Google have release their first burst after a series of beta’s.
“This is a bold move by Google. They are striking hard at a nearly $12 billion/year Microsoft revenue stream. And they are clearly trying to get this out the door fast, in anticipation of Microsoft Office 2007, which will include collaboration features for businesses (as does Office Live, announced last year).”
Source: “Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Google Makes Its Move: Office 2.0 – Mozilla Firefox”
This is significant, and I believe its time for Banks to re-consider their Office suite strategy. I noted in July that the plethora of web 2.0 web based applications which work very smoothly, and are both network centric, and team centric, might well fit better with Banks needs.
This move by Google is the first move out of beta in any significant way that could be seriously considered by a Bank for their enterprise needs. There is more to come.
And that’s just the first move. According to Aaron Ricadela at InformationWeek, Google will soon add their Writely and Spreadsheet products to the suite, add collaboration tools that will work across platforms, and even provide technical support.
And others wait in the wings.
And while all of this is going on, Zoho is quietly building a really excellent online office suite of its own. Any of the other big guys could also quickly enter this game with a timely acquisition.
Software licensing is a large cost. In addition if you ask the information security, and knowledge management guru’s at your firm, they will tell you Office technology is over-engineered for the average user, and with most files locally stored on individual PC’s the enterprise benefit from the majority of files is limited. Teamwork is not simple with horrible version control and email being the preferred method of sharing documents.
Picture the future with one version for the big strategy deck,
- simple ajax interface
- filed centrally,
- multiple users editing and reviewing,
- handling the version control,
- commentary,
- notations,
- user notification of changes through RSS feeds, and
- no related emails required in inboxes!
This is the promise of the next generation office suite.
Relevance to Bankwatch:
Study the next generation of office suites. Try Writely, Zoho, Google Spreadsheet, Google Calendar, gmail. Consider the costs of support. Think about the attributes mentioned here, and re-think the strategy to determine what is best for you, based on the new realities.
tags: office+suite, office+2007, google+office, zoho, writely
Bankwatch 
I definitely agree with you but there are some considerations that have to be consider for making a switch.
1) Privacy/Security – As big a web apps fan I am, I’m still running into concerns with how security stacks up for these types of apps. The Web2.0 movement is more about collaboration and sharing and banks are taught, via regulators/examiners, to distrust anything that’s not totally secured and to keep things behind firewalls.
2) Change – I agree that most bank employees are only using 10-15% of the capabilities of the Office apps but getting someone to change what they’ve already known is going to take understand and approvals from the top to filter down, otherwise people won’t want to do it.
3) Google Limits – Our company utlizes the Google hosted service for our email and calendaring and it’s great for us, but we’re small. And Google has limited the number of people per company to sign up for the service to 50 email addresses. So if you wanted to use Google in Banks, better be a denovo bank. 🙂
Thanks Brad for those excellent practical points, especially #1.
Perhaps Google could offer a similar service to the Google enterprise search appliance where the application could be run on site.