Solo Technology

Last August, I had a bee in my bonnet and mentioned, several times, how nifty it would be if the online office guys were working with the online storage guys. [1] [2] [3] You know, why put all our eggs (aka documents) in one basket? Why not get some cooperation going.

Apparently I wasn’t totally out in left field. Zoho and Omnidrive announced today that they have integrated their respective services. [Zoho] [Omnidrive] Store your documents in Omnidrive, open them in Zoho — and save them back to Omnidrive.

This is very cool stuff! I feel strangely validated that maybe not all my ideas are totally goofy…

I wonder if it will extend in more directions? Will Zoho and Box.Net partner up too? Will Omnidrive do some dealing with ThinkFree or Ajax13? Will Google do whatever it is Google does off in their own little playground? Inquiring minds are, err, inquiring.

I reckon I’ll have another run at Omnidrive soon. I tried recently and had some windows client issues. Was too swamped with the real world and just iced it instead of digging into it. Oh, but I did manage to get my wife using Zoho Writer this week.

[update: I should clarify and mention that the web interface for Omnidrive works just fine for me -- and is rather slick itself.]

9 Responses to “The Zoho / Omnidrive Deal”

1. Rich G. on January 20th, 2007 6:03 am
   

   You’ve read this about online office suites I take it. This is your first mention of ajax13. Honestly, I’d never even heard of it until this Computer World review.
   Now that OmniDrive’s partnered with Zoho they’re going to be looking for your paypal payment to show up you realize… I will remind Arvind of your desire to share your wealth in case he forgot.
   PS: I miss having tags in the posts. I had to open other tags to make sure you hadn’t posted about ajax13 before and find the omnidrive post. Had you had tags at the bottom your page would’ve been friendlier to me as a user. Just my 2c worth on the new layout.

2. Chris on January 20th, 2007 6:40 am
   

   Hey, hadn’t seen that ComputerWorld article before. I’ll look it over though — thanks for the link.

   Posts are still tagged here. Look to the left of the post in “Post Meta” when in the “single view” of any post.

3. Rich G. on January 20th, 2007 8:27 am
   

   Arvind… I couldn’t help but notice he conveniently ignored the part where the check was in the mail.

4. Nik Cubrilovic on January 20th, 2007 6:32 pm
   

   Omnidrive CEO here, this is very very funny - I remember reading your post when you first wrote it but had forgotten about it. A short time later we met with Zoho and we managed to have our partnership live in little less than a couple of weeks. We are looking for other application providers to work with, but in the office space though Zoho are the best.

   So next-up we will be integrating with image editors, sound editors, webmail and anything else that is worthwhile. We have the platform and we can work with anybody (the other application doesn’t even need to have an API, they can use ours) so if you have any other suggestions please do let us know

   I believe we are taking the first few steps towards a big change in how we use applications (did you expect anything less). At the moment all these web applications are fragmented and it needs somebody to put them together for the user

   Hope you enjoy using Zoho in Omnidrive now, and yes, we do take Paypal

5. Chris on January 20th, 2007 10:53 pm
   

   Hi Nik - thanks for stopping by. The “next-ups” are very intriguing. I look forward to seeing where you and Omnidrive are headed.

   I definitely agree with your “fragmented” comment!

6. Raju vegesna on January 21st, 2007 12:29 pm
   

   Chris:

   When you posted your article last August, we were working on Zoho Drive ourselves. But later we decided against it and wanted to empower other storage guys to use our apps by opening up our API. This is the result of that decision.

   BTW, how does you wife like Zoho Writer?

7. Chris on January 21st, 2007 10:48 pm
   

   Hi Raju, thanks for the update.

   Wife liked it just fine.

   I had wondered if you guys were doing a “Zoho Drive” type thing…

   And hey, is there any way to tie my Zoho (sso) ID to my Omnidrive ID? If I edit a doc out of Omnidrive, it would be cool to see my other “zoho only” docs listed for easy access (copy/paste from one to another, for instance). Or is that just asking for too much?

   Regardless, I still think this deal is really cool.

8. » pingback » Box.Net + Zoho = More Options » Solo Technology on February 2nd, 2007 8:45 pm
   
   
9. » pingback » Zoli’s Blog » Blog Archive » Zoho and Omnidrive Bring Seamless On/Offline Computing a Step Closer on July 22nd, 2007 7:02 pm
   
   

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