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Today my colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is reporting on Mandriva founder Gael Duval’s Ulteo, which now offers online access to the OpenOffice.org productivity suite:
“OpenOffice.org goes online with SAAS version“
I’m an OpenOffice.org user and overall fan of software as a service–particularly when it’s a free service–so I thought I’d take Ulteo for a spin.
It took me a few tries to access OpenOffice.org on Ulteo, and when I finally made it in, I received this somewhat disconcerting message. Apparently, my previous failed attempts left some loose ends in my Ulteo hosted home directory.
I forged ahead, broke the lock held by the phantom user, and I was staring down the barrel of Calc. Time to spend some time with my fantasy basketball spreadsheet, in all of its unsupported-by-google-apps functions glory.
Trouble was, I could tell how to upload my spreadsheet to Ulteo. The grayed-out box seemed to be the source of the trouble. A Java applet that failed to load, perhaps?
I consulted Ulteo’s search for help, but there were zero non-advertisement results for the term “upload documents.”
I read in SJVN’s story that I needed the “real” Java runtime from Sun to use Ulteo. As far as I could tell, that’s what I was using …
Have you tried Ulteo’s OpenOffice? Did you fare any better than I did?