Zoho Personal – Online Office Suite. An Overview

Posted on Apr 8, 2009 in Online Storage, Productivity, Test Drive Apps by dee 2 Comments

For many years, the only way to work with a full suite of productivity tools was to purchase/download and install Microsoft Office or Open Office onto your machines. Documents were created and stored locally and shared via Email or Shared folders, etc.

With the Internet fast becoming the medium of choice for storage and collaboration, there has been many products being developed and trying to take a share of this market. I’ve recently test driven applications such as GBridge for desktop sharing and collaboration and Adobe Buzzword for document authoring and collaboration. These are specialized in doing one thing well. And they do.

Meet Zoho. Zoho is a full suite of applications built to cater for all your productivity needs. It comes with a wide range of applications designed specifically with flexibility and full functionality in mind.

Many of us are currently using Microsoft Office or Open Office as our main suite of office applications. These cater for most of our everyday needs. However, for those of us on the move or just wanting an online option, Zoho presents an extremely viable alternative.

 

Main Features

• Free for personal users
• Wide range of applications
• Reduces costs by doing things online instead of purchasing software
• Secure storage and back ups
• There is a mobile (iPhone) version available for some of the applications
• Supports multiple languages
• Supports Sharing and collaboration.

Zoho is built to be relatively compatible with your current office suite and are targeting to become a viable replacement option to these suites.

Step 1

Open up your web browser and navigate to http://www.zoho.com. In order to use Zoho, you’ll need to sign in via a simple registration. You also have the option to sign in using your Gmail or Yahoo email account. As most of my applications go via gmail, I thought I may as well continue using that option.

Step 2

Once logged in, you can either go directly to an application by clicking the relevant "Try Now" link. Or alternatively in the top box, you have a link to go to personal.zoho.com that takes you to your dashboard. If you use the dashboard feature, you can switch applications using a menu on the left bar. Otherwise, there is a drop down menu on the top that allows the switching.

One thing to note, the first column of applications are all free to use for individual use. The second column (called Business Apps) do have some restrictions on them (listed in light gray next to the application name). To use them fully, you’ll need to upgrade. Suffice to say, most of us newbs will limit ourselves to the left column only :)

Secondly, by default Zoho will create you a mail account (yes, yet another one!) called username@zoho.com but you can add your existing email addresses there as well.

Lastly, be aware that when you first go to Zoho using Google Chrome, you do get a warning message that it works best in Internet Explorer and Firefox. However, they do allow you to close this warning and continue in Chrome. I’m currently doing all my work in Zoho via Chrome and it hasn’t misbehaved at all.

With so many applications available, the most commonly used ones will be Mail, Writer, Sheet and Show. I will go into more detail with some of the applications and do a compare against Microsoft Office and Open Office in later articles. Until then feel free to play around with these.

If there is any particular application that you need me to drill down into, leave me a comment and I’ll focus on that! Until then, I’ll work through some of the lesser known applications in the new few posts.

Read Part II here – Adding a new email account to your Zoho Mail

Tags: Cool Apps, Online Document Storage, Productivity, Test Drive, Test Drive Apps, Tutorials, Zoho

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