried to adopt such products, even dabbling with Google Docs for a while, but some key features let them down. Most notably the lack of ability to work offline or unconnected to the Web with this latest batch of browser delivered applications. In lieu of these features Carson Systems reverted back to using some of the Microsoft Office suite.

Offering applications that work in an online and offline capacity is essential and is the natural evolution of office productivity applications. The excellent Read/Write Web has recently covered this area in it’s article “Elephants and Evolution - How the Landscape is Changing for Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Adobe“. In the article John Milan explains that it’s not enough for applications to exists exclusively on the desktop or exclusively on the Web. They must be hybrid applications. Some the follow up comments pose interesting parallels with concepts that have gone before. One person comments that this is merely client / server. My own comment highlights what I think about this area in so far as to say that tools such as Lotus Domino were aiming to cover this space for the corporate marketplace many moons ago. And when you track the evolution of one person instrumental in that vision and it’s technology, Ray Ozzie, you quickly spot who has the potential to do very well in this area. Ray Ozzie is now Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, he joined through the acquisition of his company Groove Networks who produced a collaboration tool that operates both online and offline. A previous post of mine captured some of my ideas of what I think the departure of Gates as head of Microsoft’s software direction and the introduction of Ozzie might elude to. Software as a Service, being the supposed future of application delivery, still needs an interface. As Milan’s article goes on to say:

Who will the winners be? To borrow a catchphrase, “Just follow the data.” The key for success will be how easily data can be identified, distributed and synchronized. Soon enough it will be immaterial where your event or task originated. Instead, what will matter is that your data being everywhere and in sync.

This holds very true in the corporate world where unclean data can be the difference between jail for the CEO and competitive advantage.

What is proving to be interesting in this area for both consumers and corporates alike is how the latest set of applications fighting to help you create, capture, and manage data are panning out. Some, like Parakey from Ross Blake, instrumental in the creation of the Firefox browser, are causing some serious stirs. Only recently announced Parakey aims to provide an application almost like an OS for the household. GigaOm covered Parakey only a few days ago and the Spectrum magazine of the IEEE had the scoop by interviewing Blake himself. What Parakey may do for your household, Mum’s recipes, Dad’s articles on DIY etc. iscrybe aims to do for office productivity. I’ve signed up for the beta of iscrybe and will provide my comments on it once I’ve had chance to give it a go.

None of this is new really. It’s mainly hype, but it’s exciting to see new software companies coming onto the scene pushing the market behemoths like Microsoft to the limit. If the likes of iscrybe only means that Microsoft cut the price of the ever increasing scale of Office applications I’m sure many consumers and organisations will be happier.