(Credit:
Larry Dignan/ZDNet)
This was originally published at ZDNet's Between the Lines.
Zoho on Tuesday rolled out a unified mobile front for its suite of Web applications.
Zoho had offered some basic iPhone and Windows Mobile support previously, but now is unifying applications like Mail, Calendar, Writer, Sheet, Show, and Creator into one interface.
The mobile applications will run on iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian operating systems.
The company also added that some of its business applications will also be supported in the future. Zoho added in a blog post that it plans on supporting Palm in the future.
As noted before, it's a bit surprising that Google hasn't acquired Zoho, which honestly is much better than Google Docs. Meanwhile, Google could use Zoho's business apps to be more of an enterprise player.
ThinkFree, a company that specializes in "next-gen" office productivity solutions, announced Tuesday that it has launched its ThinkFree Netbook solution, which will deliver word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications for Netbooks running Intel's Atom chipsets, like the Asus Eee PC or the Acer Aspire One.
According to ThinkFree, its Netbook Edition offers a simplified user interface and compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007 files. Most importantly, the software is optimized for a small screen and features integration with ThinkFree's online service that allows users to collaborate with each other and synchronize documents on-the-go.
"In today's digital world, document collaboration and real-time synchronization is a vital part of staying on top of business," Su Jin Kim, ThinkFree's CEO, said in a statement. "Netbook users are demanding applications that are built to not only meet, but make the most of, the unique characteristics of this new device category (and) Netbook OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) can now offer their customers just that by pre-installing a customized, device-tailored version of ThinkFree Netbook Edition."
ThinkFree isn't alone in the market for Netbook office applications. Asus Eee PCs ship with Sun Microsytems' StarOffice (download) installed, and even Open Office (download) can be downloaded onto Netbooks. And as long as users have an Internet connection handy, they can perform office productivity tasks on services like Zoho and Google Docs.
ThinkFree's Netbook Edition is available for Windows XP, Vista, Linux, and Mac OS X and will work fine on 800x480 and 1,024x600 displays. A free trial copy of the software can be downloaded now on the company's site.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Zoho Mail, out of private beta testing, works on the Apple iPhone.
(Credit: Zoho)Zoho made some significant changes to a core part of its cloud-based application suite Friday: its online mail application now works offline and with Apple's iPhone, and the beta test is now publicly available.
The offline and mobile features are major areas of development for Web-based applications, and cloud computing advocates including Zoho, Yahoo, and Google are racing to build in those features. Offline access helps ameliorate Web-based applications' limitations when no network is available, and mobile access helps fulfill one of the big promised advantages of Web applications: access your documents any time you do have network access.
Offline access, which in Zoho's case is enabled with Google's Gears technology, lets people read and write mail in the browser even when not connected to the network. "Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes seamlessly. While offline, you can respond to your emails as you would normally. When you go back online these emails will be sent out from your outbox," the company said Friday in an announcement.
Easier said than done, perhaps: I just got an indefinite "Loading..." message in both Google Chrome and in Gears-enabled Firefox when trying to access my mail after I shut off my network.
(Update 10:30 a.m. PDT: I thought I'd gone through the offline settings properly, but evidently I hadn't. It does in fact work, mostly, caching messages on my PC and automatically adapting according to whether there's a network. I could write new mails, though Zoho Mail only saves them to the draft folder instead of queuing them up to be sent. And when I tried to reply to an e-mail, I got the error message, "Sorry, this feature is not supported while you are offline!")
And mobile support, while difficult given the primitive state of most mobile devices' Web browsers, can also help when people don't have access to a PC or a Wi-Fi network. "We do plan to support other mobile devices soon," Zoho said. The application worked fine on my iPhone.
Zoho Mail can be accessed with other e-mail clients using the POP (Post Office Protocol) today; the more powerful IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) support is "coming soon."
It has no storage limits or ads. Users can opt to organize mail with either labels, a la Gmail, or Folders, a la Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. And back-and-forth exchanges can be viewed either with Outlook's conventional style or Gmail's conversation view. Also adopted are some Outlook keyboard shortcuts, such as Control-Enter to send a message. The application worked for me, though I missed Yahoo Mail's drag-and-drop abilities and Gmail's stand-out filtering options.
People who sign up for the e-mail get a "username@zoho.com" e-mail address. And through the AdventNet subsidiary's business offering, customers can use Zoho Mail with their own domain.
Zoho's Web-based e-mail client uses Google's Gears to enable offline access to messages. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: CNET News)The third annual Office 2.0 conference, which starts Thursday, is where people talk about getting real work done on the Web.
There will be no robotic ice-cream machines at the San Francisco conference. Likewise, soft-core porn start-ups won't be showing up.
Once again, I'm looking forward to hearing what's new in the world of work 2.0. First up are two productivity suites, one coming out Thursday from the hyperactive Zoho and another from a company you've probably never heard of: Zooos.
Zoho Docs: This is a new integration app on top of the company's suite of apps. We continue to point to Zoho as a prime example of how much productive work can really be done on the Web, without requiring downloadable software.
Zoho Docs integrates the main Zoho applications--and all your online data files--into one application. So like Google Docs, it's a launcher and a file system. But unlike with Google, the files can actually be opened up in the docs window, which makes for a somewhat simpler experience than Google, which opens docs in new browser windows or tabs.
It's a good evolution of Zoho's product set.
Zooos: This is a very interesting development: It's a port to the Web of Sun Microsystems' Open Office, a desktop productivity suite. And it has some clever tricks that even Sun doesn't support.
In addition to having the main Open Office apps, Zooos also has real-time collaboration, almost exactly like Google Docs offers. (Zooos doesn't let two users change text in the same paragraph in a word doc at the same time. Other than that, it does let them edit the same document simultaneously.)
Offline support (and syncing documents to the desktop) comes via a small browser plug-in (Firefox and Safari at launch; Internet Explorer to trail; Chrome unknown). And Zooos has a clever file management system. In addition to the usual suite-specific storage service, people can also access documents on their local PCs via Box.net accounts, FTP servers, and even YouTube and Picassa Web accounts. All these show up as folders.
Since Zooos runs on servers and doesn't require much on local machines other than a browser, it's also a decent solution for mobile users; most smartphones with browsers should be able to run the company's mobile-specific Web services and be able to use all the Zooos apps.
Zooos will run its own server farm so people can try out the suite over the Web, but the real business is selling software for companies to install on their own servers. This allows businesses to take advantage of cloud services without putting their employees' data on some other company's machines. The service will cost $999 a year for 10 users, with significant price breaks for more users and for extensions to the subscription after the first year. CEO Hishan El-Eman told me he hopes to launch the product in October.
The Zooos system gives you access to Web version of Open Office apps, as well as a very flexible file storage system.
(Credit: Zooos) Related:
If you're looking for another online office suite, skip Microsoft
The love of work: Office 2.0
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.
Monday morning, Zoho, the online productivity suite, announced full offline functionality for its Zoho Writer product. Zoho had previously released partial offline functionality for Writer earlier this year, but you could only read the documents and not edit them. What good is that? Luckily, as a little post-Thanksgiving gift, we now have full offline editing, utilizing Google Gears (download Google Gears for Windows or Mac from CNET Download.com).
The offline functionality here couldn't be any easier. If you need to go offline, just hit the "Go Offline" button at the top, give Zoho permission to use Google Gears, and you are ready to go. If you make any edits to the documents offline, when you get Internet access again, you just hit the "Go Online" link and there you are! Everything is automatically synced back to Zoho's servers, and you are good to go.
I have used the offline functionality, built on Google Gears, for Google Reader on many occasions, so I am not one bit surprised at how well it works with Zoho. Google has built a killer platform for offline Web applications. Zoho is leading the way right now, offering offline functionality for its word processor, even before Google Apps does. Zoho currently offers 14 online productivity services, so maybe it's time for Microsoft to start taking note.
via VentureBeat
Compare the various office software solutions with this helpful CNET chart.
(Credit: CNET Networks)For most everyone working in the U.S. corporate world, Microsoft Office is a must: Outlook for e-mail/calendar; Word for word processing; Excel for spreadsheets; and PowerPoint for presentations. The 2007 release has been covered extensively on CNET Reviews.
However, a recent rise in free office suites has given end users much more choice in productivity software than they've had in many years. Just two weeks ago, IBM announced a free version of Lotus Symphony. Though it's still in beta release, the freeware includes serviceable word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software, all of which support Microsoft Office file formats.
The best known Office alternative is still OpenOffice.org, which also includes word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, but it also throws a database application (Base), a vector-graphics program (Draw), and a mathematical formula tool (Math) into the mix. The open-source productivity suite is based on StarOffice, now owned by Sun Microsystems.
Curiously, Sun recently made StarOffice (listed for $69.95 on its Web site) available for free via a partnership with Google Pack.
Speaking of Google, the online giant hopes to give Microsoft a run for its office money by providing free Web-based tools that anyone with a browser can access. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is much more limited than Word and Excel, but the collaboration features are mighty attractive. Also, online software such as Zoho Virtual Office is even more advanced than Google's offering.
For a comparison of alternative office software, be sure to check out Elsa Wenzel's recent roundup of competitors to Microsoft Office.
What do you think? Do you still rely on your trusty Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications, or have you moved on to an alternative. How many of you have tried online word processors or spreadsheets? Tell me about it in the comments.
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