Zoho Personal – Online Office Suite. An Overview

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.

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Adobe Buzzword Beta

Recently i looked at Microsoft SkyDrive as online storage mechanism and actively use Google Docs to hold a lot of my documents. Adobe is coming out with a similar offering in terms of online document storage and collaboration.

Main Features

• Its an online word processor
• It allows you to store and access your documents from anywhere (internet access permitting)
• Its got an excellent collaboration functionality – allows multiple authors to make changes to the same document
• Key to any collaboration tool is tracking changes, versioning and reviewing edits. It comes with an tools to do all these things.
• Ability to add comments to the document inline as well as controlling access to documents/functions through roles.
• It supports image imbedding and formatting words around these images.

Right.. so lets take this for a quick test drive…

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Windows Live SkyDrive – 25 gigs of space for free!

One of the more popular online storage providers out there currently is Google with their GoogleDocs application. This is a pretty cool application that allows you to upload and share all manner of documents.

Microsoft has done it one better with their latest offering called Microsoft Skydrive. Similar in concept, it’s one of the services provided by Windows Live that gives you your very own online drive where you can store just about anything.

More impressively, the space you are allowed to store is a mind boggling 25gigs! Thats a whole lot of space :)

So what would you store in these 25 gigs? Here is an idea.. practically everyone out there now has a digital camera of their own (my four year old has her very own.. in pink). And how many people out there keep back ups of their photos? I bet a lot of folks out there have no back up strategy and dump all their photos on their local hard drive only to lose it in the next boom-event (ie, virus, hard drive failure, accidentally formatting your hard drive while trying to install Linux on a separate drive – yeah.. that happens too ;) ).

So how do you get access to this free space and use it as an alternative to Google Docs and other sharing systems (such as Picasa and/or Flickr, etc)?

Right.. lets start shall we? 

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How to use SecureShare in GBridge

As part of a series of how to articles for GBridge, lets look at how to share files across your sessions. There are many ways to keep files stored in a central server (such as Google Docs) to access whenever you wish to, however, this method is slightly different. For newbies like me, its an easy way to get access to your documents stored on one of your computers from another. For example, if you have some nice mp3’s stored at home, instead of putting them onto a USB drive and bringing them into work, you can share your mp3 folder on your home machine and listen to them on the fly at work :)

The types of files that can be accessible is varied and includes popular media files such as mp3, flash video, images and even provides functionality to show the images as a slideshow :) The cool thing about this method of sharing is that because the files are not stored in a central server, you are accessing them directly from your shared PC. This means that your documents/files never stored on machines unless you authorize them :)

Right, so lets begin by creating a simple share that can be accessed from your “work” machine.

Assumptions

1. You have already set up two connections (follow my earlier guide if you need a refresher).
2. You have a folder on your home pc which contains the files you wish to access from work.

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How to Connect to your Home Machine via Gbridge

There are many reasons to connect to your home pc while you are at work. And there are many methods. As a lot of people have Windows Vista or XP at home, methods such are Remote Desktop Connections may work well, but can require fiddling with firewalls, and configuration knowledge that most of us technology newbies may not know much about.

Connecting via RDP (Remote Desktop) also “takes over” the PC at home so its not suitable for desktop sharing (ie, there is someone at home looking at what you are doing). The PC is effectively “locked out” while you are connected remotely to it. This is frequently the case when my wife needs a little help in doing something and I just can’t talk her through on the phone.

This is also valuable when “assisting” people such as parents or grandparents. Have you tried talking your grandparents through setting up their email application at home? If you have, then you may understand the pain heh.

So what is GBridge? Its an application that sits on both your work pc and home pc and allows you to remotely control one or the other. It has many other uses such as file sharing etc, but the purpose of this article is to detail out how to get the remote desktop sharing working. You can go here for additional information about its functions if you are interested.

Anyway, lets begin.

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