Online office suite Zoho released another product tonight, called Zoho Viewer. It is similar to Scribd (and the upcoming Docstoc) - upload an office or PDF document for easy viewing on Zoho’s website or embedded into other web pages.
Zoho Viewer is different than Scribd, though. With Scribd, documents are public by default (there is a private option). Zoho isn’t looking to create a community around documents like Scribd does. All documents are private and you must know the URL to view them. They are not listed in any directory or searcheable. So it is useful primarily to quickly upload email attachments and other documents you want to share with a few people but not the whole world. Viewers can also quickly download the document in its original format.
See the video below for an overview of Zoho Viewer. As an aside, I really like Viddler, which Zoho used to host the video. The quality is a lot better than YouTube and the player is very well done.
This might be helpful for people wishing to send formatted, attractive resumes to companies that warn they will not open attachments.
It might also be a convenient way to keep an online version of a resume or other info that one might want to access remotely
That’s just great, I like the way Gmail handles it for me but that doesn’t really help me that much. The real problem arises when I’m sending to other people, I can deal with attachments myself.
Anyway, a great idea. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to zip up, or upload to FTP, or change the file extension to try to get it to people who need it.
wow! what a simple application.
i agree in the definitely helpful usage for recipients. but i´m not sure about convenient usability for the sender?!
Is there any file size limit?
For Resumes there is another service called emurse.com
Thanks
Thanks, all!
Evangelist : Each file can be upto 5 MB. We will be increasing the file size limit very soon. Refer our FAQ for more.
This is a fantastic tool, I just tested it but I think I am doing something wrong.
After clicking on ‘view’ I do see the first page of the document, but if I then click on ‘continue’ I get a ‘page not found’ error message.
Perhaps someone can help me in getting right.
Thanks in advance.
Egbert
It just seems to simple. I cannot think when I would use that. Also, how big can word doccuments really get? 20Mb max.? Can they not be sent via email and read at the other end? I’m not sure. Also…I hate the company name
Can this be used in iPhone?
Wov it works!!! But how about copyright issues? Just wondering since it seems to be an issue w google
Egbert, There was a bug on our end and we have fixed it. Try uploading your presentation file now, and it should work fine.
@Ramesh, thanks. I tested it again and it works great. Compliments and thank you for the fast reaction.
Egbert
very neatly done interface
Michael,
Now does their Zoho Mail app (part of their office offering) automatically place all attachments in the viewer when the user sends an email?
Full integration within the email “create and send” flow would be super cool. Otherwise there are tons of sites where I can simply upload and share URLs. There isnt anything new in that.
Abhishek
Nice.
To make it usable for the sender , i recommend developing plugin when installed will interface with the OS (context menu) , so the user can right-click on any file on his desktop and choose to make it viewable on Zoho and obtain its URL on the spot.
This way user will not have to go to Zoho site and do the uploading each time , current scenario its not practical in my opinion.
I tried using the viewer to upload a PDF file for my organization, because I thought this would be an easier way for our members to view the document. HOWEVER, the application destroyed the formatting that I had so meticulously created, bullets turned into ?s and headers rotated 90 degrees to make the whole thing look like a mess.
The Zoho version is http://viewer.zoho.com/docs/poBdaj
The original PDF can be found here: http://www.yalearabalumni.org/.....ndbook.pdf
@Abhishek, Going forward, you will see integrations in Zoho Mail.
@Faisal, Thanks for your feedback. Yes, we will develop plugins for the Operating System, Mail clients (outlook and thunderbird) and Browsers (IE and Firefox) to upload files to viewer and get the URL.
(disclaimer: I’m the founder of http://www.docufarm.com, a related service to view office and pdf documents online)
Zoho’s viewer lacks some things:
- pdfs are rendered as HTML text plus background images, which unfortunately breaks the original layout (fonts and sizes are different in browsers), doesn’t work with unicode characters (mathematical characters, accents, asian characters)
- PowerPoint files become image-only, so they are less accessible (preventing us from finding text or selecting it for example)
- Word files become pure HTML, breaking all layout.
For these reasons, it is hard to trust Zoho’s viewer to share documents: the layout is not preserved by their rendering platform.
Docufarm does keep the layout of each page, allows people to find text and select it, works with unicode characters, and provides the same user interface for all document types.
By the way, did you see that you can also edit documents using Zoho on G.ho.st (the Global Hosted Operating SysTem) by simply double clicking on documents in the G.ho.st Storage file system
Zvi
@Omar: try to view your document on Docufarm:
http://www.docufarm.com/view.j.....ndbook.pdf
Michael Arrington: Thanks for your kind words about Viddler and the player!
Congrats to Zoho for releasing a really cool and useful product!
Sorry for the double comment: Anyone that wants to view the Zoho screencast at really great quality, do the following.
Hover the player: Choose Full screen. Then choose View in original size. This way you can see the video at the exact size that the Zoho team recorded it at. Cheers!
Yay! Now I can get emails and instead of having attachments I can read while I’m on a plane, I’ll have a web link that will be useless to me! And I’m sure nobody will ever get hold of the private documents stored online! Web 2.0 rocks!
I know Google and Yahoo etc obey the robots.txt standard (which isn’t very well documented at all anyway). What is there to stop less honourable web crawlers from getting to the documents?
or you could just send a file and let people download it and have it on their computer or laptop to view at their convenience.
if it is small, just email it.
If it is big, use something like http://arunasend.com to send it for free.
and btw email attachments are not dead.
@Omar: Thanks for reporting the issue. We will investigate on your pdf and try to fix it.
This is a great idea for Zoho…I suggest also for Zoho to offer a way for collaborative editing of the PDFs/embedded documents. An even better use of this technology is for collaborative purposes…Collaborative document editing (much like Google Docs and Spreadsheets) with connection to the Zoho software suite…
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