I am always looking for free applications online from computer protection to media players as well as office suites and image editors. For my home computer, the Microsoft Office suite is what I use as well as the Windows Live Photo Editors and Viewers. As it was alluded to in the directions and in this course overall, school districts need programs with multiple user licenses and this can become very expensive. Cash-strapped school districts are looking to people in the technology departments to think “outside the box” to find cheaper or free alternatives to the Microsoft Suite and more established software such as Adobe Photoshop.
Of the suggested free office suite programs, I was already familiar with and used Google Documents so instead I wanted a review a program I never used before. I had never heard of Zoho as an online office suite, but after I started to use all of their options I saw there were great benefits to their offerings. The first big plus to the software was is was based on cloud-computing which allows users to be on any computer to access documents (Microsoft Hotmail has the SkyDrive which is the same premise. If you access to the Internet, you can grab your work from “a cloud” and use it on any computer instead of the work being on one dedicated computer.) which allows the flexibility to be anywhere with Internet access and pull your work, make changes, and save it for later. Zoho offers word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation applications similar to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, respectively. The one component that stuck out to me was Zoho Invoice; a similar, but smaller invoice program compared to more well-known programs such as Intuit QuickBooks. This may be a great alternative to handle simple invoicing depending on the size of the school district. Overall, this office suite would be a great alternative to the Microsoft Suite (compatible with all Microsoft formats) because it is free, but the one big con I see is how good the support and response time to issues is compared with Microsoft (Zoho was started in 1995 while Microsoft was started in the late 1970’s-early 1980’s).
For the photo editor, I chose Picnik to review because I never heard of it and I liked the name. When one goes to the homepage/launch page, the page is very eye-catching listing what one can do with their pictures for free, but also giving you the option to upgrade (This is very similar to Avast virus protection software. The free version is so good imagine upgrading!). Additionally, this application allows one to edit photos online from photos located on popular websites such as Picasa (Google) Flickr (Yahoo!), FaceBook, or off your own computer. This is also a cloud-based application, Internet-based, allowing the user to pull photos online instead off one, dedicated computer location. Also, one doesn’t need to register or download anything to use the free version this give peace of mind of downloading viruses or being put on a mailing list and receiving spam. As far as photo-editing, the usual suspects are there such as cutting and cropping photos, special effects, resizing plus it works on Macs and Window-based computers. I would highly recommend this program to use at a school district level. It is only web-based which doesn’t need IT department support to install and maintain and with it working on a cloud students can work at home and at a school using and editing photo projects.
