Comments on: Zoho, Omnidrive Partner For Office Document Storage

By: Library clips :: Roundup : 88 miles, minutesinaminute, FeedBlitz outbrain voting, Box - Office on Demand, Listigator :: May :: 2007

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 01:35:12 +0000

[...] via the menu bar in MSOffice. Another feature (following in the footsteps of similar service, Omnidrive) is that you can click on a the edit document function in Box and edit the MSOffice document in [...]

By: Commercial Break

Commercial Break — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 00:02:15 +0000

[...] Omnidrive - Omnidrive is different from other online drives in that it fully integrates online and offline interaction with your files. With an Omnidrive account, you can easily push files online and serve them from static URLs. Wherever you change a file, online or on your desktop, the changes are automatically synced. Omnidrive’s API also makes it serve as a great backend solution for rich internet applications, as Zoho has chosen to do. [...]

By: RazorSharp iPods & Raw Gadgets » Blog Archive » Thanks To TechCrunch Sponsors and Readers

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 20:25:02 +0000

[...] letting you easily update photos you serve on your blog from your desktop. They also have a new API ideal for web applications looking for a home for their data. Go here to sign [...]

By: ventureblogalist

ventureblogalist — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 21:55:38 +0000

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

By: James

James — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 20:53:00 +0000

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

By: HK

HK — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:34:03 +0000

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……?

By: Zoli's Blog

Zoli's Blog — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 15:15:18 +0000

Zoho and Omnidrive Bring Seamless On/Offline Computing a Step Closer…

Omnidrive and Zoho took us a step closer to seamless on-and-offline computing by announcing their partnership over the weekend. The typical approach to editing online files is to download > edit > upload again. Better onli…

By: Nik Cubrilovic

Nik Cubrilovic — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 04:58:15 +0000

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

By: Ezrie

Ezrie — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 02:59:43 +0000

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.

By: Nik Cubrilovic

Nik Cubrilovic — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 00:51:41 +0000

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.

By: DH

DH — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 21:58:46 +0000

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.

By: Jorge

Jorge — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 17:22:35 +0000

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?

By: Ian Wenig

Ian Wenig — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 16:12:21 +0000

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.

By: staci b.

staci b. — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 13:39:48 +0000

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?

By: Jason

Jason — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 11:51:08 +0000

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.

By: Nik Cubrilovic

Nik Cubrilovic — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 09:15:42 +0000

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

By: David Mackey

David Mackey — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 04:59:21 +0000

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.

By: Nik Cubrilovic

Nik Cubrilovic — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 02:54:48 +0000

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.

By: Nik Cubrilovic

Nik Cubrilovic — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 02:53:04 +0000

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).

By: Michael Arrington

Michael Arrington — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 02:33:43 +0000

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.

By: Esther

Esther — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 02:24:17 +0000

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?

By: Cortland Coleman

Cortland Coleman — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 02:04:02 +0000

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.

By: Noel Marshall

Noel Marshall — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:49:01 +0000

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

By: Nick Gonzalez

Nick Gonzalez — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:46:37 +0000

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

By: ginchy

ginchy — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:39:05 +0000

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