Solo Technology

Zoho Virtual Office (aka Zoho X) launches today [via TechCrunch].

Google Docs and Spreadsheets announced today [Google Blog Post].

The Zoho offering seems to be going after the “all that and the bag of chips” niche. Not only can you work on your documents on a virtual desktop, but there’s POP client (email) for webmail reading and some calendaring. Thankfully, the online email isn’t yet another free service with yet another email address — instead, you just point it at your existing mail servers. I understand an Outlook converter may be in the works as well(?) which would be quite neat.

All the Zoho X stuff is presented via an online desktop. File storage is right there along with all the other integrated (or quasi-integrated) Zoho Apps. I look forward to playing with it soon. So far all I’ve had to go by is a little graphic post and the TC article.

The Google Docs and Spreadsheets thing ties together what was previously Writely and Google Sheets. One view of all your documents and spreadsheets in the more typical Google design style. You’ll probably hear some howls of protest from the Writely fans as the day goes on…

One neat feature I just noticed (was it always there?) is the ability to email a document to your GD&S workspace and have it show up in your document list.

To try it, start a new email to the address shown above and:

• Enter some text and send the message.- The message text will be entered into a new online document.
  - The title of the document will be the subject of the email message.
• Or, attach a supported document (see above — spreadsheets coming soon)- Each attached document will be converted to HTML and appear as a separate document.
  - The title of each document will be the file name of each attachment.
  - With attachments, the message text itself will be ignored.

The competition for Online Office users is really heating up. And we end-users can only benefit as each service (and there are more than just these two!) keeps adding new ways to differentiate themselves.

One Response to “Big Things Afoot in the Online Office World”

1. wes on October 11th, 2006 11:19 am
   

   You get to the email option by clicking on UPLOAD.

   Thanks for alerting me to this Mr Solo Tech. Great blog by the way!

   Wes

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