Category — Office

Our SMBx Application Marketplace panel discussion went well today - despite the fact that it started at 8:30am and everyone was out late at the parties last night.   We had probably 150+ people in the session and tons of great questions from the audience, and many people who stayed after to talk.  Thanks to everyone who attended!

The big announcement today - I’m sitting in the Eric Schmidt keynote at Web 2.0 where John Battelle is interviewing Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.  He just announced that Google is offering an online presentation tool to round out their Google docs and spreadsheets offerings. 

John asks him - “is this a competitor to Microsoft?”

Eric replies - “no, it does not have all the features that Office has, and it targets different scenarios.  We’re really focusing on how people use the web.” 

John says - “Come on.  This is a competitor to Microsoft Office!  This provides people with a free alternative to some of the capabilities.”

Eric says - “I’m sure Microsoft will respond, they have a set of web based products they can talk about.  Web 2.0 is about an architectural transition, and this is a testament of what is possible.”

(I’m paraphrasing these quotes here)

Now they are talking about the DoubleClick acquisition…

I’ll have more to say about this later today…

What is Office Live?  What does it mean for web-savvy developers?  Here is my attempt to bring things together in one of my favorite ways - a mindmap.   

Simply put, Office Live is a set of web-based services for small businesses to manage their business online.  It consists of a public facing web site for their customers and private web site that employees can use to collaborate and manage the business.  The private site comes with business applications for managing contacts, e-mail, calendars, projects, documents, sales and more.

These sites can be customized by developers, and this map contains links to developer resources for customizing both Public and Private Office Live sites, and a map to the Office Live Developer Guide.

Click on the image to view it as a click-able image map, and if you want to view it better and be able to manipulate it, get MindManager or download the free viewer.  Then download the Mindmap itself.

Also - I’d like to keep this current, so please tell me what I’ve left out in the comments below!