Web based desktop systems
In my job at Sourcesense I deeply rely on instant messangers to get in touch with my collegues who work in other cities, from home or at customer premises. So it is really annoying when I am at a client site and I cannot connect to IM’s because of firewall restrictions.
If you happen to find yourself in this situation, Meebo can be your friend.
Through Meebo, a purely web based application, you can connect to four different types of instant messangers and, obviously, firewall are powerless against it. The dark side of this tool is equally obvious: you must tell Meebo all your userid/passwords, and that’s not properly a good thing.
Since I had to use Meebo a lot of times in the last month, I started looking in the opensource arena for similar tools. If such a tool existed, it would be useful to deploy it in your company’s server, in order to give the employees the opportunity to connect to IM’s from nearly everywhere, regardless strange firewall policies.
The Yafumato Web Messenger is one of this tools, and it’s written in Java. I must confess I had some troubles in the installation process, but it’s still under development and I think it’s a promising software. I hope to have the time to give it a deeper look.
The final piece of the puzzle is eyeOS. As the website states, eyeOS is
a web based desktop system. With eyeOS you can access your data and your applications anywhere, anytime. A virtual office in your hands, no need to install anything in the computer. Everything lives in the browser, for you and your work colleagues. eyeOS is open source and free software. Set up freely an account on our servers or, if you prefer it, install it in your server. Make your life easier with the virtual word processor, calendar, file manager, messenger, browser and other applications. And if you want more applications, just visit the eyeOS Application Database!
eyeOS is a PHP based application with low requirements (a cheap web hosting should be enough to install it), and comes with a good number of applications available (see eyeApps).
The idea behind eyeOS is not new: Sun’s motto “the network is the computer” is 22-years-old (coined by John Gage on 1984), and, more recently, IBM Workplace strategy is going on the same road. However, neither Sun nor IBM have never tried to build a really simple, extensible and open system based on this idea.
The point is that I think we really need a web based desktop system now; or, at least, I need it. It’s pretty common to work remotely from home, at client sites, and often all our little useful applications simply cannot work in these situations. It’s likewise common to work for a customer who uses a specific application you don’t own, so you have to ask them for the application and a license, download, install….. while with a web based desktop system you should simply ask them for access to their web based system.
What do you think? Are the times mature for a web based desktop system?
3 Comments