ThinkFree Online Review

ThinSkin writes "ThinkFree Online is, simply put, Office without the Microsoft, a collection of free online apps that support and contain most features found in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. ThinkFree has just released a major upgrade to its features, bumping its online storage to 1GB for each user and adding a lightweight AJAX-based collaboration feature. ExtremeTech has an interesting review of ThinkFree Online's applications and features which reveals a lot to like about this improved webware and, while it may have its occasional quirks, can be great for those who want to edit and create documents on the fly."

Check the actual app out (in 2 1/2 hours)

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Think Free appears to be down for now, but at 7:00am PDT, you'll (apparantly) be able to have a look [thinkfree.com]

Re:About time..

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Now, this is the right use of AJAX..

Unfortunately, it also uses java - from the article:

ThinkFree uses both AJAX and Java. The company admits that AJAX is more portable in that it doesn't require a plug-in, but they contend that Java is needed to provide true Microsoft Office compatibility and functionality.

According to this newsforge review [newsforge.com] last year it was a downloadable java app, rather then a webapp.

Re:Looks very nice

[Young Master Ploppy]

It might look nice to you, but if these guys are serious about being "web 2.0" and/or replacing Office then they really need to work on their accessibility. Even that offline message has two big accessibility no-no's: text-as-images, and table-based layout. I tried looking at that page with Fangs (screen reader emulator) and you know what it said?

"thinkfree dash Internet ExplorerTable with one column and twenty rowsTable with one column and sixteen rowsTable endTable end"

That's what a visually-impaired person would get from that website. That's it, nothing else. And while accessibility might not be important to you in your current situation, it's extremely important to anyone with a disability, and also to the public sector. All government web systems must be accessible, and until accessibility gets taken more seriously on these kind of projects, the desktop is going to win out every time.

Hosting your own

[The Bastard]

Looks like many comments regarding Internet accessability, ownership on someone else's servers, etc may be void. ThinkFree has both stand-alone desktop [thinkfree.com] and internal server [thinkfree.com] products. Pop this puppy on your own servers for intranet or VPN access.

Hosted, or with the option of implementing my own server. Hmmm...A Web 2.0 company doing it right.

Compare to Free Email

[rewinn]

We already have a pretty good idea what happens when a web-based technology competes with its desktop equivalent: email.

Yahoomail, gmail, et cetera compete with Microsoft Outlook & that ilk. Both types of email flourish, Fill-In-Your-Reasons-Here, each stealing some market from the other but also expanding the market.

Why would not a similar situation obtain with wordprocessings?

Re:Web Based Application

[WhiteWolf666]

I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of things like ThinkFree, but I am a huge fan of solutions which allow your organization to host various services online.

Java applet versions of NoMachine's NX, for example, give you Citrix-like experience over-the-web. Web hosted e-mail means that once you train your users the only "downtimes" you experience are connection problems.

Just because you don't want to host all your companies documents on ThinkFree.Com doesn't mean that it isn't a good idea to keep (at least one version) of all your companies documents on one system.

Thin Clients were a reality for a long time, and are still a reality in many places. Thin Client-like technologies for the web are still in their infancy, yet we have many up and coming companies with boatloads of cash putting their futures on the line with thin clients. I don't necessarily mean that the "One True (Microsoft?) Server Farm" is the answer, but there are many situations where you want to keep all your data in the same place. Security, for example, is much easier to handle when you don't have to worry about each and every employees laptop.