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  Zoho - Office 2.0

  Nikhil Rastogi, Dec 09, 2007 1137 hrs IST

  Is this the future of Office?

  

Page 1 - About Page 2 - Starting Off, Files Page 3 - Interface, Web 2.0 Features Page 4 - Offline Support, Conclusion

The Interface

One thing you'll notice with Zoho Writer is that it's far more polished than the rest, and sort of sporting a "I've my own identity look" compared to the other apps in the suite. This is plainly because many of the new features are first released on Zoho Writer due to its overall popularity than the other applications in the suite. The look of which would most probably transition to other apps in the suite. Talking about the look, you can even change the default skin colour of the app to a more Windows Vista-ish dark look with "Elephant grey".

The toolbars aren't resizable (not that you'll need to), though buttons can be switched on or off via options, which is a nice touch here. As always, it's great to know that the most used quick shortcuts work as they are supposed to. It's so satisfying to know that [CRTL+S] works and works well. Meaning, it will temporarily override the browser's Ctrl+S functionality when editing, though if you switch to another non-Zoho window, your browser shortcut will return to normal magic of Ajax programming! This really shows how much we as users have got used to Microsoft Office and define other products only in relation to it -- well, after all they're the ones who pioneered it on a large scale.

Web 2.0 Features

What you'll certainly like is the ability to quickly tag the files, simple text that helps search engines identify files quickly. Again, the interface is fairly inconsistent; Zoho Writer has tags placed where they should be -- below the document with a tag icon, while Zoho Sheet had it up on the right hand side with a different tag icon altogether.

"Comments" is another nice feature -- a good way of keeping track of your thoughts or additional content while writing something.

Embedded Zoho Chat has probably taken a page out of Gmail, you can easily embed chat into any of the Zoho applications with its own skin support. Embed chat of course works with only Zoho Chat. This may put some of you off, but understand that Zoho Chat isn't meant to compete with chatting clients, rather it helps when collaborating documents with other people.

Zoho's apps, especially Writer, can easily be extended to other blogging services directly such as Google pageflakes, WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Live Journal, etc.

Last but not least, Sharing -- you can choose to share you documents privately or publicly. Private sharing requires user IDs to be set.

Page 1 - About Page 2 - Starting Off, Files Page 3 - Interface, Web 2.0 Features Page 4 - Offline Support, Conclusion

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