Zoho Integrated

The biggest news among online office suite domain in this month so far, is delivered. Zoho has merged all its scattered applications under one umbrella – Zoho Start (beta).

The main competitor to Google Office is following the Google way to integrate its independent entities into one integrated app but then, it is one step ahead – in addition to documents and spreadsheets, it has got the presentation in the suite. Presently, only these three office applications are offered integrated in the suite but as per Zoho team, very shortly, all Zoho applications will be coming under same shelter.

The interface is very much inspired from Google Docs but still it is kept quite simpler. There is facility to arrange your files in folders, tag them (it is different than folders), share your files and also interact with your buddies using Zoho Chat.

Here are the features offered in integrated suite which are worth giving a try specially when Zoho Office is containing many distinct features as compared to Google office –

• Users can now login to a common page from www.zoho.com directly without having to go to individual application login pages.
• ‘My Documents’ section integrates Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations from Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show
• Folder Management – Ability to segregate documents into folders
• A common user interface to Share, Tag, Export documents
• ‘Zoho Apps’ tab (on the right) helps you navigate to other Zoho Apps you have access to.
• ‘My Contacts’ section integrates your contacts (from Zoho Chat)

You will definitely like the tabbed interface for documents inside the suite which lets you to remain on the same page to edit / create your files. I was expecting this update along-with support to export your documents in Office 2007 format (.docx etc.) but it looks like it has been kept for next release. Still you get lot of options to export your files in different formats.