I’ve used Open Office since I got my new laptop last summer (you think I’d buy MS Office with my money?) and it provides a good open source subsitiute for MS Office, although the database application is markedly different from MS Access and more like FoxPro. I have use Google Docs in some classes and they work reasonably well, but we had issues in the ease and speed of editing. Also I had reservations about the inability to “save as” to create a new version before making major changes, something I often do in standalone spreadsheets and documents.
I played with Zoho for a while today, choosing the project management document because how entertaining can making one more spreadsheet be? I use MS Project every day in my job and wanted to compare. It is kind of a fun free tool for small projects, but the data entry is very cumbersome and the level of sophistication is suitable only for very small projects. It is nice that is will automatically email people when they are assigned new tasks. But the set up and structuring of milestones and tasks is not explained and is not very intuitive. By the time you figure how you should have structured things, they only way you can do it is to delete all your tasks and reenter them, the application will not let you move the exisiting tasks. But it’s a good beginning for online project tools.
I also set up a wiki on Zoho. I wanted to see how it differed from PBwiki, the free wiki that I’ve used several time. Here is the PBwiki I created for my neighborhood. Wikis are nice in that they let different people create any kind of content they want. I would like to see more templates, but it is free. The more peopleyou invite to join your wiki, the more storage space they give you. We maxed out the one we created for our LIS768 group project because we were posting video files to share.
