Zoho: Free App Suite Vs. MS Office

Microsoft has had a near monopoly on office applications since WordStar and WordPerfect lost surrendered. But there's a second battle raging with a totally new kind of application. Keep your eye on Zoho. It's a web-based office suite that lets you share and publish documents as easily as you can create and save them. And it's easy on the pocket (read: FREE).

When you sign up you'll be able to access the growing Zoho family: Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show—a writer, spreadsheet, and presentation tool. Zoho also has a Virtual Office that includes email and shared calendars. It has tools for business users like Zoho CRM and Zoho Creator for developing customized apps.

Not Zoho-ed out yet? Then try the Zoho Planner for to-do lists and notes, Zoho Chat, Zoho Wiki, Zoho Meeting (an online conference), and even Zoho Notebook (for organizing multimedia online note taking).

I haven't seen this much free stuff given away since Bob Barker.

The apps are pretty darn robust and full featured. Zoho Write, Sheet, and Show are not quite as feature-rich as MS Office, but have a lot of cool web features like tags and posting directly to a blog. They are miles richer than Google Docs, Google's suite of free web-based apps. Just take a look at some of the screen shots and you'll see that everything looks familiarly different. The real power comes with the ability to publish or share. You can share a document with the world, keep it private, or invite a few others to join you as either readers or collaborators.

What's the catch? Well, eventually Zoho plans to keep the consumer tools available for free, but charge businesses to license and use the tools to create custom environments. At the moment, all of your documents get stored, published, and shared on the Zoho server. The company is just releasing an applet that lets you read the Zoho Write files while you're offline, but has no way to create documents unless you're physically connected to the Internet. This makes it a great tool for the type of 24/7 folks who think the Internet is synonymous with breathing, but may not work as well for the rest of us.

And like all things web, Zoho is a work in progress. I wanted to strut my stuff and show the Yahoo! Tech team my shared spreadsheet. They got to look for a few minutes before their systems timed out. Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna said the day I used the service might have been an update day.

Zoho is for the adventurous (not to mention the financially constrained). That said, it's highly functional and a great way to extend your document life into the new web world.