Another area that is hotting up like the calendars is the online office space. That is applications that allow online editing and saving of documents. These range from standard word processors up to spreadsheet applications and online slideshow tools. Systems like these are all set to become the next generation of office tools. The next Microsoft Office. As I write Microsoft are preparing their take on the scene. I am not sure of the exact name but I am sure it will have Live in somewhere, definately a beta, maybe a Windows too. Rumours are rife that Google is preparing a suite to compete with all of these services, and the recent acquiring of Writely only serves as evidence for this case.

At this point it is key to note that the race is still on. No one has made a full office system that works totally via your browser all locked up under a single login. I know a blog that is devoted to this one aim, where a recent victory was celebrated when for the first time every office service became available online. The next step is getting it all with a consistent layout and interface, with one logon, from one company. As you’d expect Google and Microsoft are the big names that are up for this. But there are smaller new companies that have started to offer office services. Some just offer one or two, but Zoho is going full out to cover everything. And whilst Google and Microsoft are preparing theirs, Zoho has some services online now. So you can go and word process online right now with ZohoWriter or plan events with ZohoPlanner or (coming really soon) calculate things, and organise data with ZohoSheet.

When I first heard about this online office idea I was skeptical. It would always be too jerky I thought for it to ever be reasonable to use. And when I found ZohoWriter I was anixious to see if it would be smooth enough to be usable. Let me tell you: it is. It is not exactly like Word. It is not as feature rich, it is not quite as intuitive and it is a little more jerky. But it is usable. And most importantly it works completely in your browser. ZohoWriter also takes advantage of its webbased position. Whilst it keeps in touch with the obviously dominant desktop side of word processing, allowing the import and export of documents (as Word or Open Office going in and as Word, OO or PDF going out), it also adds new functionality. It lets you share documents with friends and you can chose to allow them to view or allow them to contribute to the document too. This is great for group projects. But don’t worry about someone (even if they are a “friend”) deleting some content that you wanted. ZohoWriter supports versioning. Every save is saved with a version number and you can always switch back to any previous version in two clicks. The whole interface is written in AJAX to make everything super smooth and it is relatively bug free. The initial loading time for the application is significant. It even has a loading bar — but once it is done the rest of the processes are wait free. It supports tabs allowing you to have multiple documents open at once without windows all over the place and it autosaves for you. It has a great full screen feature that probably offers me more typing space than Word can. There are a few hitches with the import of documents and the loss of some formatting but overall it is what you expect — Word in your browser.

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The other two applications from Zoho that are directly linked with the office, that is the Spreadsheet and Planning services, are very similar. ZohoSheet is very new and is currently only in a private beta. When I tried it I found it to be impressive at first. Just like with the Writer product it seemed like Excel in the browser. But it lacked serious functionality. It could calculate things, and it could work with basic formulae. It however doesn’t allow for the extremely useful dragging of formulae or numbers across many cells to avoid lots of arduous work entering the same (or a similar) things again and again. It also can’t graph yet but I am told that this feature is on the way. I certainly hope so. It is much nicer to see your numbers in a picture than as endless rows of data. Again you can import data and you can share your ZohoSheet once you have it uploaded with or without write permissions. And again the interface is slick (and consistent) and fast. This product still needs a fair bit of work, and I do hope that it gets it, but then it will be brilliant.

ZohoPlanner is an older product. But simpler too. It is not really immediately comparable with anything that is found in Microsoft Office but it allows you to make day to day to do lists in a very neat way. It will add them to a calendar, remind you of events (if you wish), and produce page summaries of what you have going on. It is not by any means a calendar application. It is strictly centred around to dos rather than having boxes of days. I made a page quickly enough of things that I would like to do with my website and shared it publicly (i.e. with everyone). The page produced it this. It allows for comments on the list and when I have done one I can tick it off on the list. It is all very nice. Simple, but nice.

Overall I think that Zoho is a company that is doing great things. It is innovating in a space that is about to be hit by the web giants. But notice Zoho have beaten them to it, they are there now whereas the others are only coming soon. I hope that Zoho keep building and start to integrate their services into one suite. I know that would make Ismael very happy.