Software allows creativity on-demand

A group of software vendors has released an office application based on open standards that allows collaborative teams to easily create, edit and share documents and spreadsheets online.

ShareOffice is built on on-demand services from iNetOffice, EditGrid, ShareMethods and SalesForce.com. The application was announced this week at the Software 2007 Conference held in Santa Clara, Calif. ShareOffice is available as part of SalesForce.com's AppExchange or as a standalone service.

iNetOffice provides browser-based word processing applications, EditGrid develops online spreadsheet applications, ShareMethods offers on-demand document management software and SalesForce.com is a provider of on-demand customer relationship management and sales support applications.

ShareOffice brings major product categories together into an Office 2.0 application to enable the assembly of dozens or hundreds of online office applications using open standards for document sharing, officials from the companies said. Office 2.0 generally involves the use of a generic Web browser and online services, giving users access to plug-and-play office productivity suites tailored for specific business needs.

For instance, with ShareOffice users could automatically generate common sales documents such as proposals, contracts, quotes and customer letters in a single browser interface using customer data from SalesForce.com. Marketing professionals could create, manage and share documents online such as newsletters, press releases and product brochures or support teams could create frequently asked questions for their sites.

ShareOffice is the first commercially available product developed based on OpenSAM (Open Simple AJAX Mashup). OpenSAM is a consortium of software-as-a-service application vendors and a set of AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming recommendations that allow multiple online applications to integrate.

OpenSAM was formally announced Tuesday at the software conference.

Rutrell Yasin is a staff writer for Government Computer News, an 1105 Government Information Group publication.