Coincidentally Zoho just released a plug-in that almost does what many of us were talking about in the comments yesterday on the Google Spreadsheets post. The plug-in is for Microsoft Office and will allow you to save and open your Microsoft Word/Excel documents to Zoho from within the application itself. So you could look at Zoho almost as being another storage spot on your hard drive.
They also have a program from Desktopize that will make Zoho feel even more like a desktop application. It will provide things like shortcuts on your desktop, drag-and-drop uploads, and system tray icons so that your files will be easily accessible without that hassle of fumbling through websites or opening a sluggish program.
I really love these features and think it was a very important move to put Zoho beyond their competitors. The screenshot above shows the plug-in when it is being used in Office 2007 but it also works for older versions of the Office Suite as well. Unfortunately the plug-in doesn’t work for PowerPoint but the two primary applications that I use are Word and Excel anyways, so I can live with only having those be compatible.
So are there any Google Docs users out there that are feeling pretty tempted to switch their stuff over to the world of Zoho?
Note: These are direct download links because the two downloads don’t actually have a homepage:
Download Zoho Plug-in for Microsoft Office
Download Desktopize for Zoho
Another reason Google Docs will not be a MS Office killer as so many people think.
Can we expect Gooho? For sure not, but Google did acquired Youtube while they already had Google Video, but this is of course different stuff.
Yeah, I think Zoho made a very smart move by embracing the applications that millions of people already love. Zoho doesn’t look at Microsoft as their competitor but instead as their helper. Why reinvent the wheel when you can just build off of it?
Gooho…that would be an interesting name.
Ever since the YouTube acquisition I don’t think anything would surprise me with Google.
What a great 2 days for Google:
First, getting beat by Yahoo Answers and now this from Zoho.
Still not enough to get me to switch from Google Docs, but great news from a competitive standpoint. This should light a fire under Google…
I thought about writing an article on the whole Google Answers thing but it just didn’t seem that shocking to me…so much so that I didn’t think it was worth writing about. It has been obviously going down the “tubes” for a long time and when Yahoo launched their whole Answers section it was way beyond Google.
Thanks for the nice post, Ryan! Nice that you like the plug-in and desktopize widget.
We sure will be extending support for Powerpoint soon as well. And we will come up with a detailed blog post on the plug-in/widget details.