You know one distinct advantage of cloud computing is that we’ll get niftier business suites, with more mobility and features than clunky old Microsoft Office. Google (News - Alert) has a good set of offerings, Zoho isn’t far behind.
Aplicor recently shared some thoughts on business suite software, noting that “we now live in a subscription economy, a concept that had no meaning at the turn of the century.” Remember when business technology was something you got in a car to drive to buy? And you got it all, whether you wanted or needed all the features or not, you paid for them.
No wonder somebody came up with a better way. In addition to more of an a la carte approach to functionality, as Aplicor notes, upgrades and new models just appear without our having to do anything, and it’s all paid for via monthly subscription fees instead of huge capital investments.
Aplicor, naturally, has what it thinks is a pretty good offering in this field, the Cloud Suite 7. It contains what company officials call a “rethink” of how such suites function from the ground up, retaining the tabbed interface for those who need to stick with that, but offering a “tiled workplace metaphor” for others.
Cool -- we’re even improving the metaphors of the cloud business suite experience.
Tiled workspaces present, in the Aplicor model, up to six apps, which the user can arrange and deploy as needed. A sales person will have a different configuration than a marketing person, a sales manager from a rep.
And since visualization of data is such a core function for business, the Aplicor suite offers charts and graphs to present whatever data one would care to present. No need to run a lot of separate queries and reports. We’re pretty sure you won’t miss that.
The watchwords for the rethink of the user interface, Aplicor officials say, are “graphic, intuitive and fluid.” Such an approach resulted in giving users the ability, for instance, to drag and drop, link and render data operational with zero programming required. They note that this makes the tool far more flexible and agile than many other offerings.
Yeah, making it more visual and intuitive would accomplish that.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Rich Steeves