Zoli’s recent post on Zoho mentioned Zoho Virtual Office. That was news to me, so I decided to give it a try.
Currently Virtual Office is a downloadable server-side product accessible via the Web, but Zoho will offer a Web-hosted version in the future. Without integration an Office 2.0 is not really Office 2.0, just a collection of online applications. (For those who may not remember, it took Microsoft long years to achieve some level of integration in their Office; for several years and throughout several releases “integration” was copy/paste, and quite painful as such.)
Overall I like it.
It’s integrated. Too many Web office apps are point solutions, they do one thing and one thing alone. When it comes to productivity tools, juggling from documents to presentations to calendar is one place where integration helps productivity. I’ve always been a fan of suites, unless there’s strong reason to use point solutions. (I’ll touch on that in a following post)
I have high hopes for Zoho, they figured the right mixture of features, did a good job integrating them, and delivers it for the right price.
The UI is clean and elegant, intuitive and simple to use. If you’re using Outlock [sic] you’ll feel right at home. And the back button works as you expect it would.
I do think the UI could be improved in several ways, though. The left panes eat up screen real estate, a maximize view would help when editing documents. It could use popup layers instead of popup windows, at least on Firefox they’re much faster. And more inplace editing (*cough*AJAX*cough) is always better.
The “Wiki” leaves a lot to be desired. It’s a quick word processor, but nothing you’d expect from a real wiki. It doesn’t have wiki words, version history, and new content doesn’t show in the dashboard. It also uses font size/type instead of proper HTML headers, which makes the content less useful. Sections exist for a reason.
Zoho Virtual Office doesn’t have the same breadth of features as MS Office, but it has all the features I use, and prices them just right. You can get a team of 25 users for the price of a single-user MS license.
It has some import/export capabilities, but overall disappoints. I couldn’t find RSS feeds for new content, iCal support, or any other way to integrate it with other services. And backup should be automated and scheduled, not manual.
Although it’s a server-side product, installation is dead simple. No assembly required.
Overall, it just works, the price is right, and it left me impressed with the overall quality.
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Sridhar Vembu
Patrick Fitzsimmons