Zoho’s Recent Announcements
Posted on December 2, 2006
3 Comments
Some recent news from Zoho, the online productivity folks. They have some minor changes for Planner and some bigger new features for the the Writer and Sheets users.
First off, they announced some updates for Zoho Planner early last week. Primarily focused on usability, so nothing new in the feature set. You can now use your browser’s back/forward buttons which should help minimize some confusion. The other change is essentially some menu changes.
I’m still hoping to someday have the ability to move task list items easily from one list to another… but I suspect I may be the only one interested in attempting to use Zoho Planner in a GTD fashion(?). I’ve mentioned this and other wish list things before, have a look at this article if you’re curious.
All that aside, Zoho Planner’s a great web app, give it a shot if you’re looking for an easy to use online planner.
Thursday of this week there was a blog post with three more announcements. All three related to Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show (the online presentation tool).
Item 1: There’s now a Zoho Plugin for MS Office. I don’t have MS Office installed at home and, to be frank, I’m not going to test this on my office machine! It seems to be getting some positive reviews though. As near as I can tell, it really integrates your desktop Office apps with the online Zoho apps. In other words, you can easily open a Zoho Writer app from within MS Word. Or save a Word document online to Writer. If you use Office and the Zoho products, this seems like a no-brainer.
Item 2: Zoho APIs:
Zoho APIs is our first major step towards opening up our applications to be integrated into other services. With these well defined APIs, other web apps can now integrate closely with Zoho applications.
I guess I’m excited? I have to confess, I’ve not yet had a chance to look over the API Developers Guide in depth, but at first glance it seems like this would be a cool way to pull Zoho document information and manipulate it. Gives me some interesting ideas for an online data collection project I’ve been noodling over…
Item 3: This is the fun one — A Desktopize created app that essentially makes Writer, Sheet and Show feel like desktop applications instead of web apps. Desktop shortcuts for each, quick launching tray shortcuts and a very nifty drag and drop feature. Just drag a document onto the open application window and it’s uploaded to that particular Zoho application, ready for your use. Same apps as ever, but the “feel” changes in some fashion. I like it.
With these new features and the Zoho Quickread browser extensions announced in September, Zoho is really making it easy to use their tools to work with documents from just about any angle. Which is really the idea, isn’t it?
Tags: desktopize, onlineoffice, zoho, zoho-planner, zoho-sheet, zoho-show, zoho-writer
Possibly Related Posts
Comments
3 Responses to “Zoho’s Recent Announcements”
Leave a Reply
Please read the "Comments" section on the Disclaimer page. Don't use SEO terms instead of a name. That drives me nuts.
Oh, and contrary to what you might have read on some SEO forum, this is not a "Do Follow" blog.
Thanks for the ncie & detailed post, Chris!
Sorry about your ‘moving todo list item across lists’ in Planner. We sure will be doing it. Just that it is a bit complex to do and may take time.
Thanks for dropping by, Arvind.
Just hearing that it (moving todo items) is something you plan to do keeps me happy and hopeful.
[...] One of the more interesting (to me) Zoho announcements I mentioned yesterday was this “desktopize” application. This is done with the folks at Desktopize and, essentially, gives you a web-app-in-a-browser. [...]