The hype-o-meter is twitching recently over porting common desktop apps like word processing and spreadsheets onto the web. EWeek and others have been declaring that web-based applications are coming of age. Google appears to be taking up the standard, leading a host of smaller developers in pushing the envelope of online applications. In fact, I am writing the first draft of this post on Google's "Docs & Spreadsheets ."

So should law and professional services firms head online for word processing?

Not quite yet. But for e-mail, many firms are already using Outlook Web Access (OWA), a web-based application. In fact, e-mail went web way back with Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo! Mail. Web-based apps tend to be more focused and have less features, largely because of the technical hurdles they face being online. Inline spell checking, drag and drop, and tracking changes are there, but forget mail-merging, if you care. This simplicity has won many adherents frustrated by how complicated desktop word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications have become. Online apps play to their strength--collaboration--where anyone with a web browser and the right privileges can edit, update, or otherwise provide feedback on a document. That same opennes, however, should scare the briefs off of any lawyer worth her salt.

But the road ahead holds a lot of promise. We envision a hyrbid scenario where apps reside on a firm's intranet, rather than the big-bad World Wide Web. Some of the advantages of online apps include:

• Easier deployment and seamless upgrades.
• Less expensive equipment on the desktop.
  
• Simpler licensing.
• Less configuration for managed environments.
• Built-in DMS: the documents are natively on the network rather than a local drive.
• RSS integration for new documents, updates, and document revisions.
  
• Microformats to reuse chunks of information rather than whole documents.

Under such an environment, the servers and connection speeds become critical. What is interesting, if web-based applications take off, it will mean that the pendulum will  have swung back toward a variant of the mainframe/terminal model of old.