Online applications have several advantages over proprietary software. Many quality programs are free, resulting in an impressive cost savings for institutions and individuals. Teachers would no longer be denied an application due to a lack of licenses. At first I thought security would be a problem, but from all my readings, I don't feel the risk is any greater than licensed software. How many security patches have you downloaded for your purchased software? If you're like me, it is a common occurrence. The ease of collaboration would also be a reason to use one of these programs rather than emailing documents to a committee members and comparing contributions and corrections. This led me to wonder if these programs would be more useful than a wiki for collaborative projects.
We were asked to compare Open Office and Google Docs. One difference is that Open Office requires a download, and Google docs does not. Another important difference concerns the compatibility of these programs with my operating system and browser, Mac OS 10.4.11 and Safari 3.1.1. While Google Docs works in Safari, the Presentation piece does not, and I would be required to use Firefox to create a presentation. Open Office has developed NeoOffice for Mac users. Google Docs seems to be a little more "bare bones" than Open Office, but I
thought one of the advantages of these programs was to escape the clutter of features in Microsoft Office. 
I still wanted to explore more alternatives and I found Abiword and Zoho. They are both downloads, and Abiword can be used with Mac, but at this point, it is just a word processor. Zoho seems to have as many components as Google and they introduced Mac capability to their word processor in March 2008.
At this point, I do not have a clear preference for any of these programs. I definitely would be interested in something easy, something that could be used for collaboration, and something that works easily on Mac. For now, that leads me back to Google Docs, but I am going to stay tuned for new apps.
(Neon question mark uploaded to Flickr, February 1, 2007 by Xurble; Google logo uploaded to Flickr, Oct. 11, 2006 by dannysullivan; Open Office logo uploaded to Flickr, Nov. 19, 2006 by Noticias-TIC; Zoho logo uploaded to Flickr, Dec. 3, 2006 by Robert Sanzalone )
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There are various online applications that are there in the online market, but how would it be if all of them are clubbed into one single thing, It is called eDeskOnline which gives you the facility of email, accounting, tax calculator, much more...
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