Hyperoffice
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
HyperOffice is an American corporation offering online collaboration software for business.
HyperOffice was founded in 1999 by Drew Morris and Shervin Pishevar. It was one of the earliest incarnations of hosted groupware, along with sites such as Jump.com (bought by Microsoft), When.com (bought by AOL), and Hotoffice (which died but was resurrected).
HyperOffice's contributions are numerous but often underlooked. The company helped shape the market for SaaS (Software as a Service) at a time when most companies were not yet comfortable with the idea of hosting their critical corporate data. Additionally, its later incarnation, WebOS is responsible for the emergence of the rich internet language known as AJAX. Finally, the company spawned a cadre of developers that went on to either found significant companies such as freewebs and squarespace or become DHTML/JavaScript pundits (Erik Arviddson and Daniel Stienman).
The company was funded during the dot-com bubble of 1998-2000 and subsequently changed its name to WebOS and adopted the primary goal of developing a web-based operating system, leaving their collaboration products to flounder. In 2002, however, the company re-opened its doors and began a slow climb back.
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[edit] History and Evolution of HyperOffice
After attempting unsuccessfully to obtain funding for a Healthcare ASP (application service provider), founders Drew Morris and Shervin Pishevar decided to try a different business model. They quickly re-purposed a few of the applications that they had developed for the health care industry and launched HyperOffice. The two founders scraped together enough money to travel a technical conference called DEMO 99 to launch the product.
The product was originally launched as a free service and targeted toward individuals and small businesses. It enjoyed modest success and was soon funded by a group of private investors. The companies' vision was to displace Lotus Notes as the preferred collaboration application and to provide a low-cost (or free) alternative to smaller companies.
[edit] The WebOS Chapter
While HyperOffice was building out its collaboration functions, a young boy named Fredrik Malmer released a web site known as webos.org to demonstrate the power of a web-based desktop. The site was immediately heralded for its innovative use of JavaScript and DHTML. Within months of its release Fredrik Malmer had been contacted by HyperOffice and had joined the company. Soon thereafter the company changed its name to myWebOS.com. A year later it would become WebOS.com.
Within a few months after Mr. Malmers addition to the HyperOffice team, the company acquired 3 more notable members: Daniel Steinman, Erik Arviddson, and Emil Ecklund. Each of these developers has emerged as a driving force in the web development community and were well-respected as some of the top DHTML/JavaScript pundits of the time. Once this team was assembled, the company began work on the WebOS API, an early predecessor to the now-ubiquitous AJAX.
The WebOS API served as one of the earliest JavaScript event/object models that was overlayed on top of the browser. It formalized a process for asynchronous communication through the use of Iframes or Layers (depending on the browser). Perhaps more importantly, the WebOS API marked the first time a collection of JavaScript libraries were managed by a single central "kernel" and loaded on demand whenever a dependent object was instantiated. Although this practice is common in compiled languages it was the first time it was implemented for on-demand loading of libraries in a web environment. This was a truly significant leap in the history of rich internet applications as it formalized a process that is now used in almost all of the modern AJAX frameworks.
Although the WebOS API's were published briefly, they were published as the company was going through a dissolution process. They were largely ignored by the developer community because of the companies lack of support for them. Their concepts, however, can be found in numerous AJAX API's that pervade the Internet.
[edit] The Rebirth of HyperOffice
Although the company had changed its name multiple times to focus on the WebOS portion of its business, the core functionality of its products had always rested in its collaboration technologies. After the dotcom bubble burst in 2001, the HyperOffice service was maintained by its founders for over a year. In 2002 the company began development anew under its old name, HyperOffice, and re-dedicated its efforts to provide a collaboration suite (this time as a paid service).
