Zoho on Thursday announced the availability of Zoho Docs, which will help Zoho users manage their documents centrally so they won’t need to skip from Writer, Sheet, and Show to get work done.
Zoho Docs is a bit overdue, but it’s good to see the company finally moving towards improving an offering that’s still a bit all over the place.
According to Zoho, its new Docs application will allow users to upload any file type they wish with a ZIP upload process. The new software will also give users the ability to view documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in a tab within the application via view mode. If they want to edit the document, they can open it with a particular Zoho app in a separate window.
Taking a page out of the Google Docs playbook, Zoho Docs now also offers group sharing, which, as you might expect, will let specific groups have access to, and edit, documents. And while working in Zoho Docs, the company has added a chat function, which will let you correspond with people in those groups as you work.
The new and improved Zoho Docs seems like a logical next step for the company. Finally, Zoho will offer many of the functions already found in Google Docs and won’t frustrate its users by requiring them to move back and forth between applications without a central location to work out from.
Excellent! I like the look and feel, too. Zoho’s lack of a central start page was the major thing keeping me from using it more often. I’ve been using Google Docs more often lately, but I’ll probably switch back now.
I don’t think Zoho has enough products.
Hats-off to Zoho for making it really, really easy to integrate their products into other web apps. We’ve mashed up with Writer and Sheets (as there was no way we were going to build our own editor apps) and have been delighted with them. Now, if only they were better at letting their partners know about releases, bug fixes and so on they’d be absolutely perfect. Oh, and if their API apps worked in Safari too that would be just *swell*.
Any idea on the valuation of Zoho?
I think the evaluation of Zoho will very much be a buy-side evaluation rather than anything else. Potential buyers are obviously Google, Yahoo and AOL but I could actually see SAP or Salesforce.com acquiring a share.
It will probably make most sense for Yahoo to acquire Zoho but I’m not sure they have anyone left in their CorpDev group.
I don’t think there’s a chance MSFT will buy them considering they’re developing their own stuff around Office.
Zoho has a fantastic set of products so I hope that in the meanwhile they keep innovating, and innovating and innovating.
omg: a positive post at last! I love Zoho.
I do not see Google buying Zoho (as Google Docs still has a lot more people, both premium and regular) or even SalesForce.com (which recently partnered with Google Docs, mentioned on TechCrunch previously).
I think Yahoo could, although that depends whether or not their leadership still has vision for the company.
Is Zoho profitable?
It doesn’t appear that one’s tags transfer over to the Docs manager. It seems superfluous to have to create folders that I’ve already created tags (that I use as folders) for in the Writer…
Lelia : Very valid concern. Zoho Docs supports multi-level folder structure whereas with Zoho Writer the tags as folders are single level. Difficult to map the two but we will try to enhance this a bit in the next update – the tags you added in Zoho Writer will get mapped to the ‘My Tags’ of Zoho Docs.
@ Don Who will be on top in 5 years: Google Docs, Microsoft Live Office or Zoho?
Does anyone know how secure any of the online collaboration sites are? In other words can we trust sensitive data on any of them? I know ultimately the answer is to keep sensitive data on your own servers you control but are we at a point yet where we can trust any of these services to keep our data safe?
Any pointers towards how to use zoho for an educational institution?
cdude : Search for zoho and education, zoho and students etc and you’ll find many examples of how Zoho is being used in educational institutions.