by Mielle Sullivan, Janus Networks
Google Docs is a great, simple office suite in the cloud. It works perfectly for a lot of people and small businesses. I’m even using it right now. But if you, or your business, need to use more powerful programs, yet want the easy accessibility, convenience and ease of collaboration that Google Docs provides, then Soonr is a good option.
Soonr isn’t new. It was founded in 2005 as a service that enabled standard mobile phones to use the applications on computers in an optimized way, but since then it seems to have evolved into a complete productivity tool.
You install the Soonr app on your desktop and mobile phone and select which files you want to sync with Soonr’s servers in the cloud. From then on, all those files are automatically updated and synced as you edit them. Just like with Google Docs, you can grant others access to documents and they can edit as well. Teams can collaborate on “Projects” containing multiple documents all organized under the same umbrella. Users can also comment on documents without editing–a nice layer between read only and edit. From the Soonr dashboard you can see all the recent edits and comments and who made them. From your mobile phone you can email or fax (that’s right you heard me, fax) documents out through eFax. With an iPhone you can even print a document from any networked printer.
The mobile interface for viewing documents is apparently very intuitive and fast, because it only requests from the cloud the portion of the document you need at any given time. Soonr supports over 800 mobile devices. We don’t offer handset editing ourselves, but coupled with QuickOffice it’s possible. We’ve integrated with QuickOffice to offer QuickAccess.net. Often times handset editing is a limitation of the handset/os , not the software.
I should clarify that Soonr isn’t an office suite, it just supports such a variety of document types (it even supports .mov files) that you can choose which office suite to use, and it is all continually updated, organized and safe in the cloud.
Soonr isn’t free. If you want acess for more than two users or more than 2Gb of storage you have to pay bit. To get at least five users and 40Gb of storage, you will pay $19.95 a month. I don’t know how the cost scale goes up from there, but it is probably reasonable. So if you work collaboratively are mobile and are tired of fiddling around with the frankly clunky version