Zoho launches document sharing service

It's not YouTube, but then YouTube wasn't made for slide shows.

Today's addition to the rapidly-expanding suite of Zoho's productivity apps is Zoho Share, a straightforward utility for sharing word processing documents, spreadsheets, PDF files, and slide shows. The online app reads in several popular document formats (although not yet the .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files from Office 2007), and of course Zoho's own documents. It creates embeddable viewers for all of them. Users can comment on files, just as they can on other sharing systems.

In the pre-release beta I looked at, uploading wasn't working and I didn't see a way to create a limited share--all files are public. However, it was easy enough to tag work with the licensing method of my choice, from All Rights Reserved to Public Domain. Other limitations include the lack of zoom controls on the view. Since PDFs displayed at 100 percent magnification in the small window, most could not be read without a lot of horizontal scrolling. However, users can view any presentation full screen, which helps.

Zoho Share competes with Scribd, Docstoc, SlideShare, and other "YouTubes for documents." This feature is becoming a commodity; like with YouTube, it's the community that makes the difference. Zoho still makes sense as a sharing function for its own suite of productivity apps. Its capability to create shares for other type of documents is just a bonus.

The viewer window can expand to full screen.