An office in the cloud
Microsoft's recent entry into hosted office applications has focused attention on cloud-based alternatives to the company's desktop Office suite. So it's a good time to discover what those competing online office suites have to offer, and whether Microsoft's new Office Web Apps service measures up. We've concentrated on products from Google and Zoho which, like Microsoft, deliver hosted word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications with no need for any special software at the client's end other than a browser.
Other options, including hosted email and collaboration services, can also be bundled into these products and for our tests we chose complete business solutions rather than mass-market products. However, to make the comparison fair we've concentrated mainly on the core office productivity tools — which is all you get with the Microsoft offering.
* Older MS Office documents are converted when uploaded
Editors' Choice
To discover exactly what you can expect from each product, you'll need to read the detailed reviews. Overall, however, we were impressed with how quickly the hosted office suite market has matured and how capable and usable the latest generation of services has become. They're still a long way off matching what Office 2010 can do, but for many business users Microsoft Office is overkill and most will only ever discover and use a small fraction of the features on offer.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, its Office Web Apps proved to be the runt of the litter, struggling to match Google and Zoho in almost every area. As a result, we'd recommend anyone looking to sign up for a hosted office suite to consider either Google Apps or Zoho Business. If pressed, we'd steer new users towards Google Apps, which gets our Editors' Choice award for its feature-rich and usable service.