Bigger isn't always better

I have mixed feelings about initiatives such as live.com, start.com, Writely etc. I really do like the idea of having this sort of thing hosted centrally. I think it would save a massive amount of time for IT support people though it does smack rather of the good old days of mainframes and dumb terminals.

I do however think that there is a seriously missed opportunity, particularly for Microsoft. I work for a large organisation in the UK, while I'm sure it would save a lot of money through the use of these sort of applications it would never be able to allow Microsoft to store it's data. The opportunity that is missed is for large enterprises to host these applications on their own servers so that they can be tied into the Intranet. This gives the Road Warriors even more flexibility. Working from home could become old fashioned, working from the beach could become reality!

It also could mean the end of drive mappings (finally!). In my experience one of the things that users get confused about is network drive mappings. If on saving you get a choice of "my personal stuff", "Stuff people in my section/department can see" or "stuff anyone can see" then you are halfway to better managed data storage.

In my department I have managed to convince users that saving all the correspondence with particular clients in their own folders on the departmental drive is a bad idea. We now have a structured system which puts all the correspondence for a particular client in one folder, regardless of who wrote it. This isn't rocket science and is probably normal practice in the rest of the world but in a lumbering organisation that is still living in the Stone Age it is a revelation. No longer do users have to search the whole of the drive (with its tens of thousands of files) every time they are looking for something. They can now search a smaller number of folders which saves everyone time. I've also created a little Word macro that takes the id of the client and saves the file in the correct location automagically and stores the fact it has done it in the central database. This now means that the database knows about the files as well as the data which means that we can make it accessible from our Intranet.

My question is - will I be able to do this with Writely or the other web 2 apps?