Colleague Maurice Vergeer pointed me in the direction of Zoho during the recent Etmaal conference in Amsterdam and our conversation on collaborative software. A week later I got around to scanning the Zoho site and my first impression is summed up in the title of this posting. I do think the range of items in the package – from simple note taking to team calendars, to spreadsheets to wikis, to chat, to planning, to (of course) word processing – provides a kind of online environment that can be shared is little less than astounding.
I'll be going through the individual packages in the coming couple of weeks to test my first impression further and to compare with what Google Docs offers. For now, let me just cite the following text from the FAQs on the Zoho site:
10. Do I still need Microsoft Office?
We like to tell people that it is entirely up to you. While we encourage everyone to work online; sometimes you need offline access or simply cannot work without your usual office tools. Zoho enables the best of both worlds since Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show support all the office formats including .doc, .xls and .ppt you can use both. While working with Zoho online you can take advantage of online collaboration with others and the mobility Zoho provides; while working offline, you can still us your MS Office tools. The good news is, we also have a plug-in (a small application you download from our site), that lets you create, edit and save your documents & spreadsheets directly to Zoho Writer/Sheet from within Microsoft Word/Excel. We also support "offline" mode in Zoho Writer so that you can work in your browser even when you are not connected to the Internet and later synch up with your online version when you are back online.
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