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Access your Desktop Anytime, Anywhere

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PCQ Bureau
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With due respect to our dependence on PCs, the latest fad is to move away

from them and access everything from anywhere. “What's so great about that?” you

may ask. Today, you can access your e-mail, run an office suite, and even store

your data online. All this is available from anywhere over the Internet. The

trouble is that all these applications lie in their own separate islands, with

separate user ids and passwords. For instance, you might have an e-mail account

with Google, an Instant Messenger account with Yahoo!, might be using something

like rBack for online data storage, etc. You'll have to access all of them

separately. There was nothing available to tie them together, until recently

when the concept of WebOS came into being. This is the latest trend in the

online world. As the name suggests, a WebOS is a web-based operating system. It

gives you your own personalized desktop on the Internet, with your own

shortcuts, applications, start menu, and much more. The concept borrows from

some of the technologies available in Web 2.0. There are quite a few Web based

OSes available on the Internet, and we checked out ten of them to do this story.

Accessing a WebOS is as simple as accessing your GMail or Yahoo! Mail accounts.

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Benefits and drawbacks



With a WebOS, you get lots of advantages-you needn't carry a laptop to

access your data. You don't have to buy any application licenses. In fact, out

of the ten WebOSes that we tested,eight are free.

You can also create community groups, which allows you to share files with

other community members. For example, while on the move, you need an important

file from your office desktop. What will you do? Of course you will ask your

colleague to mail you that file. But what if the file is too huge and mailing it

is time consuming, or may be your mail server will reject such a huge file

attachment. Your colleague may try to send it by using services like GMail, but

with due respect to its size, GMail's spam control may discard that mail. In

such a scenario benefits of community groups shows up. Your colleague can upload

the file on his virtual desktop hosted on the Web and you being a part of their

group can readily share and access that file. It's like having a mini-online

network. The concept of WebOS could also be used in DTH consoles that come with

built-in Web browsers and Internet access facilities. In such a case, you don't

need to buy a PC for home. You'll have your own OS hosted online, which you can

access using your TV as the monitor.

Nivio is one of the few paid,

online operating systems. It provides more than 700 applications and 1 GB of

storage space. Plus, you get other benefits like the ability to install your

own applications, which is something most of the others don't offer
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WebOSes also provide multimedia capabilities and hence, allows you to play

music, view and share audio/video files. WebOSes like oDesktop, Nivio and ORCA

provide this functionality.

While the concept of a WebOS sounds great, there are still quite a few rough

edges that need to be smoothened, and quite a few limitations that need to be

overcome. For instance, in case of a WebOS that offers multimedia capabilities,

you'll need to upload your audio/video files to it. That would require oodles of

bandwidth, because even a small Mp3 file can be a few MB.

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Likewise, most of them don't allow you to install your own applications on

it. You use whatever's provided by the service provider, which in some cases is

quite dismal. oDesktop for instance, offers very few applications. There are

some, like Nivio that let you install your own applications, but it's a paid OS.

There are also others that provide you a large number of applications to choose

from, so that you don't feel the need to install anything. YouOS for instance,

offers about 700 applications.

Most WebOSes are not really meant for serious corporate usage. If an

organization wants to shift its employees to a WebOS model, it can't. There

won't really be a central way of managing all the users and grant them access

rights, as you would do on a corporate network. In order for that to work, a

service provider would have to go beyond what's being offered today. Perhaps in

future, we might see this happening, wherein a service provider offers complete

mini client/server based LANs over the Web. So an organization would pay for the

entire LAN, with the number of nodes they need, the number of servers they need,

etc. It would actually work out to be an interesting model.

This online desktop service

provides more than 700 applications and 1 GB of storage space
Goowy gives you a KDE like

desktop GUI, where you can work on multiple desktops
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How to subscribe



This is a simple task, and is similar to applying for any online service.

Fill up a form, provide a user name and password, pay up with your credit card

(if it's a paid service), and you're all set. Most of the WebOSes hosted on the

Internet offer commonly used Office apps, which include mail client, Office

suites, Instant Messenger (IM), and an organizer that lets you manage your

contacts, calendars, etc.

Glide was amongst the few to

have a nice looking interface. It lets you share music, photos, and videos,

and is also the only one that's been optimized for access from a PDA

How to choose one



There are a few factors that should be looked at while you select one for

use. These factors include apps that they provide, security and multimedia



capabilities that they offer, and of course performance. We checked out the
performance of ten WebOSes by using them on both high bandwidth as well as a

dial-up connection.

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We used a Reliance RWorld connection to check out the later. Obviously, most

WebOSes worked well on higher bandwidth, but while using them with a dial-up

connection, we were not able to use their services seamlessly. For instance,

ORCA WebOS worked fine with a dedicated bandwidth of 256 kbps, but while trying

to access the same on a 56 kbps dial-up connection we got stuck.

Those who worked decently over a dialup connection were goowy and YouOS. They

initially took 10-15 minutes to load, but after loading we could work on them

smoothly.

Interestingly Glide WebOS is the one that worked seamlessly at lower

bandwidth over a GPRS connection. It was also the only WebOS that is optimized

for access from a PDA.

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Security is another major concern. How secure are WebOSes? Are you sure your

data is in secure hands? How will you ensure that and what kind of security does

these service providers provide you? While trying to find an answer to these we

found that though all of them ensure secure SSL connection and whole of the

communication between your browser and Web-server are encrypted. But none

(except Nivio) amongst them ensure security against threats like virus, spam and

malware. This is a major drawback. However we presume that it would be a matter

of time before this problem is also overcome.

While each WebOS that we evaluated had plenty of offerings, there were some

that had features that others didn't. For instance, in Nivio, we found that you

could import your contacts. It has a Contact management tool for the job. The

g.ho.st was the only WebOS to offer data backup facility. However, Glide, Nivio

and g.ho.st were the only ones to offer their services over a secure SSL

authentication.

The concept of WebOSs is interesting, and is currently just a fad. However,

given the way Web 2.0 technologies are moving and being adopted, it has the

potential to evolve into a powerful tool for organizations.

Who knows, maybe someone will come up with a WebOS model that an enterprise

can adopt in their own IT infrastructure, and provide new meaning to desktop

virtualization.

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