Thinkfree, a web based office suite, has announced the launch of ThinkFree API, that will enable websites and blogs to post or host office documents on their own servers, where end users can just launch the file in the browser and make changes then and there.
The launch is in sync with Google´s announcement that they will be launching Google Presently shortly to complete their online office offering. It seems that Google is definitely not the only player gunning for the MS Office market, in fact it does not even have a complete offering till now. Thinkfree has not only made a complete online office suite having all components in the form of Thinkfree Write, Thinkfree Calc, and Thinkfree Show, but are now moving ahead to make an ecosystem around their offering by allowing developers to create exciting new applications on top of these documents and to use them in their own hosted applications.
Thinkfree has already launched a Viewer plugin for wordpress, so that bloggers using the wordpress platform could directly create, and edit office docs within wordpress. In addition to this they are working on a “Document Exchange” that is a Youtube for Documents, although they call it Flickr for Documents. Thinkfree has also quietly build their userbase and now has more than 250,000 registered users of their application.
The company has also been smart in moving quickly to form strategic partnerships and has partnered with Jive Software, the manufacturer of Clearspace an enterprise-class application that combines the latest content creation tools (wikis, blogs, forums, collaborative documents and chats) with intelligence (tagging, workflow, user rewards, RSS). Jive has integrated Thinkfree API into Clearspace to allow their users to view, edit and save Office documents without ever firing the desktop based MS Office software. Thinkfree has also partnered with Livestart, a Dutch business portal and has signed a $3.2 million deal with NHN, the largest Korean Internet Portal to integrate Thinkfree apps into NHN’s NAVER portal, which will make Thinkfree accessible to 20 million users.
Thinkfree is utilizing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a sister web service of Amazon’s Web Scale Computing offering to allows users to have complete control over their computing resources and lets them run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 is a Web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
