Good Riddance, Bloatware: Run Your Entire Business on Web 2.0 Services
by Joe McKendrick
Anyone who is still in denial about the movement away from local bloatware stored on your PC or server and toward online services should sit up and take notice of a site maintained by Ismael Ghalimi — one of the most connected individuals I know.
Ismael — with the help of contributors — documents all the Office 2.0 tools and technologies you could ever need to avoid bloatware of any kind and run your business entirely from services delivered over the network. Some are completely free, others charge on a per-use basis.
He lists the tools he personally uses, and offers an abundance of alternative services as well.
Some examples:
CRM: Salesforce.com
Database: Dabble DB
Presentation: ThinkFree Show
Spreadsheet: ThinkFree Calc
Word processor: ThinkFree Write
Business Intelligence: LucidEra
File Manager: Omnidrive
File Server: S3
Printer: Kinko’s
This wasn’t mentioned on Ismael’s list, but corporate Intranets are also covered — Bill Ives recently surfaced the possibility of Facebook fulfilling this role.
