23 Musings

It's been a while since Zoho announced their offline capabilities using Google Gears (back in August in fact). At the time I blogged about their announcement of offline read capability with the write functionality coming in a matter of weeks.

Well, they've now announced full offline functionality. Still using Google Gears the feature will allow you to finish off that document while disconnected from the web and then synchronise changes when you connect again.

The functionality is only available for Zoho Writer at the moment, but I'd hope to see it rolled out across their suite of products soon.

Interestingly, Zoho have also spotted the announcements about Live Documents. They've responded with a post on their blog about the revenue claims made by Sabeer Bhatia.

It's going to be interesting in the online office market. I still think Google may have something up their sleeves which could make them dominant, but who do you think will be the winners?

So, Adobe have announced the acquisition of an interesting company. Virtual Ubiquity have a very cool online wordprocessing tool called Buzzword. This brings Adobe into a new arena of competition where it hasn't really focused up to now. They will now be going head to head with Google, Zoho, Thinkfree and Microsoft.

What's most intriguing about this deal is just how good a Flash based wordprocessor could actually be. Flash, if well constructed, can be incredibly easy to use, something that any online office tool must have as its key selling point.

Throw in Adobes new service Share, which allows users to share and publish online documents, and the portability and ease of use of PDF files and Adobe could have quite an engaging offering quite quickly. Share also includes REST API's to allow document data to be integrated into other apps.

The plan is for it to be ported over to AIR 1.0 when that is released early next year, giving Buzzword offline capabilities as well. Could they beat Google to this holy grail of the online office app?

Things are getting interesting, time for Microsoft to make their move perhaps? Silverlight?

Zoho, those creators of funky web based office apps, will be announcing offline functionality for Zoho Writer their word processor tool today. This may be the first on/offline office app of it's type.

The functionality has been built with Google Gears. That's a huge smack in the face for Google as they should have been first with this kind of offline functionality for their own Google Docs, not letting a competitor use their own technology to beat them to it. Users will need to install a plugin to allow the offline functionality, but that's it, really simple.

Read-only functionality is coming first for the offline users. Read/write will be added in a number of weeks and thats the killer app.

Zoho are constantly one step ahead of Google and other online office tool providers. Google et al need to step up a gear and launch some serious innovation if they are to catch up (functionality wise that is).

Here's a video presentation about the functionality:

Zoho have today made three announcements on their blog of new pieces of functionality they are releasing. The most interesting of the three is a new plugin for Microsoft Office! This plugin will allow users to open Zoho documents in Office applications, save Office documents to their Zoho accounts and even add an Office document to an existing Zoho document (good move for collaboration!).

Currently it's only Word and Excel that the integration works with, hopefully they will find ways to extend it to Outlook (for calendering) and Project as Zoho have a Planner and Project app.

They've beaten Microsoft to the funtionality everyone said should have been in Office Live when it launched (and wasn't). This really makes Zoho useful to a much greater degree than when it was purely an online office suite!

I'd expect MS to counter pretty quickly (if they have any sense)! Otherwise this could become the killer app of the online office world, certainly makes it much more useful than Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Office Live as it is.

The other announcements relate to the new Zoho API's which willow tight integration between other web apps and the Zoho suites, and Desktopize (a partner) who have customized their product to make Zoho apps seem more like desktop apps.

I like Zoho, a no-nonsense company who deliver apps that work and are really useful and aid productivity, surely this is what Web 2.0 is all about!

Google today will be announcing the merging of Writely (their online word processing application) with Googel Spreadsheets. Bringing the two services under one banner makes sense and heralds the start of a bigger push into the online office market for Google, possibly to prepare for Microsoft who are set to embark on a project to put a version of Works online. Google Docs & Spreadsheets (the catchy title for the new service) has a single admin area and sign on through the GMail accounts allowing you to see all your documents at a glance. Users can collaborate in real-time on documents with their colleagues and publish them to a web page or blog.

Also launching today is the newly merged Zoho suite of products. Zoho Virtual Office contains ten products including word processing, spreadsheets, email, task management, notes and contacts. What's more Zoho is free for personal use! This is the most full featured online office tool I've yet to see and offers a lot more than the Google service. They added a single log-on for the suite of products last week so combining them under one banner was the logical next step. The email feature is brilliant and rather than giving you a free mail account it allows you to plug in as many POP accounts as you like.

I'm sure Google will have more products to join Docs & Spreadsheets but at the moment it looks like Zoho is leading the online office tools race. Microsoft is going to have some catching up to do, I imagine they will have an advantage as people will be familiar with the Microsoft interface, but they better launch out of beta and have a free version soon or they will have a lot of catching up to do!