It’s official: Google is sticking its neck out into the enterprise applications market with its Google Apps for Your Domain. After a slow but deliberate investment in online web applications that mirror Office applications, Google has finally let the water out of the hydrant. Let the games begin!

Currently, Google is offering Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Page Creator to businesses that own a domain. The service is free during the beta. Paul Kedrosky has already played around with the service, and is impressed with the interface. Basically, there are no real suprises–just the usual clean and functional interfaces that we’ve come to expect from Google.

So, should Microsoft be shaking in their boots? With the push of Vista and its increased document sharing capabilities, Google is directly attacking Microsoft’s turf. But, it’s not going to be a walk in the park for Google, and here’s why:

• Responsiveness: On slower machines, Google’s online apps are significantly slower than Microsoft’s desktop offerings. No matter how they slice it, heavy duty apps running in browsers are less responsive than desktop apps today.
• Connectivity: Storing everything in Google’s datacenter means that you’re out of luck when you’re offline. There will probably be solutions for this rolled out in the next year, but currently, you’re stuck without an internet connection. Perhaps an Office exntension paradigm like what Xcellery provides could be a viable solution.
• Portability: Simple Excel and Word documents can convert fine. But, what about real-world complicated documents? These currently aren’t guaranteed to fly in Google’s world.

These problems are by no means simple, and I’m sure Google is actively looking into potential solutions, especially for the connectivity problem. If they can trump these three issues, Microsoft will certainly see a significant number of users jumping on the Google ship.

Online applications like Gliffy, Google Spreadsheets, and Num Sum allow users to free themselves of the desktop, allowing universal access to documents via a browser. But here’s the real question: how many people are actually using these apps for heavy duty work? I’m willing to bet that most uses of these online apps are for casual documents that don’t require tedious work. The UI responsiveness of browser apps still leaves something to be desired–desktop apps are still king in this category. I certainly wouldn’t look forward to editing big spreadsheets in Num Sum for long periods of time. This is exactly the problem Xcellery solves by combining the best features of both desktop and web applications.

The key to Xcellery’s usefulness is that, in addition to their online browser editing capability, users are able to directly edit documents in Excel. Simply click the “Double click opens in Excel” button, allow macros from Xcellery, and you’ll be editing natively in Excel. The integration is seamless, and new Xcellery-specific buttons are added in Excel that let you view the editing history, import existing Excel documents, and save and create new spreadsheets.

Of course, if you don’t have Excel, you can still edit the documents in the browser. Xcellery combines the collaborative and sharing environment of an online app with the responsiveness of a desktop app. For most users, being able to directly edit documents in Excel will make Xcellery a keeper. I would love it if all the other online web applications could hook up with my local apps. Writely with Word and Gliffy with Visio. Editing in a browser can certainly be drag–the simple solution is to let users have the choice of editing on their desktop app, and use the online editing capability when its convenient. Xcellery is trying extend Excel, not replace it.

What’s next for Collaborall, the makers of Xcellery? On their FAQ, the say that

Our vision is to provide a simple and effective collaboration package integrating with Microsoft Office.

We should be on the lookout for Collaborall equivalents of the other Office products. Personally, I’ll be excited to see if they can truly integrate the entire Office suite online.

The bookmarking space is getting very crowded indeed. Microsoft recently launched their bookmarking service, Windows Live Favorites. At first glance, it seems to be just another del.icio.us clone. But, at further inspection, it’s a lot worse.

Favorites is part of the Windows Live service, Microsoft’s foray into web applications. All the typical bookmarking service features are present in Favorites. You can add a bookmarklet to quickly favorite websites with a pop up window. I actually like this type of bookmarking method better than the redirection method in del.icio.us. Redirecting can sometimes be a bit jarring on the surfing experience. The pop-up method is also seen at Blue Dot, another social bookmarking contender to watch out for.

The interface for managing your bookmarks is all AJAXified. But, somehow it feels a bit clunky, like the whole interface is going to fall apart at any moment. At times, I found that buttons were unresponsive for long periods of time. They certainly have a few UI issues to sort out.

The service allows you to enter a description and tags along with the URL. After building up some links, you’re able to star them, somewhat like Gmail’s star feature. Later, you can sort by stars, and see what links you’ve marked. In addition, you’re able to view all your tags (there doesn’t seem to be a tag cloud feature, so all you get is a flat list). You can also directly preview each of your bookmarks by clicking on the preview button, which opens the bookmark in a columnized frame. I wouldn’t see myself using this much, but if you’re doing a lot of bouncing back and forth between each bookmark, it could speed things up.

Currently, users can import bookmarks from IE, Netscape, Firefox, and del.icio.us. I entered in my del.icio.us username, and tried importing my del.icio.us bookmarks, but was only able to import the latest 30 bookmarks. It was, however, successful in getting all the tags and descriptions for each item.

Favorites has a spotlight-like search at the top of the page, which searches your bookmarks instantly as you type. The response was pretty quick, and searches all the text and tags.

But wait, where’s the social bookmarking aspect? There is a sharing attribute for each bookmark, but there is no obvious way for you to share or view other people’s bookmarks. It turns out that you’re only able to publish your latest bookmarks on your MSN Spaces. You will need to first include the Windows Live Favorites module.

Overall, Windows Live Favorites brings nothing new to the social bookmarking table. Also, the bookmarking system is pretty closed, in the sense that the only way to share bookmarks is through an MSN Spaces account. Microsoft needs to open up if they want users to more effectively share their favorite sites. They can easily do this by providing a direct interface within their Favorites service to see other people’s bookmarks (and perhaps a zeitgeist of popular links, like the one del.icio.us provides). An open API would be even better, but I don’t expect them to do that anytime soon.

Then again, maybe Favorites is supposed to be more of a personal online bookmarking service, with less of an emphasis on the social aspect of bookmarking.