ShareMethods is announcing two new apps to its open standards Web Office suite, ShareOffice, at the Office 2.0 conference today. We reviewed ShareOffice back in May when it launched, noting that it’s the world’s first open standards online office suite. The two new apps are an online calendar from Jotlet and real-time meeting from Persony. They join the existing ShareOffice apps – online word processing from iNetWord, spreadsheet from EditGrid, and presentation app from Preezo.
ShareMethods is also announcing today iPhone support for its on-demand document management service. This will target business users with a need for mobile access to their documents.
ShareOffice is different from most other Web Office suite offerings, because it’s made up of third party apps that integrate using OpenSAM (Open Simple Ajax Mashup). OpenSAM is a consortium of Web Office vendors and its main output is a set of AJAX programming recommendations, based on open standards, that allow multiple online applications to integrate. It promotes itself as “one of the largest Mashups of independent applications available”.
OpenSAM was founded by ShareMethods.com and iNetWord.com in September of 2006. It has recently expanded to 13 independent applications – the first wave were Caspio, EchoSign, EditGrid, ,iNetOffice, Joyent, Preezo, ShareMethods, and Sheetster. The new members are Huddle.net (collaborative workspaces), Jotlet, (online calendaring), Persony (web conferencing), Smartsheet (online task management), and Data Info Sys (email). It’s an open consortium, so others are encouraged to join.
What’s more, as the screenshots in this post show, ShareOffice is a part of Salesforce.com AppExchange – as well as being a standalone option.
ShareOffice with Jotlet
ShareOffice with Persony