How open are you to using an online office suite for your daily work?
Overall, our IT team is now more productive
Neev Technologies provides software services specialising in Web-related solutions. They are involved in the development of rich Internet applications using AJAX, Flash, Java/J2EE, Ruby on Rails, .NET, and others.
Saurabh Chandra,
CEO and co-founder, Neev Information Technologies
“People can collaborate easily, do simultaneous edits on shared docs,
and are not dependant on one machine.”
“In general, we believe the world is moving more towards online services. Prices of storage and bandwidth are both following Moore’s law and are falling rapidly. It has finally become feasible to be always connected, have all your documents online, and free yourself from being dependant entirely on a machine. We have been in this mode for around four to five months.
“Several reasons make online services enticing. There’s no need to buy hardware—hardware brings with it so many costs—air conditioning, space, IT operations, electricity, racks, and if you add up everything, it’s significant. For our company, the cost benefits were secondary, though; the most important benefit was time saved, which is the most expensive resource for a young, growing company.
“It was easy, since people are used to online applications these days. We still haven’t been successful in optimally exploiting the potential of complex documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, but simpler spreadsheets or documents are so much better online since you can collaborate easily. We haven’t done a quantitative analysis, but qualitatively, there has been a substantial improvement.
“Overall, our IT team is now more productive, since common shares or mail servers need not be managed. The number of servers in the company has been kept to a minimum. The major limitations are in the creation of documents like proposals, specifications, and costing sheets. Online suites have some way to go in those areas.
“Online office suites would be apt for new organisations where inertia is low and the (younger) staff is more eager to use such apps, since they use so many other online services anyway.”
“Our offline suite has helped us directly improve productivity”
GlobalLogic, Inc. offers full product development lifecycle services to start-ups as well as emerging and established tech companies.
Sanjiv Kumar,
Senior Manager IT , GlobalLogic, Inc.
“The main limitation of the Office software suite is
its incompatibility with different office suites.”
“At GlobalLogic, we’ve been using Microsoft Office for the last five years, and our experience with it has been very good so far. Although it is termed “productivity software,” it has become an important tool for our day-to-day business operations.
“Every company has different IT policies, but they use the popular Office software suite to remain in sync with others. The common Office suite acts as a tool for easy communication with most of our clients while working on their projects. The suite has helped us directly improve productivity, which has indirectly increased our profitability.
“Besides that, it is also helpful in database management, documentation and inventory management, which form an essential part of our development processes.
The main limitation of the Office software suite is its incompatibility with different office suites.
“By using the Office package, various functions like communication through e-mail and Word documents, setting up meetings, presentations, preparing complex spreadsheets and so on, have become very systematic and organised. These software packages have fuelled the routine activities like the preparation and maintenance of project status reports.
“The main limitation of the Office software suite is its incompatibility with office suites like OpenOffice, StarOffice, and Lotus SmartSuite, which are used by various companies. To fix this issue, we have to use the same office suite that our clients use.
“We would highly recommend the use of offline office Suites to anyone, as they substantially improve productivity. It helps with day-to-day activities, and also helps stay on a common platform with clients.”