I asked AdventNet CEO Sridhar Vembu whether this news portends a full Web Office Suite (AdventNet is the company that runs Zoho). Their competitors Zimbra, ThinkFree, JotSpot and others seem to be moving towards an integrated suite of web-based office products. Sridhar said yes, that is their intention. He told me:

"We are moving towards a full WebOffice suite. We already have the Writer/Sheet/Show covered, and those are getting updated at a rapid clip. We also have Zoho Virtual Office, which offers full Sharepoint style collaboration features. We are working on integrating these services in a better way, and single sign-on is the first step towards that integration. Zoho Creator brings Access/VB like database & scripting to the mix."

Sridhar also said that Zoho Projects and Zoho CRM will be part of the Web Office Suite mix, as they "provide more breadth and depth to the product offering."

Zoho's intent then is, in Sridhar's words, "to offer a fairly comprehensive suite for businesses, as they move their data to the web."

Finally, Sridhar noted that they will offer a downloadable version of their Office Suite product "once the services mature." So it seems it won't just be web-based!

Disclosure: Zoho is a Read/WriteWeb sponsor

The new Zoho Chat 2.0 is no dumbed-down client. It offers most of the features that you have come to expect from your IM desktop applications. You can send files, record your chat history, customize your theme, and more - just like regular IM apps allow. It does a few cool tricks, too. For example, you can type in a new event in the chat bar at the bottom of Zoho Calendar to create a new appointment on the fly. In Zoho Meeting, you can launch desktop sharing with others from within the IM application. (Windows only for now.)

The chat tool is also able to send you notifications from activities that take place within Zoho itself, including document sharing notifications, unread chat messages and more - definitely a handy feature. Future releases for chat include plans to introduce even more IM networks, most notably Skype.

This release represents a major upgrade of the chat application in Zoho. Current Zoho users can try Chat 2.0 here as of today: chat.zoho.com.

When adding the gadgets to iGoogle or Gmail, you won't have to enter in your Zoho account information in order to access your Zoho data. That's thanks to the oAuth support built in. In order to add a custom gadget to Gmail, you must first turn on a particular setting in labs which allows for this (Enable "Add any gadget by URL" in Labs).

Note: To learn more about custom Gmail gadgets, go here.

In social networks like Facebook and Orkut, the gadgets function more like applications. Once you click the link on the Gadgets page to add them to your profile, you'll be taken to a page where you'll need to enter in your account information before they will appear in your Applications list.

Finally, for OpenSocial compatible networks and applications, a link to an XML file is provided and for anywhere else you need a gadget, there's a generic embed code that can be used.

For anyone thinking of making the switch from Google Docs or Gmail over to the Zoho Suite, gadgets like these can make the transition easier as you'll be able to keep up with what's new even when you're still in your Google applications. And for those of us who spend entirely too much time in social networks, having these gadgets on hand means we won't miss out on the important information that matters most.

Zoho Start is what the company is calling a first step "towards integrating Zoho Apps under a single page." The page currently aggregates files from Zoho Writer, Sheet, and Show and lets users organize them into folders, as well as share, tag, import, and export documents via a common interface. Zoho Start also draws a list of contacts from Zoho Chat, and a features a launcher for their entire application suite.

Zoho Start is still quite rough around the edges. It so far only supports Zoho's core tools and isn't the prettiest application, but by tying together their apps under a common launch interface, Zoho is taking a step toward a fully web-based suite that has the cohesive feel of desktop systems. Perhaps Nick Carr won't have to wait until 2010.

In what may be one of the more popular of the new features is the addition of a thesaurus, which is now an option on the contextual menu. The new thesaurus offers 10 different languages to choose from and can be used to lookup words. Future versions will provide replace functionality as well.

File sharers will appreciate the new "group sharing feature," which allows for more collaboration between colleagues. Instead of having to enter in multiple email addresses, this time-saving feature lets you create groups of people. Then you just select "Share" and choose the "Share with Groups" tab. These groups will be visible across all the Zoho applications, too.

The enhancements made to Endnotes/Footnotes and Headers/Footers now allow for the retention of the items when the document is exported to other formats. Manual page breaks are also supported in export/import as well.

This latest update to Writer also includes other enhancements and bug fixes, too.

Late last week, Web Office provider Zoho and online storage company Omnidrive announced a partnership, allowing users to edit a Zoho office document and save directly into Omnidrive. Also, both Omnidrive and Zoho released APIs. The news has already been covered in-depth elsewhere - e.g. TechCrunch and Zoli's Blog. As Zoli Erdos pointed out in his post, the partnership is a useful step forward in seamless on-and-offline computing.

The other thing of interest is how both companies are working on data standards for web apps and storage. Omnidrive is positioning itself as a central data provider for not just Zoho, but over time for other web applications too. As Omnidrive CEO Nik Cubrilovic told me in an email:

"...right now we let our users read/write files to various web apps through our 'live folders'. For eg. You can create a Flickr live folder which will let you read/write your Flickr files, in the similar way the above partnership with Zoho works. The whole point is to allow users to bring together not only all their desktop data, but also all their data from the various different web applications they use."

Omnidrive plans to develop a standard protocol for web applications to read/write to storage providers such as Omnidrive, and their LiveFolders format will become an open protocol. Omnidrive and Zoho are also working on a set of standards for application-to-storage communications.

I hope we see more of these types of partnerships between web app providers - and more data standards that others can adopt. The big companies have a part to play too, but don't hold your breath for open data standards from Microsoft or Google.

In the end it's all part of the best-of-breed ecosystem for web apps, which gives power back to the user to choose which apps to use for which tasks. That's the ideal web world anyway, but we'll see how it pans out.

Clearly, this new interface, dubbed the MenuTab by Zoho, was inspired by Microsoft's Ribbon interface, which is slowly becoming the standard interface paradigm for Microsoft applications. Zoho smartly keeps the most often used functions like undo/redo, copy, cut, paste, and save outside of these tabs so that they are always available (something MS Office also does thanks to the Quick Access Toolbar). In our tests, the MenuTab worked just as advertised, and if you are comfortable with the MS Office 2007 interface, you will feel right at home in the new Zoho Writer.

Zoho plans to make the MenuTab the default interface for all of its productivity applications in the near future.

New Features

Zoho also added a few new features to Writer. Among these are improved auto-insert fields for dates and page numbers in the header and footer, a word and character count in the status bar, a LaTeX editor, and the ability to change your page layout to landscape mode. Collaborative editing is probably the most important new feature (and a necessary one, given that Google Docs has been doing this for a long time), but as Rafe Needleman points out, it's too easy to overwrite another user's edits.

At DEMO today Zoho, the Web Office suite company, will announce an interesting new preview product called Zoho Notebook. I was given a run-through of the product by Raju Vegesna. The obvious competitors to Zoho Notebook are Microsoft's OneNote application and Google Notebook. This new offering by Zoho is sufficiently different to both of those - indeed Raju went so far as to say that Zoho Notebook is "not just an online OneNote". And from my tests of the product, it offers far more than Google Notebook.

Zoho Notebook is an online app that works in both Firefox and IE browsers. You can create many different types of content, including text, image, audio, video, drawings. With audio, Zoho Notebook comes with a recorder - or you can get your audio from the Web or in your file system. And with the video, you can insert it from a service like YouTube, or record from your webcam straight into Notebook. Zoho Notebook will also come with a browser plug-in, similar to Google Notebook.

The best part of Zoho Notebook though is its collaboration features. You can share a whole Notebook, or just pages - and even just parts of pages, which Raju calls "sharing at the content level". It enables collaborative editing, so that more than one person can edit a notebook at a time. It also has version control too and access controls. A neat value add is that you can show the Skype status of the users.

Raju has a video up on YouTube that explains more about the product.

I asked Raju about possible use cases. He told me that a student could use it for compiling research, or enterprises could use it as a project management tool - to gather project documents into one notebook and collaborative on them from within Notebook.

The product is pre-beta and won't be released until March, but it is being announced at DEMO. Right now it still has some issues to be ironed out - e.g. I had trouble inserting some bits of content. But you can see the promise of an online and collaborative Notebook application, especially one that handles multiple types of content. Game on Google, not to mention Microsoft!

With Zoho Notebook, you can create many different types of content - such as text, image, audio, video, drawings, RSS feeds. It's also a content aggregator (including HTML content from web, Zoho Writer doc, Zoho Sheet spreadsheet etc) and has impressive collaboration features. While content aggregation and collaboration are almost mandatory these days in a Web Office product, it's the variety of content you can aggregate and collaborate over that is impressive in Zoho Notebook. Also the ability to mash it all up. Other features include permission settings at object level, versioning support to view/revert to any past version, and ability to add comments to pages or to individual objects. There is also a Firefox add-on for clipping web pages.

Check out this video demo:

Conclusion

Some example use cases, as we discussed last time, include students using it to compile research or enterprises using it as a project management tool. Right now, Zoho Notebook still feels like a beta (which I guess is why it is a beta), but the potential is there for an app that aggregates many different types of content from across the Web in a notebook style. Personally I am a bit of an old-school guy when it comes to note-taking, as I still carry around paper notebooks. But I will no doubt 'go digital' with notes one day, and Zoho Notebook or another similar web native app is likely to be what I use.

One final point. I know that many people who use Microsoft OneNote do so on a tablet, allowing them to scribble down (literally, in their own hand-writing) notes while on the move. I suspect Zoho Notebook also needs to tap into that 'mobility' use case.

Disclosure: Zoho is a R/WW sponsor.

The UI changes focus mainly on improving the editing of presentations, which Zoho says now "matches that of its desktop counterparts" (by which we assume it means Microsoft Powerpoint). Also importing presentations has been upgraded. The video embedded below gives a good overview of the changes.

I'm not a big user of Powerpoint, but in my tests I was impressed by the slickness of the Ajax. I was told that a lot of work went into that, especially for compatibility with VML (IE browser) and SVG (Firefox and others).

Overall, Zoho Show 2.0 is slick and compares well with Powerpoint; and has added collaboration features. Plus, not for the first time, it's one-upped Google - whose online presentations software is basic by comparison.

As we mentioned in our Web Office 2007 Year in Review post last week, Zoho is arguably the most complete and full-featured Web Office suite on the market. Throughout 2007 the company has announced a steady stream of new products and upgrades. We think Zoho's suite, called Zoho Business, will hold the key for the company going forward - as it continues to integrate its many products and features into a compelling whole.

Disclosure: Zoho is a RWW sponsor

Enter Zoho Writer's offline support, just announced tonight. Note that it is read-only for now, but Zoho plans to make it 'read/write' in 3-4 weeks. Interestingly, it was built using Google Gears. Users have to install Google Gears to use the offline functionality - it works on Firefox (Windows and Mac) and IE. Perhaps this will compel Google to offer offline functionality for Google D&S, because as yet it doesn't have it. ThinkFree however does have offline support in ThinkFree Premium.

Also being launched tonight is comments within Zoho Writer. Comments can become discussions within the document - another example of blogging influencing office software.

Here's a video showing the new functionality:

Disclosure: Zoho is a R/WW sponsor

Zoho Business is a set of online office applications, similar to Google Apps. It will probably undercut Google Apps in price - at $40/user/year, it would be $10 per user cheaper than Google Apps. Zoho Business will be available in private beta for now, then move into public beta next month. It will go 1.0 during Q1 2008.

As yet the features for the Pro version haven't been confirmed. But Zoho told Read/WriteWeb that it'll include additional storage, security, telephone support, additional apps, customization and more control, more flexibility and control in groups, and more. These features will evolve as the Web Office market evolves over the next few months, we were told.

Some of the main features of Zoho Business:

• Company level Admin Console
• Domain Management (for pointing your domains to Zoho Apps)
• Centralized User and Group Management
• Single Sign-on across several Zoho Apps
• Zoho Apps include Writer, Sheet, Show, Wiki, Notebook, Email, Cal, Tasks, Planner, Viewer, Chat etc.
• Customization Options
• Multiple levels of Security including SSL
• Remote Backup
• Telephone Support
  

The following video has more details and also see the screenshots below.

Zoho Business Control Panel

Zoho Business, Spreadsheet view

Disclosure: Zoho is a R/WW sponsor

However Yahoo Mail did come up with offline functionality in July - it gave offline access to all free and paid Yahoo Mail users through the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. Earlier this week Yahoo announced further Zimbra integration, this time with its Calendar app.

So Google is well and truly behind the times with offline support for web mail. However the Google white coats are having a fine old time tinkering with mail stuff in their labs - tonight Google Labs announced Advanced IMAP Controls, which lets you "fine-tune your Gmail IMAP experience."

To be fair, Google probably isn't worried about Zoho coming out with offline functionality in its mail product before Gmail has. For one thing Google is so big it can afford to wait until it's good and ready, despite Gmail fans yearning for offline support! But also Google probably sees Zoho less as a competitor at this point (even though Zoho does compete directly against Google Apps) and more as an evangelist for its technology - such as Google Gears.

To access mail offline in Zoho Mail, you'll need Google Gears installed on your browser - at this point IE and Firefox are supported. Chrome and Safari support is coming. According to Zoho's blog, you can also download images and attachments in offline mode. Another cool feature is that Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes.

Here is the video, also available on Google Code blog:

Zoho Writer, the company's word processing tool, can now be used offline, using Google Gears. If you're someone who has grown dependent on the online functionality of Zoho, Google Docs or an other service - you'll find that it's very exciting to be able to go offline with Gears. It couldn't be easier for the user. If you've got Google Gears on your computer, you can download selected Zoho documents to your hard drive with just a click. The pages for those documents will then be accessible inside your browser, even with when you are not connected to the internet. Someday soon, the company says, the other Zoho apps will also be available offline as well. If you've tried Google Docs, you've probably noticed that it's ugly and awkward. Zoho is far less so, and now offers the advantage of being able to go offline as well. (Your collaboration partner probably trusts Google already, though, so it's not a clear case by any means.)

Whether all the bugs have been worked out of the implementation remains to be seen. Other applications leveraging Gears sometimes experience problems when trying to sync back up online after a session offline. I'd suggest you test out Zoho Offline with a back-up copy of any important documents, and perhaps save revisions in a text editor, the first few times you use it.

While early Web 2.0 hype was all about doing everything online, subsequent developments have shown that the desktop has plenty to offer still. Rich Internet Apps, capable of working on the desktop but leveraging the web, offer the best of both worlds. Gears is a variation on the RIA theme and has a whole lot of promise.

Google Gears was built to allow offline use of Google Reader and GMail but can be used by developers of any online service. With the new GearsMonkey Greasemonkey script, Firefox users can take any website's pages offline. Note that while Zoho Writer went offline today, Google Docs and Spreadsheets still does not offer official Gears support for offline use. There is a certain irony to that.

ThinkFree also stated in their blog post that they are the number 2 Web Office suite provider, behind Google Apps. They wrote:

"GD&S is a great lightweight tool, but having the best MS Compatibility and the highest level of feature functionality of any online offie suite has propelled us into the second spot."

Judging by the figures both companies provided, it seems that Zoho's growth rate is stronger. According to their blog post, Zoho took "12 months to get to the first 100K users, 6 months for the next 100K users and 4 months for the last 100K users." However it's great to see that both Web Office startups are experiencing high usage and growing well. While Google is the dominant player in this market, both ThinkFree and Zoho are an acquisition away from being major players in the office software market (e.g. Microsoft or Oracle might buy them).

Disclosure: Zoho is a R/WW sponsor