Simon’s Blog

I’ve been wanting to experiment with “saving my data in the cloud” (i.e. out on the Internet) for a quite a while now. Assuming the implementation is right (transparent), it seems like it should be the perfect way to store your data. After all, if it’s out on the Net, you can access your data from anywhere, on any device, at any time.

Making this transparent is easier said than done of course, but one application suite that’s made a reasonable attempt to enable this is Microsoft Office. Today, I’ve been authoring a Word document, and saving it as I go on our shiny new WebDav server out in the cloud. Microsoft haven’t done a bad job, I have to say. In Word, you simply do a “Save As”, and then instead of entering a FileName, you enter the URL of your WebDAV server. Doesn’t get much more transparent than that, in terms of implementation.

OK, there are a few buglets in the system e.g. sometimes the document Save throws an error, and you have to watch out because sometimes a doc opens as Read-Only; but on the whole it’s pretty damn great. I tried doing the same in OpenOffice to see if saving to a WebDAV URL is supported; but it doesn’t appear to be. Pity, because OpenOffice Writer is very nearly there as far as being “good enough” to be my main word processor. It needs two more features to make it good enough for me to consider switching: firstly, support for saving data in the cloud; and secondly support for reviewer comments that’s on a par with MS Word.

Having your data in the cloud is definitely the way to go. It will change the way you work for the better. The more applications that support this kind of functionality out of the box, the better, AFAIC.