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ThinkFree Unleashes 3 New Offerings

ThinkFree, an online office production suite I recently reviewed, has released three new features which include an API to the ThinkFree Viewer, a WordPress Plugin and instant upload to ThinkFree DocExchange. We will take a look at these new options a little more closely below.

ThinkFree Viewer API  - Now you can with the release of the ThinkFree Viewer API. The API will enable developers to integrate the ThinkFree Viewer into any product to display an array of file types on any system regardless of the OS and software installed. Below is an example of the ThinkFree Viewer in action. What would you mashup with it?

ThinkFree Viewer WordPress Plugin - WordPress users can now rejoice at the fact that you can add ThinkFree documents into their blog posts and readers can view them directly from the browser without the need of office software. You can find the ThinkFree Viewer WordPress plugin here.

Instant ThinkFree Doc Upload - Looking to position itself as the "Flickr of Office 2.o" ThinkFree file uploads will soon be directly uploaded to the ThinkFree DocExchange, a publicly accessible area, where users can view, comment and rate documents from the ThinkFree community.

ThinkFree offers a great online office suite and its constant improvements like these that should keep its users happy and ahead of the pack of Office 2.0 options.

ThinkFree For Office Apps Online

The days of desktop office productivity software are numbered as solid web-based products have began to emerge. ThinkFree, a San Jose-based company, offers a fairly robust web-based Microsoft Office compatible application suite. ThinkFree Office Online is easy to use as it leverages users’ familiarity with Microsoft Office to offer a product made up of ThinkFree Write (word processing), ThinkFree Calc (spreadsheet), and (ThinkFree Show) presentation software. You no longer need to rely on Microsoft Office to produce documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Currently, the product is offered solely for online use; however, I had a chance to chat with ThinkFree Director of Marketing, Jonathan Crow last week at the Under the Radar: Office 2.0 event and he mentioned that users will soon be able to upgrade to a premium offering which includes offline use.

ThinkFree provides 1 GB of storage and presents a dashboard called “My Office” which offers a place for managing the suite. Each application offers quick edit mode and power edit mode for more complex formatting. With ThinkFree documents, spreadsheets and presentations can be started from scratch or uploaded directly. Items can be tagged and placed in folders for organization. ThinkFree also offers some interesting publishing options which enable any document to be shared publicly and accessible via a URL. For example, I uploaded a test document and published it here. The ThinkFree community can view, comment and rate public documents. ThinkFree DocExchange uses the community information to surfaces the most popular public documents, coolest documents and most blogged documents. 

For companies looking for an enterprise solution, ThinkFree has a Server Edition that makes it possible to run ThinkFree on a company server. To find out more about ThinkFree be sure to check out the ThinkFree blog.

Bottom-line: ThinkFree offers an online productivity suite which is very comparable to Microsoft Office.