ThinkFree unveiled the long-awaited online version of its office suite earlier this week, but thus far, technical glitches have made the service inaccessible — a situation ThinkFree hopes to have reversed soon.
“Unfortunately we had some issues with our server in bringing up the new ThinkFree Online,” ThinkFree’s Jonathan Crow told Macworld. “We fixed some of the issues last night and are adding more servers. Unfortunately, right now the service is down for some reason — our technicians are looking into the problem.”
When the service does become available users can expect 1GB of storage for file sharing, blogging and storage of documents. The online productivity suite offers compatibility with Microsoft Office documents and gives users the ability to create, share and edit those documents online.
“We have the best Office compatibility of any Microsoft suite out there so you can get going immediately and you don’t lose any compatibility,” said Crow. “Old files that people send you will just work.”
ThinkFree Online includes ThinkFree Write for word processing, ThinkFree Calc for spreadsheet management and ThinkFree Show for creating presentations.
The online service also includes Collaborative capabilities for group document editing and file sharing; Document tagging to allow optimal organization and categorization; 1GB of free upgradeable online storage; Ability to publish documents to a Web page, blog or Internet application; Easy insertion of images through Flickr, the online photo management community, to share more vivid personal images of life events; Ability to set different collaboration levels, from completely private to accessible by anyone on the Web; Consistent user interface regardless of computing platform; and Ajax and Java technology support, which gives users the ability to do quick edits as well as power edits for more complex documents.
The web interface is localized for U.S. English, but built-in multi-lingual application support is included for UK English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, simplified and traditional Chinese, and Japanese.
Recommended hardware includes 100 MB free hard disk space to use ThinkFree Online Power Edit features. Macintosh G4/G5 systems are recommended for Mac users, the company said.