Zoho, Omnidrive Partner For Office Document Storage

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1. Yohay Elam
   

   January 19th, 2007 at 5:31 pm

   If it works, it seems like a a good integration between storage and office applications, which makes the hard drive and especially MS Office obsolete.

   If they would combine a robust generic mail client software into this web mashup, it would be perfect!

2. ginchy
   

   January 19th, 2007 at 5:39 pm

   I can really put these services to good use because none of my computers have hard drives.

3. Nick Gonzalez
   

   January 19th, 2007 at 5:46 pm

   I’ve used it recently for the research on the article (obviously) and like it, as I think came across somewhat in the article.

4. Noel Marshall
   

   January 19th, 2007 at 5:49 pm

   Just signed up and added some docs from my desktop. Seems to work well, very fast. I think it has a lot of potential especially if they broaden the range of applications they work with

5. Cortland Coleman
   

   January 19th, 2007 at 6:04 pm

   Interesting and potentially powerful parnership. Both companies have appealing services and integration makes great sense for these two.

   I’ve recently switched to FilesAnywhere. They have a mile-long feature list (including auto-backups, simple drive mapping, drop-boxes for other people, etc.), it appears they’ve been in business for a while and their power user/workgroup options are impressive. It is a fee-based service but the prices are reasonable, and most importantly, their service is (seems) reliable, fast and easy, and I’ve tried almost every storage company reviewed on TC.

6. Esther
   

   January 19th, 2007 at 6:24 pm

   Way to delete the negative comments. Certainly doesn’t seem unbiased to me.

   They were completely valid too, how can a program require registry removals to uninstall?
   http://forum.omnidrive.com/topic.php?id=44

   Also, I don’t understand how this is a partnership, isn’t this just using ZOHO’s API?

7. Michael Arrington
   

   January 19th, 2007 at 6:33 pm

   Esther - your question on uninstalling the product is a good one.

   On your first paragraph - we are not unbiased. We are biased. We’re just honest about our bias. the constant noise from anonymous comments can actually break this blog if they’re not cleaned out.

8. Nik Cubrilovic
   

   January 19th, 2007 at 6:53 pm

   Hi Esther, I am the CEO of Omnidrive. The desktop shortcut for Omnidrive wouldn’t remove itself properly in a single release we did 6 weeks ago, this release was only out for 6-8 hours before we updated it, and only a small number of users removed the software and had the resulting problem. Since then, we have released 3 major versions each of which give the user to add/remove shortcuts on the desktop, start menu and quicklaunch toolbar. The Omnidrive desktop client is very well behaved, outside of the single issue we have. So in short, editing the registry is not how you uninstall Omnidrive, it was a fix we had to put out for a small number of users.

   As for the partnership, the original press release as well as the blog posts refer to Omnidrive and Zoho continuing to work together in the future on other projects (with this just being a starting point) - the most major initiative being the development of a standard protocol for web applications to read/write to storage providers such as Omnidrive (as well as our LiveFolders format, which allows users to read/write to web apps from Omnidrive, this will also become a published and open protocol).

9. Nik Cubrilovic
   

   January 19th, 2007 at 6:54 pm

   actually the forum post you linked to mentions that it was a minor issue only affecting some users who have specific versions of some DLL’s that Omnidrive links to.

10. David Mackey
    

    January 19th, 2007 at 8:59 pm

    Seems pretty innovative, but the pricing is higher than I’d like. Streamload/MediaMax really kicks all the competition in that area - but development seems extremely slow over there.

11. Nik Cubrilovic
    

    January 20th, 2007 at 1:15 am

    David - Omnidrive is cheaper than Streamload - OD is $40 a year for 10GB or $99 a year for 25GB. Streamload has high monthly bandwidth charges

12. Jason
    

    January 20th, 2007 at 3:51 am

    Zoho are going from strength to strength - I have been recommending some of their products to some of my smaller clients with real success.

    Partnering with OmniDrive is a good move.

13. staci b.
    

    January 20th, 2007 at 5:39 am

    So on products that mike is associated with, comments that bash or in some way are negative are removed. On competitive products or other products on techcrunch, they are left. Things that make you go hmm.

    And tell me, why isn’t this a PPP? Isn’t it a marketing message for a company to which mike is invested in?

14. Ian Wenig
    

    January 20th, 2007 at 8:12 am

    These are all great comments - the free flow of ideas, opinions and suggestions is what this is all about for me. As the partner guy at Zoho, I wanted to add my two cents: all partnerships begin with an idea and someone bold enough to pick up the phone and pitch it. Some of these turn out to be very strategic while others fizzle and die. While I was not involved in the Omnidrive discussions, I agree with Nik that this is a great start to a very promising idea that will evolve over time.

    We are witnessing a new computing and collaboration paradigm, one that feeds on the collective interactions between different teams from company A and B, professional bloggers like Michael, a diverse global user base, the press and the competition. Turning ideas into products and products with API’s that integrate with partners into joint solutions is happening at lightening speed while everyone gets to participate. I love it.

15. Jorge
    

    January 20th, 2007 at 9:22 am

    I like Zoho, but I can’t stand Omnidrive. Couldn’t they have picked a better partner?

    Oh…and Omnidrive’s current version doesn’t completely uninstall itself. I had to edit the registry to remove it. Did you guys go back to some older code or something?

16. DH
    

    January 20th, 2007 at 1:58 pm

    I’ve been unimpressed by Omnidrive so far. Tried installing it when it came out of beta, and an error about reading XML configuration kept popping up whenever I restarted my computer.

    Even when I uninstalled it, there were traces of Omnidrive left, lurking around in the background. It didn’t show up in my computer, but did show up in the drive list in Nero and various other applications. Eventually managed to remove it using Autoruns from Sysinternals.

    But, these are basic issues, and Omnidrive should’ve really made sure that the application could be uninstalled. It’s applications like these that don’t uninstall themself properly, which cause users machines to get slower and slower, ultimately requiring a format to get rid of their crap left behind.

    In any case, I’m not a big user of either Zoho or Omnidrive, but it’s good to see these two companies working together to make the storage and document managent process seamless.

17. Nik Cubrilovic
    

    January 20th, 2007 at 4:51 pm

    DH: We never came out of beta, not sure what you are using

    We have a very active community at Omnidrive where discussions take place. We haven’t heard from anybody about these issues, so if you are really having problems login to the forum with your OD username and somebody will help you out.

18. Ezrie
    

    January 20th, 2007 at 6:59 pm

    The problem I have with omnidrive is that it in it’s process to store files online, it actually creates a sync folder in its program directory and syncs back and forth between the computer and their servers. This is a non-starter for me as I had hoped to use this program at work, but I have no desire for my personal files to be copied in total to my work computer.

19. Nik Cubrilovic
    

    January 20th, 2007 at 8:58 pm

    Ezrie: That is the current model, but as mentioned on our blog that is a local cache, and in the next release it won’t cache everything - just cache select folders or files. Surprisingly we don’t get as many requests for this as you may think, so setting the option for each folder (with the default to not synching anything from another machine) has been on the back-burner for the past few releases.

    Thanks for suggesting it though, it is only when users tell us what their needs are that we can help them

20. HK
    

    January 23rd, 2007 at 4:34 pm

    Does this mean people won’t need to buy MS Office in the future because you’ll be able to use Zoho with Omnidrive online (no need for the syncing feature if you’re always online) from a basic computer set up with a decent internet connection……?

21. James
    

    January 29th, 2007 at 12:53 pm

    Omnidrive crashed for me on firefox, and it wouldn’t upload files on IE7. Talk about beta.

22. ventureblogalist
    

    February 6th, 2007 at 1:55 pm

    why wouldnt zoho just add their own file linking technology to their core product?