Today we have been working on the development schedule for one of our projects. We realised early in the day the extent to which we have been switching more and more of our team work to online applications.
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The project we were discussing was Marinetta Marinetta Ombro which lives on several web sites and on the island of La Mentala Rosario within Second Life.

Camie and I have been using Writely for about four months now as our collaborative writing tool. We began by dumping all our important documents there, and proceeded by using it as our word processor of choice. There have actually been two occasions when, with a deadline looming, we have both been working on the same document at once. And, inmpressively, this worked both times without a hitch.

I had noticed over breakfast that Google have launched Google Apps for Education and so we joined the beta test. This gives us two important benefits: it enables us to have marinetta.org email addresses for everyone and it gives us a group calendar. It will become even more useful when Writely and Google Spreadsheet are integrated with it, which is promised “soon”.

Google are not the only people doing this. Zoho which we looked at before choosing Writely has now expanded and offers a full office suite. If we were not already using Writely we might very well have given it serious consideration. However I cannot believe that Zoho can continue to exist on its own in the long term, so we would have had to consider where we were likely to end up: either out in the cold or as part of Yahoo perhaps?

Update:
Writely has now been absorbed into the new Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which is rumoured to be expanding soon into a full online office suite.