Access your Desktop Anytime, Anywhere

Continued from page: 1

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

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

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.

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.

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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