Solo Technology

The new Google Toolbar (beta 3 I think) was very recently released. It introduces some new features, with one that should be pretty interesting to the online office folks. In fact, that new feature even got its own blog post at the Google Docs & Spreadsheet blog titled, “Dragging and Dropping.”

[...] you can open most popular file types in Google D&S. Clicking a link to a file on a web page will open the document directly in your browser window. Even cooler, you can drag file icons from your desktop to your browser and have them automatically imported into D&S. Once you’ve installed the beta, enable these features from the “Options” menu of your Toolbar.

Other new features for the toolbar at the link.

For the Zoho users, don’t forget they have some similar extensions: QuickRead for Firefox and an IE version as well. These work in a similar fashion and handle most common doc, spreadsheet and presentation formats. The Desktopize aspect of the recent Zoho announcements fits nicely in here too.

Wonder if Google has a something in mind for presentations or slideshows?

Regardless of which flavor of web office that you like, both companies are on the right track: Make it as easy and simple as possible to get to your stuff. Don’t bog folks down with having to consciously upload and download stuff.

On a related note, Rich has a couple of interesting discussions going about online app security concerns worth reading (here and here).

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