Microsoft has now struck back by releasing free online versions of its Office Suite and giving the users an alternative to Google Docs.

Called Office Web Apps, this suite is a cut down version of the desktop applications and allows for document viewing, sharing and light editing.

The consumer version of the tools are free and store the documents on Live SkyDrive. The corporate versions can get self hosted versions of the applications using Sharepoint.

Being online applications means that the applications will work regardless of the operating system and have been tested in Windows, Mac’s and Linux based machines through various internet browsers.

If you have Office 2010 installed, then Office Web Apps takes advantage of offline and online editing and can present a richer experience for users.

Office Web Apps are also supported via mobile browsers and allows the user to view documents saved onto their Live SkyDrive account directly on their mobiles.

Read below on how to use Office Web Apps.

Using Office Web Apps

In order to use this facility, you can sign up to your Windows Live account, or navigate to http://office.live.com.

Once you have signed on, you will be presented with a new “live” page similar to below:

The page will list all recent documents created using Office Web Apps as well as giving an option on the right to create a new document.

The interface is uncluttered and is user friendly. Hovering over an existing document displays a menu that allows for additional options:

These menus allow the user to share a document, view version history, download a local copy, etc.

When creating a new document, the first thing Web Apps asks for is a file name

Because this is a web application, the speed at which the application opens is dependent on your internet connection. It can take a bit of time to open the applications themselves.

Word

Any existing user of Microsoft Word will be familiar with the lighter online version of the application. It has a subset of functionality, but enough common functionality to be a good alternative at a pinch.

Opening up the document locally directly from this interface won’t work unless you are running Office 2010. Note: 2007 does not meet the requirements.

Excel

Again, a familiar interface to anyone who has used a spreadsheet before.

The one thing I couldn’t locate in here was a charting option. Which is a big omission. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough, but given the limited functionality, I couldn’t seem to see it anywhere.

PowerPoint

This allows you to create quick presentation slides or brochures. A lightweight again compared to the full version, but it comes with a variety of themes that can make a good looking presentation quickly and easily.

Because this can be graphically heavy, it can get cumbersome to work with online.

OneNote

OneNote is Office’s version of a catch all information store for storing ideas, plans, etc. It can contain multiple “notebooks” that can have pages that can hold all manner of information.

The online version is similar to the full version and while it hasn’t got the place notes and clips everywhere, it has enough to allow the user to jot quick notes down and store in an organised manner.

Conclusion

Working with the online version can present a bit of an issue if you have been using the full versions and are used to having functionality that suddenly is not there.

However, the subset of functions available are usually enough to use on demand.

I don’t believe this suite will replace the desktop versions (I don’t believe that is the aim). But if required, this can be a good half way house.

To enable full integration, you will need to use Office 2010 which supports opening documents from the web.

Related Posts

• Live SkyDrive – Mounting as a Network Drive via Gladinet
• Live SkyDrive – Saving files larger than 50 megs
• Zoho Personal – Online Office Suite

Users can use Gladinet Cloud Desktop to get around this limitation through the use of Chunking.

Chunking is a process where Gladinet breaks up a large file into multiple smaller ones (similar to multi-part zips) and uploads this to the SkyDrive account. Read below for advantages, disadvantages and how to enable this technology in Gladinet.

Chunking has the following advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

• Useful when the storage provider (in this case Live SkyDrive) limits the size of each file that can be stored onto its servers.
• Improves transfer speeds as multiple chunks are uploaded or downloaded simultaneously.
• In the case of a failed transfer, only the affected chunk is retried. This will reduce bandwidth usages and the “oh bugger” moments when you are at 99% of a large file transfer and the network falls over.

Disadvantages

• The files are stored as “chunks” in SkyDrive, hence shown as multiple files within its user interface.
• Once chunked, the only way to restore the original file is through the use of the Gladinet application. Downloading via the Gladinet client will restore the original file.
• Chunking should only be performed on little used files or files that are required for archives etc.

As above, there is a word of warning here. Chunking is not without its risks. Its always advisable to keep an original copy somewhere.

Prerequisites

In order to use this, you must firstly have a Live SkyDrive account. Click here if you need a guide to set up your own SkyDrive account which gives you 25 gigs of online storage space for free.

In addition to that, you will need a copy of Gladinet Cloud Desktop installed. There is a free version that you can use. Click here if you need a guide on how to set up Gladinet Cloud Desktop.

Lastly, you’ll need to ensure that you have configured Gladinet Cloud Desktop and mounted your SkyDrive Account.

Step 1

Click on your Gladinet icon on the mini task bar to bring up its menu.

Click on Virtual Directory Manager

Step 2

You will see the Gladinet Management Console with a list of all your online storage drives that you have mounted.

Click the little tool icon on the left of Windows Live SkyDrive (circled above).

Step 3

You will see your login details to Live SkyDrive along with an option for Chunking at the bottom:

To turn on Chunking, ensure the checkbox is checked. The default size of each chunk is 20megs. For Live SkyDrive, I would recommend changing this to something like 40megs. This is below the maximum size of 50, but should suffice for most purposes.

Once finished, hit Apply and close all windows.

Uploading Large Files

Once the configuration is complete. Open your SkyDrive folder using My Computer. Navigate to the folder that requires the files and simply drag the file across.

For the purposes of testing, I left my Chunking size to 20megs and uploaded a 30 meg file. Gladinet broke the file into two pieces and started uploading immediately.

Both parts were simultaneously uploaded to the server.

Once completed, the file will appear as a single file when browsing through your Windows explorer:

However, if you look via the Live SkyDrive website, it is shown as multiple files:

Downloading Chunked Files

Downloading a chunked file is as simple as dragging and dropping onto a local folder.

Again, both chunks gets downloaded simultaneously and when complete, Gladinet automatically rejoins the chunks and makes the file available.

Conclusion

Chunking is an interesting technology and Gladinet has had quite a bit of time to ensure that it is robust and safe to use with SkyDrive. I’m not the kind of person who would store large files on my SkyDrive account, so the use of Chunking is limited for me.

I did have a few gotcha’s while testing. One was renaming a chunked file using the Gladinet client does change the name displayed, but not on the Live SkyDrive website itself.

Also, I did have difficulty downloading a previously chunked (at 20meg) file after I changed the chunked size to 30megs.

My advice here would be to pick a chunk size and stick with it :) Changing it may cause unpredictable behaviour.

Relevant Links

• Introduction to Live SkyDrive – how to log on and use SkyDrive
• Gladinet Home Page
• Gladinet Blog
• Gladinet Edition Comparisons – between Starter, Professional and Premium editions.

Here is an updated guide on how to install, and configure Gladinet Cloud Desktop 2.0 to map your cloud storage as a network drive.

Windows Live SkyDrive is a facility that allows you up to 25gigs of storage space for free. The storage space is available anywhere and while its an excellent storage mechanism, it can get cumbersome dealing with uploading files and working through the web based interface.

Ideally, you want to have a folder structure set up on your computer so that you can just navigate through your SkyDrive just like you do any of your other hard drives. Gladinet is a cloud based service that does just that.  It brings online applications and storage to your local machine. Read below for more information on it.

Gladinet is a fully featured service that allows for (amongst others):

• Drive “mounting” (act of setting up an online storage like SkyDrive or Picasa or Google Docs as local hard drives)
• A Cloud based desktop that enables users to use online applications to work on local files.
• Task schedulers to cater for scheduled transfers of data (eg as backup)
• Smart file transfers that allows for encryption, compression and reliability.
• It allows you to upload images without resizing!! (If you use the web interface to upload images, they get resized automatically – this way it treats image files as data, so SkyDrive doesn’t resize or constrain the image in any way).

Prerequisites

In order to mount SkyDrive using Gladinet Cloud Desktop, you must have an existing Live SkyDrive account. If you don’t have one, you can follow the following guide to create one first: Live SkyDrive – 25 gigs of space for free!

Step 1

The first step would be to download Gladinet onto your machine and install it. There are two versions available on the website (http://www.gladinet.com): a Free Starter one and a Professional Edition. The Professional Edition is on a limited introductory offer, but as it costs money, I will use the free version You can download either of them on the following page: Gladinet Editions Download Page.

It comes in both 32 bit and 64 bit versions, so download the one that is suitable to your operating system.

Step 2 – Install the Application

Once downloaded, start the install process by clicking on the .msi file. Hit Next and agree to the license agreement. Hit Next again

Ensure that Start WebClient service and Register Gladinet Cloud Desktop to Windows Firewall are ticked and hit Next.

Choose a location to install the application to (I selected the defaulted) and click Next.

Click Next again and the install process will start. You may get an authorisation request from Windows which you will need to agree to in order to continue.

Once the install is complete, ensure that Launch Gladinet Cloud Desktop is ticked and hit Close.

Step 3 – Configuration

Gladinet 2.1 comes with a new configuration wizard. We will be installing the application as a free application. There is a professional version available. However, for everyday purposes, the free version should suffice.

Click Next (or if you have purchased a license, then this is the place to enter it).

I would recommend registering with Gladinet to receive future updates and news. This step is optional. If you don’t wish to receive emails from Gladinet, then simply click Next.

This is the main screen that we need to configure. You can add as many services as you like here. I prefer to start with Windows SkyDrive and add others as I go along.

For the purposes of this post, tick the Windows Live SkyDrive and click Next.

Leave all values as is. The only one you may wish to change (as I’ve done above) is to change the location of the cache. My c: drive is quite small, so I changed it to another drive by clicking the Change.. link.

Once happy hit Finish to complete the configuration.

Step 4 – Mounting Drives

When the configuration is complete, there will be two visible changes to your desktop:

There will now be a small notification icon on your mini task bar. Click on it will present the following menu:

In addition to this, there will also now be a new “drive” set up on your computer under the drive letter Z.

Open the Z drive by either clicking on it via My Computer, or clicking on the taskbar icon and selecting My Gladinet Drive (Z:)

Double Click on Windows Live SkyDrive.gvm

Simply enter your Windows Live Id and Password here and hit Next. Hit Finish to complete the mount operation.

Gladinet will then proceed to complete the configuration. If this is the first time you are setting up SkyDrive, a “Loading Online Storage Plugin” dialog box will appear.

Click on Yes to allow it to complete.

The creation process can take up to a minute to complete. Once complete, the following dialog box will be shown:

This is where you can specify your backup configuration. As this can be done later too (and I’ll write a post on this subject later), for now hit Cancel.

Your explorer window should now show Windows Live SkyDrive as a folder on your Z drive:

Double clicking on it will show you the contents of your drive just like any other folder on your local machine.

You can copy and move files to and from your SkyDrive account just like any other folder. Because the storage is cloud based, every time you transfer files to and from, it gets scheduled in Gladinet’s task manager and the transfer happens in the background.

Creating new folders using Gladinet defaults the permissions on the folders to you only (ie, not public).

Adding other Cloud Storage Types

This is as simple as going to your Gladinet Drive and clicking on “Click to mount [cloud storage].gvd”

Choose the Storage Provider from the long list of storage options and proceed through the very user friendly wizard to complete the configuration.

Using this method, I now have one place to access and manage my Google Docs, Picasa

Conclusions

As a simple drag and drop access to your online storage, it does what’s asked of it. It gave me a network drive that allowed me to access my online data stores and i can easily upload and download documents to and from my drives.

Currently, its one of the best ways to really make use of SkyDrive without having to go through a web explorer.

You can continue to explore Gladinet on your own by right clicking its mini-icon and checking out the various options.

You may also wish to read our guide on other storage and collaboration solutions. Click the following post to have a look (opens in a new window):

11 Free Services for Online Storage, Sharing and Collaboration

Relevant Links

• Introduction to Live SkyDrive – how to log on and use SkyDrive
• Gladinet Home Page
• Gladinet Blog
• Gladinet Edition Comparisons – between Starter, Professional and Premium editions.

Version 14.0.8117.416 is part of the new Wave 3 suite of the Live Essentials package.

Most Windows platforms are supported, however the installer still complains when trying to run via Windows 2003 Server.

I’ve extracted the MSI package for Writer and placed it on my Live SkyDrive in case you need to install it for Windows Server 2003. Read below for instructions and download links.

You can download the MSI here: http://bit.ly/Writer14_0_8117_416 

A few notes:

If you already have an older version of Writer installed, you will need to uninstall it first. To be safe, back up your Plugins folder (normally found in c:\program files\Windows Live Writer\Plugins) and store in a safe place before uninstalling.

I uninstalled Writer using the Add/Remove programs applet in my control panel.

Once uninstalled, you can then right click on my MSI and select Install. It should install Writer automatically.

When I installed it, it didn’t lose my blog settings or my plug ins. Be prepared to set up everything again should it be required.

If you have any issues, feel free to place a comment and I’ll try and assist as much as possible.

Would appreciate a tweet/share/comment if you found the above useful :)

Related Posts

Recently, a new product has come into Beta, that allows for the same level of functionality and allows the user to set up their SkyDrive account as a network drive without going through extended configuration steps that Gladinet takes us through.

In all fairness, connecting via Gladinet offers many more options such as connecting to other types of cloud storage at the same time (for example,  Google Picasa, Amazon S3 and Google Docs). SkyDrive Explorer only connects you to Live SkyDrive.

SkyDrive Explorer is a free product and is easy to use. It requires little to no configuration and allows the user to use their SkyDrive just like any other folder on their computer….

To install SkyDrive Explorer, go to http://www.skydriveexplorer.com and click on the Free Download menu.

Step 1

Download the setup via the download link and run through the steps to install the application:

When you hit Finish, the installer will close. At this point in time, there is no “executable file” that you need to run to start the application itself.

Step 2

Open up your “My Computer” and you’ll see the SkyDrive Explorer under the list of your “Other” drives:

Step 3

The first time you double-click on the icon, the following dialog box will show:

Put in your Live user details and hit Sign In

Step 4

Once authorized, your windows explorer will now show the contents of your SkyDrive account:

And that is pretty much it! Again, you can treat this just like any other windows folder and/or drive on your computer. The advantage of this drive is that it is stored on the cloud and so available wherever you go.

Warning

SkyDrive Explorer communicates with your SkyDrive account by HTML Web page parsing, which means that should Windows Live decide to change their content format, this application may not work any more. However, I’m sure that the SkyDrive Explorer folks will update regularly should any of their functionality gets disabled due to Live SkyDrive changes.

At that time, Gladinet was still a Beta Program. Recently, they released Version 1 and there has been some significant changes to the instructions. I’ve now updated the post to properly reflect these changes.

I’m now using the free edition of Gladinet to connect to my SkyDrive, Google Apps and Google Picasa albums all via My Computer

You can find the article here: Set Up Live SkyDrive as a Network Drive via Gladinet

Hope this helps everyone!

All these are good methods to carry information with you as you go however they have a few disadvantages. They are physical devices prone to accidents and subject to demands of physical transportation. They can be lost or stolen and can end up placing information into unauthorized hands. They may also require special drivers or slots installed on the machines before the information can be seen. Collaboration and versioning can be difficult unless if additional transportation methods are implemented.

• The alternative to carrying physical storage devices with you is to store the information in a secure online facilities. Depending on the online facility, this can have the following advantages:
• Its accessible everywhere as long as you have access to the internet.
• It is safe and secure (provided the online facility has good authentication and authorization practice).
• It may be possible to edit your documents online directly on the online facility’s site. Alternatively, some facilities offer offline editing with automatic synchronization back to the online document.
• It is possible to share documents with selected or public audience.
• Some online facilities provide for collaborative editing of document.
• Lastly, its possible to keep physical stores synchronized across multiple devices

Here are a few applications and services that can provide for online document storage, collaboration and remote synchronization:

1. Windows Live Mesh 

A popular product that gives you 5 gigs of online storage space as well as file synchronization across devices. It has additional functionality around remote access and ability to add many “devices” to your Mesh. I’m actually using this quite extensively to connect to my home machine. I’ll write up a post about getting this working on your machine soon.

Links: Windows Live Mesh

2. Adobe Buzzword

A service that supports document storage and collaborative editing of these documents. Its limited to document types only but has a flashy interface and once you got used to it, it can quickly become a tool that you can use everywhere.

Links: NewbTech Review, Adobe Buzzword

3. Windows Live SkyDrive

Another excellent file storage system that gives the user a whopping 25 gigs of storage space and is not limited to document types, so you can store all manner of files here.

Popular file types (such as images) are recognized automatically and SkyDrive will adjust its presentation of these files accordingly.

Links: NewbTech Review, Windows Live SkyDrive

4. Google Docs

An online document management system that allows for storage and editing of documents straight from their user interface. There are limitations on file sizes and functionality if editing through their applications, but, its suitable for everyday needs. The online applications are provided via Google Apps.

Links: Google Docs

5. Zoho Office Suite

A free online office suite similar to Google Apps and includes a variety of collaborative ready applications. It includes versioning and online storage (I believe its 1gig for document storage space)

Links: NewbTech Review, Zoho Office Suite 

6. DropBox

Has functionality that allows for users to create shared folders and drop all manner of files in them. The free version allows for 3gigs of online space and its perfect for quick storage requirements.

Links: DropBox

7. MozyHome

An online backup service that gives you free 2gigs of back up space and you can dictate which folders you wish to automatically back up.

Additional space costs more. It is widely used and highly recommended especially amongst small businesses who may or may not have a robust backup strategy.

Links: MozyHome

8. Spideroak

A cross OS service that allows for online backup, synchronization, sharing and storage solutions. Its available for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems and gives the user 2gigs of space for free.

Links: Spideroak 

9. RapidShare

A file hosting service that allows you to upload a file and get a download link that you can send to anyone to download. This service allows for very large file sizes and is popular around gaming and media sites.

Links: RapidShare 

10. drop.io

Allows for private sharing of files and real time collaboration. It creates a virtual folder up to 100megs and supports all file types. You can specify a name to call the “folder” and share this as part of the drop.io URL.

It allows for password protection and other users can drop their files into this folder.

Links: Drop.io

11. GBridge

Offers file synchronization across your devices over the Google GTalk network. It can go through most network firewalls and can allow you to create “shares” on your machines that can be opened to other authenticated users.

Links: NewbTech Guide, GBridge

Conclusion

A lot of online storage services can be made to integrate seamlessly into your desktop using products such as Gladinet so that they appear just as another folder on your computer. In actuality, the documents are stored on the online facilities servers.

The above are just some of the huge variety of options you may have in terms of online storage, synchronization and collaboration. If you use or recommend a similar service, feel free to comment below :)

This post has now been superceded with an updated one. Please go below to see the new post:

Updated Article – Setting up Live SkyDrive with Gladinet 2.1

Recently I talked about Windows Live SkyDrive, a facility that allows you up to 25gigs of storage space for free. The storage space is available anywhere and while its an excellent facility, it can get cumbersome dealing with uploading files and working through the web based interface.

Ideally, you want to have a folder structure set up on your computer so that you can just navigate through your SkyDrive just like you do any of your other hard drives. Gladinet is a cloud based service that does just that.  It brings online applications and storage to your local machine. Read below for more information on it.

Gladinet is a fully featured service that allows for (amongst others):

• Drive “mounting” (act of setting up an online storage like SkyDrive or Picasa or Google Docs as local hard drives)
• A Cloud based desktop that enables users to use online applications to work on local files.
• Task schedulers to cater for scheduled transfers of data (eg as backup)
• Smart file transfers that allows for encryption, compression and reliability.
• It allows you to upload images without resizing!! (If you use the web interface to upload images, they get resized automatically – this way it treats image files as data, so SkyDrive doesn’t resize or constrain the image in any way).

What we will do today is use Gladinet to “mount” our SkyDrive so that it is available on My Computer.

Prerequisites

you have an existing SkyDrive account. Easy enough to do if you follow my earlier guide: Microsoft SkyDrive – 25 gigs of space for free!

Step 1

The first step would be to download Gladinet onto your machine and install it. There are two versions available on the website (http://www.gladinet.com): a Free Starter one and a Professional Edition. The Professional Edition is on a limited introductory offer, but as it costs money, I will use the free version You can download either of them on the following page: Gladinet Editions Download Page. There is a version for both 32bit and 64bit operating systems (sadly no Linux).

Step 2

Once downloaded, complete the installation process. Select all the defaults (you may wish to change the install location, but apart from that, all else should be as normal).

When you launch the application for the first time, you’ll have an initial “Run Once Initial Settings” for the Cloud desktop.

Here, choose a drive letter that you want to assign to Gladinet and hit OK. In my case I chose “R” as my drive. Leave everything else as is and hit OK.

Important!

If you are running a server operating system (or one which has IIS running), you may get a message that states that Port 80 is being used already. It will ask to install a virtual adapter. Click Yes.

At this point, the Gladinet Virtual Driver will be installed.

If you continue to have an issue installing the virtual adapter, there is a troubleshooting guide in the install folder\WosHome called “GladinetTroubleShoot.pdf”. It may help resolve issues around Gladinet behaving with applications that also use Port 80 (such as Skype or IIS).

In my case, I changed my unassigned port on my local web server to port 81 and it worked fine. There are ways to preserve port 80 and have Gladinet coexist with your web server. Its detailed in the Troubleshooting guide.

Step 3

Assuming you have any possible conflict resolved, Gladinet will start. You can tell from a taskbar mini icon it will place on your start bar and it should show you an initial menu screen.

Click on “Mount Disk Storage or Web Storage As Virtual Directory”

Step 4

This will open up the Virtual Directory Manager.

As we’re adding SkyDrive, select “Windows Live SkyDrive” as the Service Provider.

The dialog box will change slightly to collect your SkyDrive credentials:

At this point you can create a “safe card” (refer to Gladinet for details) or just type in your SkyDrive credentials and click on Add.

Your username is your Windows Live Id (usually same as your MSN Messenger or Hotmail Id)

It will take a while to create the virtual directory and progress will be shown at the bottom of the screen. You may get a “Loading Online Storage Plugin” agreement dialog box. Hit Yes to this.

Step 5

Once its finished, a new Windows Explorer window will open up and show you the contents of your SkyDrive!

At this point you can navigate through the folders just like any other folder on your computer. If you happen to close your Windows Explorer, opening up My Computer later will show you the drive under Network Location (Vista) or Network Drives (Windows 2003).

You can also open up your drives by right clicking the Gladinet mini icon and selecting your drive

Via the same method, I managed to add Google Picasa as well as Google Docs to Gladinet as well.

When you drag a file into your SkyDrive, (if you chose the professional edition), you will be asked if you want to upload immediately or schedule it for later. Additionally, right-clicking on an “office” type document will display and option to read it in an appropriate viewer.

Conclusions

As a simple drag and drop access to your online storage, it does what’s asked of it. It gave me a network drive that allowed me to access my online data stores and i can easily upload and download documents to and from my drives.

Currently, its one of the best ways to really make use of SkyDrive without having to go through a web explorer.

You can continue to explore Gladinet on your own by right clicking its mini-icon and checking out the various options.

You may also wish to read our guide on other storage and collaboration solutions. Click the following post to have a look (opens in a new window):
11 Free Services for Online Storage, Sharing and Collaboration

Relevant Links

• Introduction to Live SkyDrive – how to log on and use SkyDrive
• Gladinet Home Page
• Gladinet Blog
• Gladinet Edition Comparisons – between Starter, Professional and Premium editions.

Zoho Mail by default gives you a @zoho email address (yes, yet another email address), which I’m not too keen on as i have many already. Instead I wanted to add my Newbtech and Gmail mail accounts so that i can access them via Zoho Mail.

Most broadband providers have an online offering in terms of allowing you to access and create mail from the web without having to use large windows/linux based clients such as Microsoft Outlook. However, if you’re anything like me, you may most likely have quite a few of these accounts and Zoho mail allows the user to maintain all these accounts within one application.

Zoho Mail is a fully featured mail application with facilities to attach documents from your local drive through to Google Docs. It supports folders, labels and other functionality commonly found in Microsoft Outlook for instance.

It’s interface is familiar and clean and makes checking your mail from multiple accounts a cinch. It has a good Address book functionality though I couldn’t see an “Import Contacts” function anywhere.

Step 1 – start by logging onto Zoho (http://www.zoho.com) and clicking on Zoho Mail. (Alternatively, you can always go to http://mail.zoho.com). Zoho Mail interface should be familiar to anyone who’s use email applications before (similar to Outlook or Outlook Express).

Your folders, labels and views are listed on the left toolbar, with additional navigation on the top of the screen. The bulk of the screen shows you a list of your emails with a preview pane at the bottom.

Step 2 – Click on the Settings link on the top navigation bar. In the resulting window, click on Mail Accounts on the top. This will take you to the list of mail accounts you have registered with Zoho Mail. Initially, this will be your @zoho.com email address.

What we want to do here is to add a new POP3 email account. POP3 is your basic standard email account settings. Most people registered with any broadband provider has a pop3 email address.

For now, we want to add our Gmail account to Zoho so that we have a central place to check our mail. Click on “Add Mail Account” on the top.

Step 3 – In the form that appears, enter the fields in as per the screenshot. If you are trying to add an email address other than Gmail, you will need to get the POP3 settings from your provider. They will normally have that on their website somewhere, so do a search for it.

Hit Save when you finished entering the form in.

If you have entered everything successfully, the list of your email accounts will show up under Mail Accounts:

To see the contents of that email account, above the Folders on the left side of the screen, your username should now be a drop down. Click on the drop down and you should see your other account there. Click it to go to that accounts Inbox. If you have many emails on that account, it might take a while for Zoho to fetch all the mail.

Step 4 – Repeat the same for any other POP3 email account you may have.

The default server settings when adding a new email account is to leave the mail on the original server. This is excellent as you may have multiple clients (as I do) and want the mail to be available on all the clients. However, if you do wish to change this, you can do so by clicking on the “Personalize” tab and going to the Server Settings page. This is also where you can set up your signature and folder structures for that email account.

On the Mail Accounts page, you can select any of your email accounts and make it the Default or edit them further if you wish.

In order to send an email using any of your accounts, ensure that you have selected that user first and then click on Compose to create and send a new email. You can switch the “Sending user” easily by adding your other email addresses in “My Preferences”. If you add additional addresses here, you can switch the email address you want to send as when composing new emails.

One last thing to note: Microsoft Outlook has something called Rules which are events that trigger something. For example, if a new mail arrives and meets a certain criteria (eg, subject contains “Comment”), then you can flag or move that email. Google Mail has similar functionality called Filters. Zoho Mail has the same functionality and you can get to it once again from the Personalize tab.

Thats pretty much it. The application is quite self explanatory otherwise and if you have used any email clients in the past, you should be comfortable using Zoho Mail.

While I had the latest version of both installed at home, I had a major issue installing Windows Live Writer at work. I run Windows Server 2003 on my desktop at work and the installer for Windows Live simply refused to work on it.

After a bit of research, i found that it was only the installer that had the issue and I could install Windows Live Writer via the .msi. In the end, I found the .msi file in my temp folder on my Vista machine at home. (I also found an .msi on the net, but that was for either Dutch or an older version). This one is for Windows Live Writer 2009

For others who are running Windows Server 2003 and the installer complaining, I’ve uploaded the .msi file to my Skydrive. You can download it from here:

http://tinyurl.com/gimmeWindowsLiveWriterMSI

NOTE: This is the 32 bit version!

If you need any other MSI’s (eg, Live Messenger, etc), please leave a comment or send me an email.

I’d appreciate a comment if this helps you in any way :)

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