OpenOffice goes online!

Gael Duval, the creator of Mandriva and now CEO of Ulteo (ironically Ulteo is based on Debian, and not Mandriva, or any other RPM based distro) has taken the open source OOo (OpenOffice.org) and put it online. This takes googledocs (formerly Writely) and takes it several steps further.

All it requires is relatively up to date web browser and a JVM (Java Virtual Machine)

Fortunately, OOo is pretty much identical to its desktop counterpart, which gives it way more features than its competitors, that have built (from the ground up) very limited web based (usually ajax or flash) Office imitations.

you can sign up at www.ulteo.com/home/ooo

It is a shame that Duval chose OOo, as even when running on a local machine, it’s a bit bloated. Ideally they could have used Abiword, a very light, yet still good word processor), but I’m sure the fact that OOo has java all over it made this port possible. In case anyone is wondering why this would be useful…

Imagine you have a laptop, a desktop, a work computer, and you sometimes travel, and use random computers. This way, you store your documents online, and they’re all accessible from anywhere with a web browser. It’s kinda similar to how web based email took over from POP and IMAP for most non business users.