A Webified OpenOffice.Org Challenges Office Live

Ulteo's

Or, it's trying.

Ulteo this week launched its service into beta and is looking for 15,000 testers. Its promise: to give you portable, Web-based OpenOffice.org applications including Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base and Math. Not versions of those apps, but those apps themselves, portable, collaborative, and available at the click of any Web browser that supports Java.

"Run OpenOffice.org 2.3 within your web browser with the Ulteo Online Desktop, manage your office document online, share your OpenOffice.org session in realtime, share your prints and get PDFs. . . " Ulteo says that you can save a document either to a hard drive or to your free allocation of 1 Gb of online storage.

Files are stored in a virtual root directory and, once you find that (by clicking on a "Transfer Files" button), you can upload or download documents back and forth between a hard drive and your online storage.

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Ulteo's blog also discusses different features like encryption, web browsing and bookmarking from within its service.

It's a great idea but it still needs work to make it successful. Google Docs isn't as pretty, but it's fast and it's easy. Ulteo's service is balky and slowed down by Java. (Use Ulteo, and you start to understand what Steve Jobs meant when he referred to Java as a "ball and chain.") And to make matters worse, a crush of early adopters may have taken its toll. "(S)ince yesterday, we're experiencing a big rush on our web server," Ulteo warned users on Saturday. "If it's too slow, or if you cannot get an OpenOffice.org session, please just register and come back later. We will inform you when things get back to normal! Sorry for the inconvenience."

What a bummer to open a service that could take on Microsoft, but, within a couple of days has to apologize for an "inconvenience" that keeps people from using it.

Earlier this week, also, Microsoft Office Live kicked off its limited beta test of Office Live - - joining the space for online document creation and collaboration that Google had entered long ago with Google Docs. A few weeks ago, Live Documents - - another online productivity app service, created by one of the founders of Hotmail - - went into an invitation-only beta. (No invitations have yet been sent this way, despite a few requests.)

A lot of people are working very hard to get it right in the online applications space, with some success, some failure and a very uncertain chance for financial success. Ulteo is trying to make your digital life simpler. If only it could find a way to make its applications simpler.