Access your Desktop Anytime, Anywhere

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.

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

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.

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.