Principles of Information Systems in Business and Organizations - Essay Example

Principles of Information Systems in Business and Organizations Introduction In a world where the technology rules, much advancement in the computer related applications has been made. Further research led to the development of web-based application format of the existing stand-alone software applications. In this paper, a study has been made to know the functionalities of a few web-based applications with a comparison made with the stand-alone software and the differences in terms of functionalities, flexibility of usage, pros and cons are discussed.

Overall Evaluation of Products:ZOHOWriter (www.writer.zoho.com) Built with AJAX technology, the web-based word processor is fast and flexible to use. It has all the functionalities available in similar stand-alone word processing software like, Bold, italicize, underline, alignments and much more with 24X7 access availability. Using this Zoho writer one can publish items directly to a blog and can save and import a range of text document formats, from Microsoft Word to HTML. One can import a document from one's computer or from any other web-page.

But it raises a question, why should one import a file rather than accessing it on his own computer! There is no need to register in this website. One can easily access this website from anywhere by using his/her google e-mail id. The other main disadvantage noticed here is that, not two or more applications are made available in one page. In comparison, Google Docs (http://docs.google.com/), a well designed online application that helps user to prepare a Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation and Form.

Also, the work done can be shared by others to get online reviews. The application is found to be highly professional with all the basic tools and functionalities available in a stand-alone word processing application. Also, as four applications are made available in one browser page, people tend to use google docs than any other application. The main features of this application is one can allow the list of persons who can access their documents. Files can be stored online securely. Above all this application is totally free.

Conclusion:In an overall view of the web-based applications, one accepts well the pros and cons. The users around the world like to use the stand-alone applications rather than the web-based applications. Only the people who always are bound to travel a lot make use of such web-based applications. Even such personnel do use the stand-alone software in their laptops and not much on the internet. The web-based applications are used as an alternative for the stand-alone software worldwide. Many of the applications used are for business an application, which makes one to think about the security factors.

As one work with the web-based applications, the hold on the work done becomes less and on the other side, the work is done using an open-source application called the World Wide Web. Also, internet is not completely spread across the world and also in many countries, DSL is yet to reach and working with such web-based applications is quite hard with the dial-up connections.