iNetOffice and ShareMethods Create Online Office Mashup and Ajax Mashup Specification
Application mashup demo of Salesforce.com, Google, Thumbstacks, iRows, ShareMethods, and iNetOffice shows power of composite applications, increased productivity, and open standards interoperability
SAN FRANCISCO, October 11, 2006 -- iNetOffice, a browser-based office applications provider, and ShareMethods, an on-demand sales and marketing document management vendor, today announced a partnership to bring online office applications to market and to develop Ajax mashup recommendations. The goal of the joint work is to provide the next wave of software services to dramatically improve efficiency and flexibility working with documents online using multiple on-demand applications. The companies demonstrated their mashup at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco on October 11, showing the power, potential, and vision for end-users.
The ability to quickly and easily create online office mashups enables organizations to improve productivity, better serve customers and users, and solve business problems more rapidly. The goal is integration of best-of-breed online office applications presented to users in a single interface, available any time and from anywhere on the Web. The proposed approach enables the Internet as a platform for "plug and play" office productivity suites tailored or modified for specific business needs. No online office application should be an island unto itself; the online office can go beyond a traditional office suite into an online office ecosystem. In this ecosystem, users can combine their choice of online document, spreadsheet, and presentation services on demand with an ability to share content across these services and to collaborate on a global basis.
An example of the ecosystem at work is an online office mashup which combines iNetOffice, ShareMethods, Salesforce.com, and Thumbstacks. This mashup enables automatic creation and management of sales documents such as proposals, reports, and presentations which can be shared internally or with sales prospects. Newsletters and press releases can also be created and shared easily by marketing teams. An online mashup demo illustrates how a sales user can easily and quickly build a dynamically generated sales proposal using customer data from an on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) database. A video demonstrating the mashup of web-based CRM, enterprise content management (ECM), online word processing, and online presentation software is available at http://www.inetword.com/mashup/index.html.
"This multi-way mashup is an excellent example of how quickly Web 2.0 applications can come together because of interoperability, standards, and user experience," said David Coleman, managing director of research and consulting firm Collaborative Strategies. "End users benefit from reduced time to create these applications and from the additional functionality that can be added through each of the components in the mashup. Quick, easy, and intuitive are all attributes of Web 2.0 applications and this mashup shows how a virtual on-line office can be put together in a very short time."
iNetOffice and ShareMethods plan to make a sales and marketing productivity mashup broadly available. The two companies are also inviting other software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies to join their online office mashup and to participate in technical recommendations based on open standards such as WebDAV (Web Document Authoring and Versioning), SSO (Single Sign-On), and ALE (Ajax Linking and Embedding). Simple Ajax Mashup (SAM) recommendations can be viewed at http://www.inetword.com/mashup/SAM Spec.html. Simple Ajax Mashup recommendations will be posted to the Office 2.0 conference wiki to allow for collaborative input and contributions of new ideas.
The SAM technical recommendations seek to address Ajax application problems, such as:
Single Sign-On: Eliminate the need for users to log in separately to each online office application in a mashup.
Cross-Application Document and Content Sharing: Enable diverse online office applications to store documents in a single repository of a user's choice. Such storage allows a user to organize, browse, and search all of his or her documents in one location and allows all documents to participate in the workflow, sharing, and other capabilities of the repository.
Copy and Paste: Recommendations for support of ALE improve the quality of content copied and pasted from one Ajax application into another.
"ShareMethods and iNetOffice have built an exciting vision of an Office 2.0 future with their multi-way mash-up demo and its focus on productivity improvements working online. Their partnership work is important and I look forward to seeing products realize the vision. The technical recommendations in Simple Ajax Mashup are a step in the right direction to build bridges across Office 2.0 applications, making for a more powerful user experience," said Ismael Ghalimi, founder and organizer of the Office 2.0 Conference and CEO of Intalio, the leading vendor of open source BPM software. About iNetOffice
iNetOffice (http://www.inetoffice.com) is a privately held and funded Washington-state corporation that specializes in developing fully functional web-based office applications. The company was founded in 2000 by Tom Snyder. iNetOffice is positioned to accelerate the software industry's evolution away from desktop-based applications toward hosted, SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions. The company's vision is to deliver online office applications with lower overall costs, ease of use and rapid deployment of SaaS software without compromising program capabilities or requiring extensive user training.
About ShareMethods
With ShareMethods, sales and marketing teams can store, manage, and share documents easily and securely, collaborating with extended selling networks to close more business, providing a cost-effective alternative to developing and supporting a sales and marketing intranet or extranet. The "Sales and Marketing Portal in a Box" approach can cost less than one tenth of the price of traditional enterprise software. Visit http://www.sharemethods.com or call 1-877-SHARENOW for more information.