This is pretty amazing: A company called Ulteo has made it possible to run OpenOffice in your Web browser. No big application to download to your PC, no software to install or run. And it’s not some stripped-down version of the beloved office suite, either: It’s the newly released OpenOffice 3.0.
In addition to providing full access to all six of OpenOffice’s apps, Ulteo offers real-time collaboration capabilities, meaning multiple users can work on the same document simultaneously. That makes it pretty worthy competitor to Google Docs and Zoho — especially for those users already accustomed the offline version of OpenOffice.
During the beta trial (which has been going on for nearly a year), you can sign up for a free account with 1GB of storage. I had no trouble getting browser-based OpenOffice to run in Firefox, and dang if it didn’t look and operate just like the desktop version (though it was just as sluggish as the last time I tried it out — in December, 2007). Definitely worth a look while you’re waiting for Microsoft to launch its browser-based version of Office.
