Exclusive: ShareMethods beats Google to finish line; Launches EditGrid+Preezo+iNetword Mashup
By Vivek | May 7th, 2007 at 10:35 pm ET
Oh Yeah Preezo is finally live(Salesforce only)! Oh Yeah EditGrid and Preezo and iNetword are working together! Oh Yeah we have the big-big Office20 mashup! I had written about the upcoming launch of this mashup few days back and today I am free to write about the aptly branded and much awaited office suite - ShareOffice. The mashup, driven by on-demand content management solution provider ShareMethods, comes in partnership with the best of the breed Office20 solutions built in the last few years.
Initially being launched on Salesforce AppExchange, ShareOffice would be available in standalone mode in the next few days. The integrated suite provides the ability to easily create, edit documents inside of Salesforce using iNetword processor, EditGrid Spreadsheets, and Preezo(preview mode right now, ie access only via Salesforce) presentation application. Just to list some of the top features that business users will get - realtime collaborative editing capabilities from iNet and EditGrid(Preezo - coming up), “One Click” launch of Document Templates for Fax, Quotes, Proposals, Full Text Search for Online and Desktop Documents, tagging, desktop access and Offline Support via ShareDrive OnDemand to key documents including offline synchronization of files and folders, SSL encryption of your communication, Service Level Agreement (SLA) committing to application availability of 99.9%, and best of all - Open Standards Internet File System (IFS) where users navigate through a familiar multi-level file and folder model for online documents based on a worldwide open standard for document sharing and running purely in AJAX. There is more of ShareOffice than what I put here that makes it a very well featured solution to start with.
As for the pricing, since the suite is currently targeted at Salesforce customers it will cost $25 to $45 per user per month for full featured access to an individual user; read-only users seats would come for $15 per user per month with volume discounts to $5 per user per month for large user communities.
All in all, lots of hardwork in planning, setting up the partnerships, and eventual integration all the apps to provide a comprehensive solution. If you are a Salesforce user and haven’t upgraded to Office 2007 or moved to Google Apps, migration to ShareOffice would be the perfect move as the Office20 pieces start falling into place. Actually let’s not stop there. Forget about Microsoft, I think ShareMethods has very effectively beaten Google at it’s own game - providing SaaS solutions. Despite all the server farms, and developers, and big bucks, Google has been out maneuvered by a far smaller set of companies. In some ways it shows that bureaucracy is slowing down Google. I would say, give these smart startups another year or so and they will completely eliminate the so called FOG by making more partnerships among the likes.
Coming back to the real story, ShareMethods will be looking to integrate more applications into the office mashup. To that effect, ShareMethods is launching OpenSAM, which is a set of recommendations and techniques for integrating SaaS applications into incredibly powerful and flexible solutions. You would pretty soon see lot more of your favorite collaboration applications joining in the ShareOffice Office20 Marketplace.
Checkout a Preezo based presentation showing highlights of ShareOffice.
Links:
ShareMethods
ShareOffice on AppExchange
Preezo
EditGrid
iNetword
