The online office suite Zoho launched a new presentation tool this week called Zoho Show, for use in creating and displaying remote presentations on the web. Zoho parent company Adventnet is a TechCrunch sponsor.
Thumbstacks appears to be the primary rival faced by Zoho Show, and both have certain advantages and disadvantages.
This newest offering is the 12th Zoho web based application, including a word processor, spreadsheet, chat, CRM, an app creator and more.
Zoho Show’s most important feature is that you can import Power Point (and open office) files. That’s it’s primary advantage over Thumbstacks. Unfortunately, there’s a 1 MB upload limit on those files, so substantial Power Point files won’t work. Zoho files can also be exported to power point files or put up on the web with single click, whereas Thumbstacks exports to HTML.
Both Zoho Show and Thumbstacks offer remote controlled online display of slideshows, and both make it easy to toggle between public and private. When private is selected, both systems display an error message if you try to load the public URL.
Zoho Show does not appear to support the creation and manipulation of arrows, which seems like a huge problem for presentations. Thumbstacks does. According to the Thumbstacks developer’s blog this was a real technical feat, browser support for arrows. Instead Zoho offers some images of arrows that you can move around and resize. I don’t look forward to having to do that.
Both services support easy import of your photos from Flickr, but only Zoho’s prompts you to login to access the photos you’ve marked private. I can imagine private web based presentations being put together with private web stored photos, and if that’s what you’re looking for you may not want to use Thumbstacks.
Thumbstacks seems to have struggled on Macs since inception and has a limit of 5 viewers at once for slide shows. Overall I get more error messages and UI struggles on my Mac with Thumbstacks, but being able to add arrows to my slides is very important to me. While Zoho Show is a more polished offering from a commercial vendor, until they add support for arrows at least I can imagine myself using Thumbstacks to create most slide shows just for showing people over the phone. I’d use Zoho Show if I was working on something collaboratively with people who use Power Point – and I’d ask them to put the arrows in it for me.
To be fair, the now 12 services strong Zoho suite is impressive. We reviewed Zoho Writer here when it came out and the company is obviously serious about improving their offerings over time. Here’s hoping that Zoho Show increases its Power Point upload limit and adds support for arrows.
Not very impressive…They seem to simply replicate PowerPoint instead of trying to build a presentation tool targeted at Soccer Moms. What a waste of time and energy. -Edwin
Good to try out, but they have restricted to demo user account, wondering when they would be opening up for registration.
Hey dreamchaser zohowriter.com is open to the public, I just got an account last week. I have only used the word processor function. With that said it worked fine for the few paper I had to write this week.
those damn arrows
Dreamcaser,
Registrations are open & you just need to fill the sign in / sign up form in the right hand side to register. You have to check ” I’m a new user” to sign up.
The demo account is to make it easy for users to try before signing up. We don’t want to force registrations on users even to try the software.
Edwin,
I am not clear with what you mean by “targeting Soccer Moms”. Please send a mail to mani [at] adventnet [dot] come with you feedback, so that we can better understand your feedback.
One of the main advantage over PPT is that you can access your presentation anywhere & you can make remote presentation ( over the web ) with full controls without using web conferencing tool.
Thanks,
Mani.
Mike, you mention that presentations can be exported to PowerPoint, but they do not list that as a feature and I cannot find it anywhere. Also, just to clarify, the five viewer limit in Thumbstacks is for what both apps call “Remote” functionality (i.e. hosted conferences), not slide shows in general.
Also, maybe it just reflects that this review is more of a comparison with Thumbstacks than with PowerPoint, but are arrows really the biggest thing you think is missing?
Oops, I meant Marshall.
I don’t think the snide remarks about Zoho’s sponsorship hold much water if you read the post. I appreciate their sponsorship, but I wouldn’t have written that post any other way regardless. We’re also not the first review blog online to cover this service, it’s news.
On export, the public presentation is posted as a file online, so a right click and you can save it to the desktop.
I think a good online power point would be just fine. And I think that visual presentation without arrows to point to particular parts of a visual display is a pretty fundamental problem, yes.
Sheesh!
I just wanted to see how does it support Unicode and bidirectional languages, it seems that it supports Unicode but not bidi langs.
After that I tried to import a simple and small ppt file, but after several attempts it seems for me that it take more time than I can wait.
Re: “On export, the public presentation is posted as a file online, so a right click and you can save it to the desktop.”
I really don’t think so.
Seems quite rushed (is that…comic sans in the logo?). Doesn’t line up with the visual standard of the other zoho apps. Mac support is also pretty ropey.
I don’t mean to sound overly negative, but this whole thumb-in-every-pie strategy for web start ups is starting to grate. If you can’t make software as good as 37signals can, perhaps it would be better to marginalise and focus on one particular area and excel at it, rather than producing an entire office suite of okay-but-not-wow-inducing online apps.
If I had to guess, I’d say that this was rushed through to launch because a couple of weeks ago the rumourmill said Google was looking to buy something like this.
Anyway, it’s free so I’ll stop complaining
I’m sure adventnet are hard at work improving it!
yongfook,
Yeah, but let’s not forget that Zoho Writer was pretty poor when it first launched – it’s now a really solid product.
Yongfook,
It wasn’t rushed – we have been perfecting the main editor component for months now. It proved to be quite involved, more difficult than Zoho Writer. IE is quite hard to support.
We discussed about putting the logo on top, but space constraints (the main part of the screen demands a certain aspect ratio to hold the slide) prevented it. Our engineers argued logo is not as important as providing a good experience.
On the visual standard side, we invite feedback. We have gone through several rounds internally, but we will keep revising based on user feedback. Our internal users report that it kind of grows on them over time. Compared to Zoho Writer, the UI looks more minimal on the main screen, and it primarily reflects the different functionality. Partially it also reflects the fact that Zoho Writer has had the benefit of many months and thousands of user suggestions.
We could have simply adopted the well-liked Zoho Writer UI, but we decided that was not the right solution to this problem.
We are working on perfecting Powerpoint imports, the main area of pain. Imports work, but are slow, and complex imported presentations take too long to come up on slideshow. We are working on a solution right now, and should be available next week.
Thanks for the feedback. We appreciate the criticism.
Sridhar
Mani,
What I meant is that when you put a new product out, you can generally accelerate adoption by targeting sub-polutions/specific use cases. Targetting the professional user or trying to combine PowerPoint and Webex in a single tool seems like a VERY hard strategy, specially given that both on Macs and Powerpoint, people have tools they are generally very happy with.
What I meant by Soccer Moms is that there is a population of user out there who do not use powerpoint in their everyday life yet but might want to create simple presentations. I think that it would have been more effective to find a few of those use cases and focus on them rather than try to take the path of replicating PowerPoint knowing that it will take 4-5 years to really get to a point where professional users *might* consider switching.
-Edwin
I love Zoho and have reviewed them as a part of my web life experiment at http://www.degardener.com , however I question the logic with this one. Unlike Excel or Word, Powepoint is a classic desktop application. Online tools have too many disadvantages (long upload time, slow editing) when it comes to this specific app. I think online presentation editing and sharing is important, but should be built with a paradigm shift – different design and user interaction concept, in a way that will fit the web 2.0 drivig forces – light weight, fast and simple display, easy sharing and collaboration.
Edwin:
We appreciate the candid feedback. We agree it would be futile, to try to replicate everything in a Powerpoint & Webex. By the same token, the web as a medium provides some inherent benefits that are harder to achieve in a desktop application. At some point in the future these two worlds will merge.
On the remote presentation functionality, we showed a very early version of Zoho Show without it, to some early adopters. The first thing they wanted is “How do I give a remote presentation? Isn’t that natural to expect that about a web presentation application?” So we decided to get that done before releasing it.
To some extent, the target market is not sharply defined. We have been surprised by the variety of users in Zoho Writer, ranging from school kids doing home work to alpha-geeks-living-in-the-cloud. We are still feeling our way into this whole market. We feel pretty good about Zoho Writer, which has attained a reasonable level of maturity (still lots to do, of course). Zoho Sheet and Zoho Show will be on the same trajectory. We will experiment with a variety of ideas, and see what works.
Sridhar
Aner, thanks for the feedback. Do you find Zoho Show slow while editing presentations? I hope not, because that is the part we have spent the most time on to get right. Currently when you import a complex graphics-rich Powerpoint documents, it is slow, but for creating a new presentation it should be fast – tell us if it is not, we will definitely investigate.
Give us some time to fine tune and polish it, and I am sure you will like it! We will consider selectively incorporating Flash if that would improve the user experience in some areas.
Sridhar
This thing is so abominably horrible that it seems like an online prank. This reminds me of when Corel announced to the world that they were launching a Java-based online Office Suite to compete with MS Office. That was the end of Corel as a viable corporation. The vast stupidity of that decision forever tarnished their once fast-rising star.
My 9 year-old niece looked at this for about 30 seconds before announching it “icky”. They use PowerPoint in 4th grade these days, so she knew whereof she spoke.
It is becoming incrasingly apparent that this site and the companies it showcases are simply a rehashed version of the worst aspects of the dot-bomb era.
People fawn over crap because it has one or more labels (Ajax, Web 2.0, social, whatever) attached to it, just as in 1998 (web, eyeballs, sticky, etc.).
Unbelievable. Don’t invest in this junk or you’ll be just as sorry as all the idiots were last time around.
Steve, at least we are wasting our own money, not suckering some investor somewhere
See ya in 2010 (if we are around, that is)
Well, I think the people are just concerned about getting the full fledged services for free as fast as they can (well, I am talking about those with negative comments about the service).
They are saying that they are finding it cr*p but I don’t think that way…for e.g. Mr. Mcdonald is not happy with the service or is suggesting investors to keep away from the service because their 9 Year old niece rejected it. Come on Mr. Mcdonald if you are proud of Microsoft Powerpoint then please go ahead and check out its history
even Microsoft was started with small money in hand and things improved lately.
As far as Adventnet is concerned..I guess you must do a little bit of research and find out where they actually stand
If you use Zoho Show to create a new presentation, generally you should find it responsive. We acknowledge that importing large powerpoint presentations, as well as loading of graphics rich (imported) presentations are slow right now. One reason is the server load – which impacts importing disproportionately, because newly created Zoho-native presentations don’t stress the servers as much as importing does. We are also planning to do more design optimizations to improve importing and rendering of graphics-rich presentations.
Finally, the demo account gives you a particularly poor experience, because it is full of graphic-rich imported presentations. We admit to being caught off-guard on that count because the first thing most visitors seem to try is to import complex powerpoints. Honestly we didn’t anticipate that, and that would explain the abominable/horrible/slow kind of comments. We are sorry to present you with that experience – we will fix that soon.
Thanks,
Mani
Why is everyone from Zoho defending their product? Yes it may be your product, but we have a set of opinons that are outside opinons on your product. Of course your going to differ from us.
Ok NOW here is my crotique.
Ok, software like this is a waste of time. People will only look at it for 5 secs go, Oh Ok. And never return to it.
Not to mention slow server load time.
NEXT. Powerpoint presentations should stay in power point. This is silly. This isn’t a sensible applicaiton. It no where compares with what power point can do. So you guys have a nice background image with hovering text. Good job.
Will someone bring this to a conference room and begin clicking next slide previous slide? Absolutly not! Also You have to hope your client has DSL connection inside the conference room or some sort of Wireless access..
Thank you zoho for another pointless creation. I see alot of work gone into this, and I think you shoulda point your energy into something new and innovative that we as a web community could utilize.
Because if you think guys like us do many presenations your wrong. And if you think some doofus in sales at Prudential is into AJAX and is all on top of web desktop apps and crap your wrong.
I would like to see Web 2.0 Companies create something we need. Not this stupid 5 secs of wow with no real viable goal of creating a regular userbase.
A more suitable comparison I think would be TeamSlide. We’re currently evaluating it (no other affiliation). Its cool I think because you can host the server yourself and its incredibly economical.
http://www.teamslide.com/
Mr. Cefalu…If at all you are including me in the zoho team then let me inform you that I am not one of them.
Secondly, defending of their own product is not bad at all. They put in efforts in making products like these and consider it as their child and see it grow every day and I can’t think of any father in this world who will not defend his own child/children.
As far as your thinking that it will not be used in conference room then even I agree that it will not be possible now but I am sure that in future it will be certainly possible and I hope that you’ll be one of them using it.
If you actually want to know about my opinion then I reviewed this service and gave it 2 points out of 5 but still I am not completely against it..I am hoping that it will get better and better in future. So, all I am asking other people is that if you have some negative feedbacks then instead of calling it a crap, help the Zoho team to develop the service into a fully fledged presentation service.
Oh. Nice Mayank.
How about you read our crotiques and see how your child can do better. This is a world with many products, and if I don’t like one I go to the other.
Thank you Zoho for your effort, but its wasted. This is my opinion, and I can see it reflected in many other users.
And if you think an online program will replace a desktop application right now your nuts. Fully fledged presentation service? Zoho, should concentrate on software web designer/programmers can actually use and utilize. I will not help you with your products. Thats your job. And the problem of every major corprotion is to create a product that the public will easily accept.
Like I said, a 5 second wow with no ability to keep a on going user base. I can easily say the same for most of your products that hold no viability.
I am done on this product and this is my last remark as I am tired trying to make ppl see the light.
This project is simply dead:
http://www.alex.../spongecell.com
One down, many more to go. Funny how hype quickly turns into loneliness.
Thanks Denal. Like I said, software with no ability to keep regular user base. They don’t listen.
Nice write up Marshal!
I googled for zoho and landed on a blog post which talks abt an interview with zoho product mgr by vadivel. http://vadivel....er-of-zoho.html — it was a nice read.
From that, Zoho seems to be focused with what they are doing. I was wondering what they see as the future of this app. I mean do they want to sell it themselves or do theywant to be bought out! As I feel most of the small firms are looking at that.
Good stuff though!
Jason:
We beleive the cloud can be a different place when these office apps are commodotized and opened up.
The opportunities will be enormous to the user when these office apps open up for users to build their own usage scenarios. You can consider it the same way useful mashups bubbled when Google opened up their Maps. I see a similar pattern here going forward. Also, when you are working on a web/browser, there should be no reason to open up your local apps.
Zoho is here to stay and we will be selling a suite of apps (more coming) online. We will continue to invest in these ideas and lets see what happens
.
Raju
i tried to install zoho office but we couldn’t figure
out how to let other people login!!!
what a confusing product
http://www.sugarcrm.com seems easier trying that one now
Hi Jason,
To let other people login, you need to add users into the product. For that, login first, click setup link, from there you can add users. Mails will be sent to them automatically. Then they would be able to access the product. We really appreciate your criticism.
Thanks,
Dilip.