When it comes to the somewhat niche market for online offices, Google Docs might be the first thing which comes to mind. Well, if Google’s offering doesn’t suit your needs then take a look at Zoho.
While Zoho’s web site does appear eerily similar to the look of Google Docs, it actual does boast a more impressive selection of online applications. Zoho does offer many of their services for free, but if you want access to their more intriguing online applications (CRM, project management, etc.), you will have to join with a pay subscription after the trial ends.
I did try Zoho briefly while researching my online office suites article, but found Google Docs to be more to my liking. Overall though, it comes down to personal preference as Zoho is a polished product.
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No doubt there’ll soon be Twitter Office 1.0 and Posterous Docs Suite beta 1 …Et-cetera; but nothing beats the original taste of good ol’ Microsoft Office. I have the 2007 Office Enterprise installed and none of these freebie apps come anywhere near it: OK I admit I’m a Wintard and I admire M$ to a large extent, but so what: If they wrote crap software I’d look elsewhere – And admittedly one or two of their services and pieces of software are crap – Which gives Linux maybe more than no chance.
Jason : Thanks for trying out Zoho & recommending us to your readers. All of Zoho apps have a free version. First 3 users in Zoho CRM are free and for Zoho Projects, the first project is free.
And Zoho has been there before Google Docs. We debuted our word processor (Zoho Writer) & our online organizer (Zoho Planner) in September 2005.
Love the Zoho suite. I use their invoicing tool and i use their CRM tool. For Docs i prefer Google. For companies Google Apps is pretty neat. One thing i dont like in the Zoho suite is the project management tool. The interface is a little boring and some of the functionalities are missing. For PM we use Deskaway – checked it out yet?
Btw – are u using a WP Platform?
Cloud Computing is slowly becoming dominant in the online market as you can see there are several applications that are available online and more over they are free and can be accessed anywhere in the world, With sites like eDeskOnline and others this is becoming possible nowadays posing a serious threat to offline applications which were dominantly ruled by microsoft for years now!
MS guis definitely failed to develop a good tool for project management. I’ve tried MS Project, and it was horrible. It’s got all the great features, but still it just doesn’t work well for many project teams. Zoho, Basecamp, Central Desktop and my favourite Wrike.com are much better alternatives. They are cheaper and are more flexible. Of course not all of them have the feature set to match MS Project. I like Wrike, as it has interactive Gantt Charts, reports, due dates and many other stuff, that some other MS Project alternatives lack.