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open source

Enterprise Mashup

March 9, 2010 22:48:55.386

I find this announcement fascinating - a mashup of MS Outlook and Google Docs, using the APIs from both products:

Effective today, Mainsoft is offering full-featured access to Google Docs documents directly from within Microsoft Outlook. Their belief is that e-mail and document collaboration sites need to work together seamlessly — so end users can be more productive. They're also planning to give away software that offers full-featured access to SharePoint document libraries, within Microsoft Outlook. So to reiterate — full use of Google docs within Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint — tools enterprise users are used to, with the significant benefits that the cloud brings.
The Mainsoft product is called Harmony and will be a free product and has been built using SharePoint Web Services interfaces and Google Docs open APIs, giving full-featured access to Google Docs or SharePoint documents from an Outlook sidebar.

I'd love to know what Microsoft thinks of that. On the one hand, it doesn't displace Outlook. On the other hand, if an outfit that wants to go with Google Docs finds that they pretty much only use Outlook from the Office Suite, that could cause some heartburn.

Not having used Google Docs, I can't really say anything about whether they would actually serve as a replacement for Word and Excel. I've been happy enough with Apple's iWork, so I haven't seen any reason to wander over that way.

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posted by James Robertson

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