Your Office in the Clouds: The Best Online Virtual Desktops

Doriano "Paisano" Carta — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:00:20 +0000

I recently wrote “How to Carry Your Office on a Stick,” which showcased the best ways to install portable applications on a USB flash drive. But what if you’re the type of person that doesn’t like to carry a flash drive around or happens to lose or forget it? The solution then might be a desktop in the clouds. This idea of an online or virtual desktop that you can access from any computer has actually been around for years, but continues to evolve with time. Here are some of the best ways to host your desktop online today.

Free Web Desktops

If you’re not interested in hosting your own virtual desktop or are not quite ready to invest in an expensive corporate class solution like the ones offered up by Microsoft, WMware and Citrix, then you might be interested in some of these free web desktop offerings. These services provide extremely easy do-it-yourself solutions that even the least technically-savvy individuals can set up.

iCloud from Xcerion provides a super-slick web desktop that you can set up in a few minutes. Its free public version provides 3GB of online storage for files and documents, and plenty of free applications such as a Twitter client, instant messenger for many services, email, calendar and much more. You can also add free widgets to your desktop, just like your regular one. It’s a neat product, but one issue that Simon highlighted when he wrote about it earlier this year is a lack of browser support.

EyeOS is another cloud desktop, but it’s a little different because it’s an open-source platform that you can either install and run on your own server, or you can create a free hosted account. One of the big advantages this one has — besides being able to host your own online desktop — is that you can actually create Word documents and spreadsheets with the included web applications. You can save your documents on your virtual desktop or download them to your local computer. Another interesting aspect is the fact that you can even build your own EyeOS web applications thanks to its open-source development platform. There is a helpful wiki for developers too.

G.ho.st stands for Global Hosted Operating System and it also offers a web desktop where you can run applications and store files that you can access anytime from anywhere.

One of the best things about G.ho.st is that it offers live connection to Google Docs and Zoho Office apps which means you can work on your word documents, spreadsheets and presentations all from your web desktop. There are also many other slick web apps and widgets that you can add to customize your desktop. You can save files on your 15 GB G.ho.st drive and even share files or folders with others. I especially like the ability to share files with non-G.ho.st users by making them public.

There’s also a G.ho.st lite version which is actually a mobile device version of the platform. This is exciting because it means you can access your files on your virtual desktop from your smartphone.

Self-Host Your Own Virtual Desktop

The concept of self-hosted virtual desktops isn’t new by any means, but the technology has matured over the years and has now become more affordable for smaller firms. The biggest self-hosting desktop solutions were originally from Citrix and Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services. Thankfully, the incredible expense involved with establishing virtual desktops has steadily declined through the years.thanks to newer services like like VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Citrix has also unleashed its own open-source virtual solution with its Xen Hyperviser product line.

What web desktops have you tried? Please share them in the comments.

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Web-Based "Cloud OS" Aims for App Developers and Users

Samuel Dean — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:25 +0000

While the idea of an Internet-based operating system has already been explored through offerings such as YouOS and EyeOS , Xcerion, a small Swedish company, is taking an ambitious new approach to the idea. The company’s XML Internet Operating System/3 Beta (XIOS/3) is best described as a “Cloud OS” and Web 2.0 service. I’ve been testing it on a Windows machine, loading XIOS/3 in Internet Explorer (you can’t yet load it in Firefox), and it generally looks promising.

XIOS/3 has many of the properties of an operating system (though strictly speaking it is more of a Web-hosted environment), and is targeted at online application development, collaboration, and sharing of free applications. It is XML-based, and uses AJAX to connect to back-end servers. If application developers begin to collaborate using it, it could become a promising new open-source platform and a flexible way for web workers to get jobs done.

XIOS/3’s desktop looks very much like the desktop that a Windows user is familiar with, complete with a sidebar on the right that resembles Google Sidebar (a clock, a weather widget, etc.), and tabs along the left that take you to programs you can run in the environment, a search engine, an XML editor for working with applications, and more.

Xcerion is backed financially by former Microsoft executives, and reports have already surfaced that XIOS/3 may begin to compete with Google and Microsoft in delivering numerous types of Web applications and services. For the time being, I see it as more of a Web 2.0 service that allows for collaboration on sophisticated online applications and sharing of those applications. It’s also in a limited beta version right now, so you need to apply to test the beta.

XIOS/3 allows you to do work offline and then automatically synch the work up with your data and applications when you go online. If I open up, say, a simple cash flow application and start changing values in the underlying data, then I go open another browser, my changes to the data will be reflected in the view in the second browser. In this way, web workers could easily collaborate on transaction-based, database-centric applications.

XIOS/3 also allows you to save data on your own hard drives, if you wish, or it can be stored online. Also, applications execute locally, so XIOS/3 is faster to use than some of the other Internet-based operating system offerings. It also has a very clean and easy XML editor.

To a large extent, the success of XIOS/3 will depend on coders building and sharing applications with it—just as standard operating systems have always depended on developers for success. You can find many screenshots of XIOS/3 and forthcoming applications at Xcerion’s home page. There is also a video demo and other information at the company’s blog.

The business model is to offer XIOS/3 and applications for it for free. In my own use, I found it stable, intuitive and good for collaborative application development. But what Excerion absolutely needs next, as is true in the Linux world and throughout the open-source arena, is enthusiastic developers.

Would you consider using a collaborative, browser-based spin on an operating system? Have you used any of the other Web-based OS offerings?

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Your Office in the Clouds: The Best Online Virtual Desktops

Web-Based "Cloud OS" Aims for App Developers and Users