Zoho's online office suite is getting closer and closer to becoming a real rival to Microsoft Office. One important update Zoho recently released was support for Visual Basic compatible macros in its spreadsheet application, which was great for importing already existing spreadsheets with macros, but writing macros was limited to coding them in a text editor. Today, Zoho has rolled out an easy to use macro record and playback function, similar to what most offline office suites offer.
While Zoho also has a number of consumer oriented products in its line-up, the company notes that it has lately been focusing mostly on providing features for businesses rather than consumers, which can be seen in the line-up of recent Zoho's products like Projects, CRM, and Invoice. Macros, too, are a feature that is mostly aimed at business users.
Google Docs, Zoho's largest competitor, offers a similar set of features (though no macro recording), but its overall product suite is limited to documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Also, Adobe just launched its own online office product in June. Chances are that Microsoft is also working on a similar product, though for now, it is following its 'Software+Services' strategy and is using the Internet mostly for storing documents and some limited file viewing capabilites.
While the current crop of online office suites can't quite match the feature set of traditional suites like Microsoft Office or OpenOffice yet, the steady addition of features and products is making the online suites a lot more competitive and while they are still somewhat limited when compared to MS Office, they are approaching a point where their feature set can satisfy the majority of customers.
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One of the commonly held assumptions about online application suites is that they will lag the desktop in functionality. Instead, I believe online suites are going to leap-frog in terms of functionality. One key reason is the partitioning of functionality between client & server tiers.
As an example, the macro feature in Zoho Sheet is actually implemented on the server side. So it is fairly easy to enable mash-ups with other web APIs or access databases, and extend the functionality in various ways.
Over the next year, we at Zoho will be exploring these themes in greater depth. All in all, this is a very exciting time to be doing online applications!
Posted by: Sridhar Vembu | August 13, 2008 10:59 AM
Sridhar,
Have you ever used Excel? Mashing up external data into an Excel spreadsheet has been around since 2003! And if you use MS server collateral like Sharepoint, the integration capabilities are even more powerful...
Your opinion that a desktop application cannot pull or interact with data from a server is naive...just because Zoho offers a web-native UI does not make it superior in any way to provide features like data mashups...on the other hand, it severely limits the capabilities that you can bake into the client tier...
Cheers,
Don
Posted by: Don | August 13, 2008 11:33 PM