Microsoft, to the blackboard! Or what Office365 can learn from the editor on Canvas

Recently, TechCrunch has a curious review of “another Microsoft competitor” by Steve O'Hear . And he would hardly have attracted my attention if it were not for Canvas, on which, according to the author, the product is written. Canvas, which, it seemed to me, is mainly used only for games and effects. For those who are not indifferent to the development of HTML5 technology (and even those who are looking for an alternative to MS), here is a translation of the article.

Online document editors such as Google Docs and Zoho Docs look very promising in the context of getting rid of MS Office and offline editing of documents in general. However, when it comes to more complex formatting and compatibility with the same Microsoft, I must admit that browser applications, to put it mildly, do not cope with the task. Accordingly, their only competitive advantage is the opportunity to share the document with a friend and edit it together in the cloud (which, incidentally, Microsoft recently added to its Web Apps in Office 365)

And here appears on the scene Teamlab Personal - a free version of the Teamlab office suite for personal use. Written using the HTML5 Canvas element ( development history for those who care), it combines Google’s online collaboration features and Microsoft Word formatting quality. And judging by the video prepared by the Teamlab team, their product has every reason to send Microsoft Office 365 back to the design phase.
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The personal version of Teamlab includes text, spreadsheet and presentation editors, essentially reflecting the capabilities of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but with the addition of tools for collaborative editing and commenting. Teamlab developers explicitly state that thanks to html5, their product can do what no existing online document editor can:

• Identical source and output data: the processed file retains the same style, paragraphs, line and symbol spacing, etc. when viewed in any browser in any OS, as well as when importing and printing;
• a wide range of options for working with tables, line spacing, multi-level numbering, text styles and headings;
• the possibility of smooth processing of multi-page reports, business or financial documentation in strict accordance with all standards;
• no language barriers due to the maximum number of fonts, including hieroglyphs.

You can sign up for Teamlab Personal through your Facebook or Google accounts. After that, you are invited to "create a single workspace" for all your documents by connecting the storage Google Drive, Dropbox, SkyDrive and Box. The use of third-party file storage applications allows a Russian company to offer its product for free.

(What you should pay attention to when watching a video: despite the fact that Teamlab definitely does incomparably better than Google and Microsoft, none of the three products performs 100% of the task. Well, the road will go the same way).



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