Atlassian Editgrid Tie-in: Online Spreadsheets in Confluence Wiki

By John Conroy | Published Jan 15, 2008

Atlassian and Editgrid Offer Online Spreadsheets in Confluence enterprise wiki

EditGrid, one of Google's main rivals in the online spreadsheet department, is now available to users of hosted versions of the Confluence enterprise wiki from Atlassian.

Confluence customers can now collaborate on spreadsheets in real time using EditGrid's technology and create or insert spreadsheets into Confluence pages. The result is a spreadsheet saved as an attachment in Excel format and a revision history that can be managed via Confluence.

The Editgrid plugin for Confluence offers more than 500 features, “the greatest of any online spreadsheet” including:

Multiple Users: Enables multiple users to see dynamic changes to a spreadsheet
Remote data update: Retrieves live financial data on the Web and brings it to the spreadsheet
Import/Export: Enables importing/exporting to and from Excel, CSV, HTML, Gnumeric, Lotus OpenOffice…
Chat: Offers built in Chat function

We took a guided tour of Editgrid's Excel Plus plugin a couple of months ago with CEO David Lee, and were extremely impressed, particularly with the live linking capabilities to web-based financial data.

For the Excel plug in, the synchronization tool EditGrid Sync. is employed to automatically back up data from offline to online sources daily. There is also a range of other features on board which most likely caused some teeth-grinding down at Google Labs.

The battle for the SaaS office applications high ground is just getting started. While Google looks down from its lofty perch, it's highly questionable whether its online apps have the ability to beat the likes of Zoho and EditGrid.

Then there's ThinkFree, which has been quiet lately, but you just know they're planning something. In addition, there are all kinds of interesting products clinking around in SourceForge, just waiting to burst out and amaze us all.

Meanwhile, if you're interested in an enterprise wiki, Atlassian Confluence might be just what you need. After that, head on over to EditGrid to find out more about their products.