Cripes but this is a massive icon don’t you think? I created this test document in the Microsoft Office clone, ThinkFreeand then asked to blog it from inside ThinkFree. It’s an option. I needed to set up a small web service to allow ThinkFree to access my blog engine before I could proceed. It took all of 10 seconds.
My good friend Ismael Ghalimi gives ThinkFree a glowing report. I’m not as keen. First let me say that it is the most ‘complete’ offering I’vd seen that’s comparable to Microsoft Office. The taunts of ‘crippled product’ put forward by naysayers of online office productivity can be safely ignored. Even so, I believe ThinkFree have missed four important issues:
I’ve installed the desktop and used the online editions. There are important differences. Starting up the online edition in Power Edit mode is way too slow. The desktop version is a lot quicker but not up to the near instantaneous speeds that desktop users expect. Lousy load speeds are a real turn off and something ThinkFree will need to consider carefully.
Second, they’ve included a tagging system but it isn’t part of the document creation/save process for the desktop edition. It is used when you wish to share documents in an online environment. To my mind this is an omission because many other services use tags as a way of organising documents. However, having the means to embed an editable Microsoft Office type document inside a blog post is a pretty neat thing to do.
Third RSS. I can’t see any feed subscription information anywhere. That would have been nice. Again, only available where documents are shared in an online environment.
Finally, pricing, while attractive is not as great as I would have liked. With the server edition, you can pay as you go at $30/client. That’s good, because you only pay for what you use. You could for instance have people working with Office, and others picking up documents for use within ThinkFree as part of a wider document maangement system. If you want to use the ‘portable’ facility – which means putting it on an iPod where you use the iPod as an external hard disk, you have to pay an additional $29.95 per user. While that’s a really cool idea, I’d suggest some sort of bundling to allow for mobile users who also need an office license.
One other thing – how am I supposed to know what this document is about without a meaningful file name being displayed when a document is published to a blog? It means I have to waste part of the blog post explaining the document.
The really good news however is that they’ve published an API so I can imagine a number of services that might want to hook into this asp art of a wider content management scenario.
NOTE: I’ve updated this review because when I returned to the service/product, I found other things that rendered my original opinion incorrect.
Technorati Tags: innovation, thinkfree
