Realize Fantastic Results March 17, 2008
Posted by Tom Snyder in : General , comments closedOur splash page, as you may have seen, is an editable document within iNetWord when you visit our home page. We structured our home page this way so that visitors can very easily try iNetWord’s advanced editing and formatting capabilities.
We have realized, however, that most of iNetWord’s innovations are still hard to discern. Customers care not so much what an app can do, but more what can an app deliver in my system. So we are readying a new version of our splash page that speaks directly to the latter question. The headline is:
Realize Fantastic Results
We’ll launch the new splash page along with an updated version of iNetWord in a few weeks. Stay tuned!
Snowballs and First Movers October 6, 2007
Posted by Tom Snyder in : General , comments closedAs you may have noticed, our focus right now is on spreading OpenSAM (Open Simple Application Mashup techniques). Our efforts were focused almost exclusively on OpenSAM at the Office 2.0 conference. “Why,” you ask? Our reasons are selfish: the more Web 2.0 services adopt OpenSAM, the more our iNetWord can connect to without any work on our part.
This is huge. The time and effort to integrate Web 2.0 systems is daunting and usually prohibitive. Cost of integration is currently the biggest limitation within the Web 2.0 arena. OpenSAM eliminates this problem and enables you to quickly create mashups which are broad and deep and use the best applications available.
Because OpenSAM is near the beginning of the adoption curve, this presents an opportunity for any Web 2.0 service. A service’s listing and mentions in all the OpenSAM materials will always be chronological by time of their first OpenSAM connection. Being one of the first 10 or 100 OpenSAM components will connect a service to more customers, more quickly, and with more visibility.
OpenSAM has, at the time of this writing, 15 services that have publicly declared their support. There are several more who are readying their support. Although I can’t be specific, I can report that discussions are taking place within many of the top multibillion dollar companies about when and how to support OpenSAM. If you are tasked with analyzing the industry and its players, I recommend you add OpenSAM to your list of developments that will have a profound impact on the success, failure, and valuation of Web 2.0 ventures.
Stealth Mode No More August 9, 2007
Posted by Tom Snyder in : General , comments closed
One of the biggest contributors to OpenSAM and ShareOffice is Preezo.com—An online slide presentation tool. They have just exited private beta and are available for the world to try. Sign up here.
We’re very impressed with how faithful they’ve stayed to familiar desktop editing patterns. The buttons are exactly where you’d expect them and every click, drag, and select works exactly as you would expect. Few Web 2.0 applications can make that claim.
And most importantly, the slide shows render immediately and look crisp, clear, and professional. No compromises were made and Jason pulled plenty of rabbits out of the hat to accomplish that on the challenging browser-based platforms.
I’m fortunate to have met Jason at the last Office 2.0 Conference and to have stayed abreast of Preezo’s advances. Every new release was exciting and this one is, by far, one of the most powerful and easy to use Web 2.0 apps available. iNetOffice extends a hearty CONGRATULATIONS to Jason and the entire Preezo team.
Don’t-Miss Conference July 28, 2007
Posted by Tom Snyder in : General , comments closed|
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September 5-7, 2007 |
iNetOffice is excited to exhibit at the Office 2.0 Conference in two capacities:
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As a founder of the OpenSAM coalition. This is an ideal venue since OpenSAM was launched at the 2006 Office 2.0 conference and the coalition has grown dramatically due to the many contacts we made there. In particular, we first saw Preezo there, and when confronted with the speed and power of their presentation software, we knew we had to bring them on board. Read what Ismael Ghalimi, conference organizer extraordinaire, wrote about OpenSAM here.
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Representing iNetWord, our only product. We’ll be showing iNetWord integrated within several platforms which will vividly illustrate the ease of use that results from connecting top notch applications with top not services and environments.
You may have noticed that cross-application integration is growing rapidly within the industry. Zoho now runs on omnidrive.com. 30boxes now runs within Facebook. One of our partners, EditGrid.com, now runs in ThinkFree and many other platforms, both private-label and EditGrid branded. The big question now facing the industry is:
When will the mega portals Yahoo! and Google open their platforms to other applications?
The answer, of course, is when it would clearly fill their pocket books. That will take a bit more time, yet, to come about. Whichever moves first, however, will enjoy a large first-mover advantage and will garner a huge amount of good will from the online applications community.
You’d better register soon for Office 2.0 Conference. It has strong momentum and the attendance count is limited.
Sean A. March 22, 2007
Posted by Tom Snyder in : General , comments closed|
Sean’s Suggestion Documents |
One of the largest challenges in Web 2.0 application development is prioritizing the sheer number of innovative ideas and integration opportunities. Here our Beta Test Participants play a crucial role. Their feedback guides the direction, focus, and details of each new version of iNetWord.
We’d like to recognize one Beta participant in particular. He has submitted fifteen documents, each with many excellent ideas replete with detailed use and user interface analysis. He has proofread our button tool-tips and offered numerous corrections. His obvious passion for improving the tools and systems he uses is a true inspiration. He’s the kind of rare, visionary, detail-oriented, never-settle individual you’d want to hire as your V.P. of Make Everything Awesome. Sean A.: this posting is dedicated to you.
Sean sent us his ideas by sharing one of his iNetWord folders with our tom_s iNetWord account. This gives us both access to his documents and includes Track Changes so we can each track the additions and modifications we make.
Here are Sean’s comments about this post:
It takes more than a beta tester who submits bug reports and suggestions - it takes a company willing to recognize a vision other than their own. The developers of iNetWord have proved to be open to ideas which take the product places the original creators did not imagine, adding functions and features not included in their original scope.
Tom has made me feel a part of his team, having an open mind to each suggestion and proposal, embracing the ones most different from his own plans for the product.
Use their product and don’t hesitate to suggest improvements – iNetOffice will restore your faith in developers. Where most companies will turn a deaf ear to ideas off of their projects plan, these developers will surprise you by asking you to describe how this change will affect your usage of the product, to give examples of how it should be implemented, and then ask you for more submissions.
Hats off to Tom and his team - keep up the good work!
-Sean
JavaScript is Not Industrial Strength, unless (part 2) February 5, 2007
Posted by Tom Snyder in : Ajax Technology , comments closedIn a previous post I discussed the fact that JavaScript lacks a built-in macro processor and how to use the C pre-processor to optimize a release version of your JavaScript program.
Another major shortcoming to JavaScript is that it allows you to code calls to undefined functions. You can test, deploy, and run your program with no warning at all. The only way to see the error is to run that particular line of code with the undefined function call, and to have your browser configured to report errors.
The situation is akin to eliminating cones, signs, flag-men and barriers from freeway construction sites. The first hint you get that the bridge you’re on is unfinished is when your car hits the water. Eeeeeooouch!
Other serious programming environments give very clear errors when you try to create a program with undefined functions. This shortcoming with JavaScript is getting more problematic as SaaS and Ajax applications get larger, more complex, and have many engineers working on the same code base. You can imagine how easy it would be to simply misspell one function name within a 20,000 line program.
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The solution is a very handy tool called JavaScript Lint. There are two of these tools available online. The first is www.jslint.com written by Douglas Crockford who is now at Yahoo! The second is www.javascriptlint.com written by Matthias Miller and was inspired by Douglas Crockford’s work. We use Matthias’s JavaScript Lint because it handles very large projects well and integrates with IDEs.
Interestingly, JavaScript Lint has the undefined function detection feature turned off by default. This is because for multiple-module projects, you must add declarations like this so that modules know about one another:
/*jsl:import othermodule.js */
Also by default, JavaScript Lint will give programing style warnings on common code constructs such as this:
if( myvar ) {
Thankfully all warnings can be configured. The configuration we use is here.
We at iNetOffice extend our thanks to Matthias Miller for writing JavaScript Lint and making it available. This one tool alone may improve the reliability of SaaS systems across the net more than any other single utility.
2007 January 10, 2007
Posted by Tom Snyder in : General , add a comment2007 is poised to be a vibrant year for Ajax vendors. Here at iNetOffice we’re assembling a larger development team, partnering with top notch integrators, collaborating with several other leading Ajax applications, and contributing to a couple of the most popular open source components.
Most importantly, we’ve been receiving real-world feedback from our beta users. January and February will be the months where we stamp out some minor irritations and make iNetWord even easier to use. For instance:
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We’ve added an Add to Dictionary button in spell check so your company name and industry terms aren’t flagged as misspellings.
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We’ve made the File New, File Open, File Save, and Picture Upload dialog boxes work more like your desktop. This lets you browse files and folders within them just as you would in Mega Office Corporate Suite (Enterprise Select Business Management edition 17.v2, SP4).
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We’re expanding the numbering drop-down to include start-at, continue from previous, and other options needed for more complicated documents such as lengthy contracts.
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Many others.
Some of the most valuable additions are the simplest. For example, if you’re going to use our WebDAV read/write support to connect iNetWord to your work-flow solution, you’ll be glad to hear we’ve added CGI parameters that allow you to specify the exact Save As Folder, Save As File name, and Save as File Type in our launch URL. By scripting your work-flow engine to generate and track file names and locations, your users will never need ask: “where was that file?” or “What should I call this file?” And when your users no longer have to do something, you don’t have to train them for it and they can’t make a mistake.
Office 2.0 Conference Presentation October 16, 2006
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Eric Hoffert of ShareMethods and I presented at the ”One Day in the Life of an Office 2.0 Worker” session of the Office 2.0 Conference on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006. Eric gave his multi-way mashup demonstration live. That demonstration was described by CNET as “impressive” and “the demo shattered one of my big misconceptions: That it is nearly impossible to get online productivity tools from different vendors to work together.”
I followed Eric with an introduction to our new SAM techniques. My talk was an appeal to industry participants to achieve rich integration by using a unified set of underlying technologies for application launch, file read/write, and metadata transmission. Here is a transcript of my talk:
Hello, I’m Tom Snyder, President of iNetOffice. Our product is iNetWord.
You’ve just seen iNetWord mashed up with ShareMethods and Salesforce.
When ShareMethods and iNetWord began assembling this mashup, we quickly realized that soon everyone would offer launch/read/write integration among apps. We also recognized that it would be faster, easier, and more robust if we all did it the same way.
Therefore we have compiled a set of technical recommendations called SAM - Simple Ajax Mashup. SAM is not a new API. Rather, like Ajax, SAM is a set of techniques using currently available standards and APIs such as WebDAV. We encourage everyone to evaluate SAM and consider adopting some of its techniques.
To further examine the future of application mashups, we have this app mashup matrix. The matrix is forward looking and includes entries that are planned but not yet available. This matrix is not exhaustive - there are no doubt entries that we’ve not learned of yet.
The red diamonds are mashups using site specific APIs. The diamonds clustered down the diagonal correspond to the suite vendors, who, quite naturally, mashup with themselves. Zimbra’s entries are well populated partly because of their Zimlet technology.
The blue circles represent mashup points based on SAM. Because SAM is a single set of techniques for integrating launch/read/write, adding SAM to your application automatically makes you mashable with all the other SAM applications. Of course, since this conference is Ajax oriented, this chart is interactive. When you click on an entry you see the effect of adding SAM. Lets add SAM to a little known company called Google… [click on Google’s entries].
You can image a time in the not too distant future when most Office 2.0 applications are integrated in this way. On that day, the entire Internet will be your Office Productivity Suite.
Our Application Mashup September 21, 2006
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Version 2 Released August 21, 2006
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Today we released iNetWord Version 2 to beta test at www.inetword.com. This release is a major milestone and the culmination of over a year’s work.
Version 2 has features that make it useful every day in a fast paced business environment. We ourselves didn’t fully appreciate the value of Track Changes until we started updating our Web pages and expanding our help pages. Of course these efforts were rushed, with several people contributing. File names changed. Content got moved from file to file. Edits got made and then reverted. With iNetWord’s Track Changes we all worked on the very latest copies, from anywhere, at any time. We could review exactly what happened to every document, every step of the way, and by whom.
Track Changes and the other additions to iNetWord version 2 were a result of knowledgeable feedback from several wildly-popular Internet companies. In recognition of the immeasurable value of such feedback, we’re offing a free Wi-Fi detector to anyone who contributes to our beta. We hope this will encourage you, and your most insightful cohorts, to share your views with us.