The idea behind Zoho is that all the programs you need are online. Google has already done this. And the public has responded with a blank look. How many people use Writely and the spreadsheet and so on? The square root of very little.

Now AdventNet announces Zoho which does the same thing and journalists jostle to say how it will give the Google offering a run for its money. But if the Google offering is not being taken up in any serious way what chances are there for Zoho? Very few or none depending if you are an optimist or a pessimist.

AdventNet’s Zoho line of online applications include a word processor (Zoho Writer), spreadsheet (Zoho Sheet), wiki (Zoho Wiki), and presentation package (Zoho Show).

One journalist referred to it as ‘one of the few free office suites that has the potential to give apps such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets any competition.’ This is true. But the Google free office suite has never taken off. It is .0001 percent of Google’s profits. It is one of its many attempts to get out of the ‘just a search engine’ mode.

The most interesting component is Zoho Notebook which is a collaboration and note-taking tool similar to Microsoft’s OneNote. Microsoft OneNote has not set the world on fire — did you know it existed? — so Zoho Notebook has to do it much, much better. Which in fairness it does. But is it better enough?

It is described online as letting you ‘create, aggregate, and collaborate on multiple types of content online.’

So you can assemble a variety of information: text, line drawings, images, Web pages, video, RSS feeds, and other media. There may be a lot of potential for people who like working online and who want to share.

In theory you could run a project among a group of you and share ideas. One group I work with already does this using email with attachments. This, at least in theory, could be simpler, easier to use. It has tabs and you can draw things and add bits — but you cannot as yet, we are still in the beta version, search. The problem is getting everyone in the group up to speed using the program.

If you use Microsoft OneNote to get a project going — and, yes, I know three groups who do that — then this is an alternative.

Going for it is that it is a true Web 2.0 application which lets you collaborate by providing other people with access to both full notebooks and parts of them, and you can publish Notebook pages to the Web so anyone can see them without signing up with Zoho. In this it is miles better than the Microsoft offering and is, indeed, a fresh new look at collaboration. I have seen it and I am impressed but I am certain I have no need to use it now and doubt that I will in the future.

Will it take off and be a big success?

It depends on how soon truly collaborative work takes off and how soon you need the ability to share so much varied information in a closed group. And how quickly you can get a group to use the same program. I do not think it is going to happen quickly but perhaps I am totally wrong in this. I often am.

Related:

Entry was posted on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007 at 7:28 pm under Open source, Opinion.

Read more entries by Gareth Powell.
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