Reaching for the Cloud with OpenGoo

I really like Google documents.  I like the flexibility – I can access my information from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.  Also, it feels good not having to buy the pricey Microsoft Office.  Actually, I'm one of those who is very excited about cloud computing so I pretty much use Google docs for everyday things. (I hear zoho is much better though).

I recently started a small web design 'business'. Basically, I build sites for small organisations and individuals.  I have a reseller account with Myriad Networks so I also host my client's sites.  When I ventured into this, I decided to try and store all the business documents online.  I chose Google docs as I perceive them to be stable and fair.  However, as my small business is progressing, I'm starting to worry about my important documents stored in the 'cloud'.  What if something happened to Google, or what if I somehow lost my Google account?  Questions such as these wore down my resolve to online-only document and spreadsheet processing. I made a local back-up last Tuesday.  Sadly, that's the main problem with computing in the cloud – you entrust your information to a third party.  I'm sure many individuals don't mind doing that – they already have their whole lives on facebook or myspace – but for corporations it is a big problem.  Not only is it worrying to store your company's private information on someone else's disk space bit in some cases, it is not even legal to share client information with third parties.

Guess what? Today I found a reason to go back to my online-only strategy.  OpenGoo is an open source web office solution for every organization to create, collaborate, share and publish external documents.  It offers:

Text documents
Spreadsheets (coming soon)
Presentations
Task lists
Email (very cool)
Calendars (very useful and feature-rich)
Weblinks
Contacts

Of course these are available elsewhere so how is open goo different? Well, 🙂 , OpenGoo is open in all ways.  It isn't hosted on someone's server like, say, Zoho.  You install it on your own disk space and run it from there.  The installation process is similar to WordPress' five minute installation.

Lifehacker has a wonderful review of OpenGoo.  Read it.

My take: OpenGoo provides a solution to many of the problems that plague cloud powered online office suites. Not only that but you don't even need the internet to install and run OpenGoo.  You can use XAMPP instead.

What do you think of OpenGoo?