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Mary Jo "Thorn in Microsoft's Side" Foley says the MS answer to Google Docs will actually be a SharePoint space hosted on a Microsoft server. You can sign up for a beta now. Here's the FAQ.

I can see an IT manager of a medium-sized organization allowing this before letting users go to Zoho or Google. Especially if it's a Microsoft shop. The promo pages look nice and safe and corporate and boring -- not like whippersnapper online apps sites that are almost certainly made by commies. ;-)

I signed up for Google Apps for one of my personal domains this morning. I'm tapping my foot now while the CNAME record goes through and Google verifies I own the domain.

It occurred to me after hearing about Google's plans to build social networking on top of its existing properties that Apps already provides something like a closed-circuit network if you wanted to use it that way, a little like Marc Canter's PeopleAggregator .

I thought I might use this as my header.

Oops. Nope. Realized almost immediately that Google marks are not allowed, so I guess I'll have to take out that "M." Don't suppose they can trademark the use of different faces and primary colors within a word, though.

Later: You have to mess with MX records, then wait up to 48 hours for them to resolve, too. I'm not very adept at those sorts of things, always seem to get one little thing wrong and I never know which little thing. It's still very arcane, isn't it? I suppose that's the way the organizational mail server admins like to keep it.

Now, when you start a new document in Google Docs it can be a PowerPoint-like slideshow in addition to the word processing or spreadsheet choices.

I played around with it and found it easy to use when creating a brand new deck, very smooth. Haven't tried importing a .ppt file.

There's no sign of its name, "Presently," that was being thrown around pre-launch. It wouldn't make sense for it to have a separate marketing name within the context of the Docs interface. You'll recall they dropped the "Writely" name, too, when the independent online word processor was acquired to become part of the suite.

I have hopes for online office suites, but have to say that my self-imposed trial to do without MS Office for six months at home did not work out so well. I found that I needed certain advanced features both in a word processor and spreadsheet that Google Docs couldn't manage.

ZDNet's Google blogger didn't like the presentation tool, but its education blogger did. (Anyone else find the ZDnet education blog a little k-12-centric? When I read about higher ed online learning I find I'm able to apply more of it to corporate training.)

Jon Udell's latest interview on IT Conversations gets into Syndicated Oriented Architecture (SynOA, to distinguish it from plain ol' SOA).

Here's the .mp3 file of the talk with Rohit Khare, founder of KnowNow and software architect.

The first step, both evangelists say, is you gotta "RSSify" everything. Then tag your information to help other people find what you've found. Consider special problems of syndication in the enterprise.

My note: think beyond blogs when you think about RSS.

Yahoo for Teachers, demoed yesterday at Techcrunch 40, has been labeled a "yawner." It isn't much more than a bookmarking service, allowing teachers to drag resources from the web into an online app. The networking aspect of it, where teachers all over the world can see what other teachers have saved on a particular topic and share it with their own students, seems like the real value. So let the techies yawn. The web has always been about bringing people together around common interests more than it's about the zeros and ones that make that happen.

Looks like the much anticipated launch of Google's wiki and presentation package slipped. It didn't get announced last week at Office 2.0, says Rafe Needleman on Webware.

Still, it seems like Google isn't actively trying to hide their run at MS Office the way they seemed to be doing a year ago.

Know what I'd do to pry the door ajar to the enterprise space? Make some breakthrough feature for the calendar, because of course sometimes you want reminders about work-work you have to do at home, but of course you don't want to use Outlook for it. I use web Outlook, and can access Outlook through Citrix and I still don't want to use it at home -- don't want to feel obliged to look at it except on whole work-at-home days. It doesn't help that web Outlook must be viewed in IE for it to look and work at all well.

Plus, IT managers might not feel as strongly about letting go of the calendar as they would about cutting loose from Outlook for mail.

BTW I had a work-at-home day last Friday and watched part of the panel Rafe moderated at the Office 2.0 conference. He did a nice job. Crack-me-up part: when he invited Sridhar Vembu, Zoho's CEO, to remark on a question, he'd say, "Sridhar?" And every single time it sounded to me like he was saying, "Sweetheart?" Lonely homeworkers have to find some sport, and need to talk back to somebody or something, so each time I'd say, "Yes darling?"

I don't know how to say this. It's going to sound conflicted.

I don't really like those little skinny buttons you see all over the place. Like this.

I think there have become too many of them.

But I do really like at least the idea of this tool for making them as PNGs online.

Actually, I think I'd like it a little better if it made the buttons in HTML with CSS, since they come out all unanti-aliased anyway.

The language on the live.com team blog annoys me. I won't be caught up in the enthusiasm just because of some exclamation points.

More important, I notice the live.com folks speak of "shipping" which I understand is a term used in tech circles even if the product is not tangible. It's a point of pride to ship and the word is kind of cool in a hip capitalist Jobsian sort of way. Still, I think I'd feel better about Microsoft if the live.com people seemed to embrace the live nature of the project and didn't cling to terms better applied to disks and cardboard.

Dr. Fran talks about online personality tests in her Mental Health Missives podcast today.

She also says some flattering things about me. I suggested the topic. Fran's a fellow OPML blogger.

I like the Podcast News Network format. The 5-minute segments are scripted by the podcaster, which results in a lot of information packed in per minute. Fran does a nice job of providing a bunch of authoritative info while delivering it in a very accessible style, and throwing in her own opinions.

I like rambly podcasts too, but you just can't take the time to listen to many of those -- something I think everybody must discover several weeks after first getting bitten by the podcast listening bug.

We won't even get into podcasters losing interest. I'm feeling guilty about my literature game's hiatus. I think maybe after my vacation this week, I'll do another nine episodes to nudge it up to the magic 100. Then I'll probably do another game podcast at some point.

Am I missing something, or do Microsoft Gadgets only work on MS websites? I thought they were more like Konfabulator Widgets, which appeal to me because they're little and cute and separate from the browser.