Microsoft, to the board! Or what Office365 can learn from the Canvas editor

TechCrunch recently showed a curious overview of “another Microsoft rival” from Steve O'Hear . And it would hardly have attracted my attention if it were not for Canvas, on which, according to the author, the product is written. Canvas, which, it seemed to me, is mainly used only for games and effects. For those who are not indifferent to the development of HTML5 technology (and also those who are looking for an alternative to MS), I quote the translation of the article below.

Online document editors such as Google Docs and Zoho Docs look very promising in the context of getting rid of MS Office and offline editing of documents in general. However, when it comes to more complex formatting and compatibility with the same Microsoft, I must admit - browser applications, to put it mildly, can not cope with the task. Accordingly, their only competitive advantage is the ability to share a document with a friend and edit it together in the cloud (something that Microsoft, by the way, recently added to its Web Apps in Office 365)

And then Teamlab Personal appears on the scene - a free version of Teamlab office suite for personal use. Written using the HTML5 Canvas element (development history for those who care), it combines the possibilities of online collaboration from Google and the quality of formatting from Microsoft Word. And judging by the video prepared by the Teamlab team, their product has every reason to send Microsoft Office 365 back to the design phase.

The personal version of Teamlab includes editors for text, spreadsheets and presentations, essentially reflecting the capabilities of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but with the addition of tools for joint editing and commenting. Teamlab developers expressly declare that thanks to html5, their product can do what no existing online document editor can:

• identity of source and output: the processed file retains the same style, paragraphs, line-spacing and character-spacing, etc. when viewing in any browser in any OS, as well as when importing and printing;
• wide range of options for working with tables, line spacing, multi-level numbering, styles of text and headings;
• the ability to seamlessly process multi-page reports, business or financial documents in strict accordance with all standards;
• lack of language barriers due to the maximum number of fonts, including hieroglyphs.

You can sign up for Teamlab Personal through your Facebook or Google accounts. After that, you are invited to “create a single workspace” for all your documents by connecting Google Drive, Dropbox, SkyDrive, and Box repositories. It is the use of third-party file storage applications that allows a Russian company to offer its product for free.

(What you should pay attention to when watching a video: despite the fact that Teamlab definitely does incomparably better than Google and Microsoft, none of the three products performs the task 100%. Well, the road will be overpowered).



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