Month: March 2006

Microsoft Online Services

Microsoft has bundled a lot of its online properties under the MSN banner.  Offerings include e-mail (Hotmail, Hotmail Plus and Outlook Live), IM and Blogging, Search, Internet Acess, Entertainment, and Mobile.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 is an online version of Microsoft's bloated Outlook desktop email product.  Hotmail Plus offers more in-box space and larger attachments.

Instant Messaging & Blogging offers MSN Messenger, and MSN Spaces.  In my opinion, MSN Spaces sucks balls.

I will not describe the others here.  Check them out yourself.

Web 2.0 again

After discovering the ITRedux web site I decided to try out a few of the apps recommended on the site. I liked iRows and was quite impressed with it especially when I found out it could handle chart and graphs! The features are fairly basic but useable. One problem for me was when I imported Excel work books with multiple sheets and graphs. iRows chose to break the worksheets out into multiple workbooks and I lost the linkage between the sheets. I have not fully tested Zohosheet.

I had already tested Writely, which I like a lot, so I tested Zohowriter. I had no problem importing existing Word documents but I feel that Writely does a better job of emulating a real word processor.

I also tested Thumbtack, an online presentation system. There is no current ability to import Powerpoint slides. Slides must be created from scratch and there is not way to include graphs from a spreadsheet although one can import images.

I look forward to using these tools on a daily basis and see what works and what does not.