An online office suite or online productivity suite is a type of office suite offered by websites in the form of software as a service. They can be accessed online from any Internet-enabled device running any operating system. This allows people to work together worldwide and at any time, thereby leading to international web-based collaboration and virtual teamwork. Usually, the basic versions are offered for free and for more advanced versions one is required to pay a nominal subscription fee.
Applications are often developed on the Web 2.0 paradigms with leverage on the existing developer community. Players come from both the commercial software market and from the open source, free software communities.
The centralized administration of office productivity software, installation, licensing and version control
Collaborative applications which improve personal and organizational productivity
Centralized storage of data, rather than traditional personal data responsibility
Applications which focus on collaborative data sharing, document review and document resource management
Office applications which are able to be run from multiple independent platforms with a suitable back-end framework to present the application in a uniform manner.
The cost is low. In most cases, there is no specific charge for using the service for users who already have access to a computer with a web browser and a connection to the Internet.
There is no need to download or install software outside of the office suite’s web page, including the ongoing upgrade chores of adding new features to or eliminating bugs from the office suite.
Online office suites can run on thin clients with minimal hardware requirements.
Online office suites provide the ability for a group of people to share a document without the need to run their own server.
There is no need to purchase or upgrade a software license. Instead, the online office suite is available as software as a service.
Online office suites are portable. Users can access their documents from almost any computer with a connection to the Internet, regardless of which operating system they use.
If the user’s computer fails, the documents are still safely stored on the remote server. Online service providers’ backup processes and overall stability will generally be superior to that of most home system