Computer Applications: Web 2.0 to 4.0 Home

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State of the Market
The evolution of computer applications and productivity software suites will be driven by the protocols and the emerging web standards. The result will be changes in the architecture and the functionality associated with standardization in order to achieve interoperability among applications and collaborative computing. SYS-ED's computer application courses define and teach MS Office - 200, 2003, 2007 on MS Windows XP and Vista. Equally as important, we highlight the differences in relation to open source alternatives and software as a service.

Web 2.0 is driving the changes in the featureset of business applications. Web-based documents can be accessed via the internet thereby providing real-time collaboration and sharing. With Web 2.0 memos, documents, and address books no longer have to be stored on the computer desktop. Personalized home pages create a virtual desktop which can be accessed by logging on via the web: e-mails, alerts, RSS aggregator, documents, and tagged items.

These icons and their corresponding capabilities are becoming increasingly common to the workstation desktop.

	Build and utilize wikis, blogs, and forums.		Streamline content and document management through centralized collaboration.
	Create and utilize enterprise search.		Provide RSS subscriptions and web alerts.

SYS-ED has been benchmarking the Web 2.0 standards and underlying protocols which serve as the foundation for the emerging software as a service applications and tools. As technologists, we are also are evaluating industry think-tank projections as to the future Web 3.0 and 4.0 standards.

Technology Projection
Web based productivity tools are an excellent means of increasing productivity: collaboration, communication, and saving time. They are significantly less expensive than the Microsoft Office Suite. Many of these software products are free or available at minimal cost.

Web based productivity applications provide online access to a document while tracking iterations. Web-based documents can be accessed anywhere, anytime. It no longer will be necessary to keep a copy on the office PC, home PC, and another on the laptop.

Although web-based documents do not have all the bells and whistles of full-feature desktop software they foster real-time collaboration and sharing.

Google Docs is a tool which serves as an impetus for designing collaborative agendas, documents, and reports. It provides the capability to create and edit documents and spreadsheets online while collaborating in real-time with others. Documents can be uploaded from MS Word, OpenOffice, and RTG files in Google docs. There is a collaboration option which can be used to invite others to edit or view the documents. And there is an option to compare different versions of a document that have been shared. Documents can be downloaded to a computer in a number of different formats.