I just finished up a project using both Google’s and Zoho’s cloud-based office suites. I finished the work I wanted to finish, but there were some rough spots.
Document portability is great!
No doubt about it, being able to pick up or put down a writing project on any of the devices I use regularly is wonderful.
Zoho’s rich text editing is as frustrating as Microsoft Office’s
I’m constantly trying to un-format this or figure out why that looks slightly different.
Google Gears works…
Zoho docs can easily be backed up to access offline via Gears. It only takes a few clicks.
…but only for a few applications
I couldn’t take my Zoho wiki offline, even though it only had 5 or so pages. I had to copy them one by one into regular Zoho docs before I could take them offline.
Here’s a link to wrap this one up: Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang sees an evolution in corporate IT. LinkedIn’s new widget suite is one more way that employees can and will socialize with one another without having to wait around for their IT overlords to choose and purchase the “best-fit” internal tools.
Zoho and Google Docs will be a part of this (r)evolution. That is, assuming your firewall doesn’t block them. I’m guessing they will block them, and then a few years later they’ll unblock them again. Such is work!
Photo credit: tim_d
