Quickoffice Inc. has extended its offering with two announcements at the Smartphone Show. These announcements start taking the company beyond supplying just a tool to edit Microsoft documents on a Symbian smartphone. Richard Bloor spoke to Paul Moreton to find out more.
is rapidly transforming itself from a company focused solely on enabling Microsoft Office suite document editing on S60 devices and UIQ phones into a total document solutions provider. It is doing this through cooperation with a company which is new to the Symbian ecosystem, SoonR.
However, the core of its offering is still Quickoffice and at the Smartphone Show Quickoffice Inc. is demonstrating the next version of Quickoffice.
Quickoffice Premier v5 will bring editing for Word and Excel files in the new Microsoft Office 2007 document format to S60 devices by the end of this year. "This is a major milestone for Quickoffice and the first solution to support Office 2007 document editing on S60 devices," says Paul Moreton, vice president of product management at Quickoffice Inc. "It has been a major undertaking; incorporating Microsoft's new XML file formats." Paul says that support for the new document format gives Quickoffice users with the same viewing and editing features provided for the older Office document formats, plus support for some of the new Office 2007 formatting features. "We are also providing our same no data loss technology for Office 2007 documents, so any features we don't support in Quickoffice are preserved when a document is saved," says Paul, who also notes that PowerPoint 2007 document support will be provided in a future release.
Paul is also quick to point out that the current release of Quickoffice Premier v4.5 already outperforms Mobile Office on Windows Mobile 6 Standard. "We support more features and offer significantly better data maintenance than Microsoft's product," says Paul. Paul gives examples such as the ability to create new documents, more advanced editing features, the preservation of data items such as document revision marks and Word drawings, and the fact that Quickoffice Premier v4.5 is much more efficient at opening large files.
In the second announcement Quickoffice Inc. is teaming with SoonR to build client technology, branded as Quickaccess, to facilitate the sharing of documents and other files between a PC and Symbian devices. SoonR already provides its users with the ability to access content on their PC from mobile devices, while the user's PC is on, using a mobile browser. In cooperation with Quickoffice Inc. this capability will be significantly enhanced, with access provided to files on SoonR's server and the ability to view file remotely.
"With Quickaccess smartphone users will be able set certain files or folders on their PC to synchronize with the storage solution hosted by SoonR," says Paul. "This will then allow users to download or view these files on their smartphone. In addition, our technology will synchronize any files modified on the smartphone back to the SoonR service and, when the user turns their PC on, the modified files will be returned to their PC."
The viewing technology will be powered by Quickoffice Inc.'s SVG viewer technology (which is BitFlash technology Quickoffice Inc. licensed exclusively in 2006). The advantage of viewing documents via SVG Tiny (SVGT) on a mobile device is the data transfer requirements. "PowerPoint presentation can be many megabytes in size," says Paul. "By converting the content to SVGT we can highly compress the data, so using this technology we can render a page using just a couple of hundred kilobytes of data; for a document page this can be as little as 3 kilobytes." Another big advantage of SVGT, particularly for PowerPoint slides, is that Quickoffice Inc. can support slide animations and transitions using the animation capabilities of SVGT. This SVG technology will also be used to provide a unified device, SoonR repository, and PC file browser.
Most Symbian devices already have an SVGT viewer (indeed BitFlash is the standard viewer in UIQ) but Paul explained that "using our own viewer means we don't have to worry about the capabilities of the on-device viewer. This will be a cross platform technology so it makes sense to incorporate our viewer so we can deliver a consistent and high quality experience."
The SoonR technology will be released in the first quarter of 2008.
I covered the cooperative approach Quickoffice Inc. is taking to expanding it offering in a recent article discussing the Adobe Reader LE v2.5. The agreement with SoonR extends the cooperation Quickoffice Inc. is undertaking by moving beyond simply implementing a piece of smartphone software. By mobilizing PC data in this way the technology should eliminate the frustration of synchronizing a device with vital files, usually a job rushed while leaving the office. While this will offer significant advantages to individual users and smaller businesses it will be interesting to see if Quickoffice Inc. can leverage Quickaccess into the enterprise space, where there are already a number of synchronization and remote access specialists.
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