For starters I am seeing more forcefully the importance of wikis. When someone sends me an email attachment I think why not send me a link to a wiki page? If it is important enough for you to write this and me to read it, someone else will probably find it useful, too. I am now finding myself copying the contents of Word docs and emails to Wiki pages. It's a little more work for me but not much and I hope to demonstrate we can use wikis a lot more than we do already.

On the flip side, sometimes I can't change things and I need to follow protocols that were established for good reasons. I need to use certain formats, end of discussion. Google Docs does not have all the features I need (at least as far as I know and I'm not willing at this point to invest more time finding out if they are actually there, I need to get my work done). I've switched, at least partially to Zoho. There are more features in the word processing tool and it fits my needs better.

I have to admit I fell off the wagon today. I was working on a presentation with Zoho's presentation tool and couldn't get an embedded image to display properly. I have no doubt Zoho developers tested this and it works in most cases, just not mine. Again, I could have spent a bit of time investigating the problem, searching forums and finding that a quick fix that would have solved all my problems. Not a chance, not today. I have got to get this presentation done (it's still not done, thanks for asking) and I don't have time to mess around.

So, after a week of working mostly without desktop apps I can say I miss some easy integration features, I don't know how to do somethings but wish I did, legacy constraints keep me from a full switch to online apps ... but ... my default word processor is now Zoho Writer, I'm convinced wikis will make all of our lives easier (at least the small circle of people I collaborate with), and I am convinced we are just past the tipping point where online apps can compete with desktop apps. Sure there are differences and online apps can't do everything desktop apps can do, but desktop apps are not as enabling as online apps.

To make the full switch to online apps I will need to learn how to do a few more things that are done differently in Zoho or Google Docs and those vendors will have to add some more features or improve robustness of the ones already there (unless of course I'm the source of problems). The biggest drag on a full switch to online apps: working with others who continue to use desktop application-centric work flows.