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What would the office of the future be like? Perhaps something that can assist you to do your work where ever it may be? Now with Internet access everywhere, the conventional meaning of work by sitting only at office (or in one place) is changing. This major shift in lifestyle is helpfully being facilitated by a fresh approach in tools that enable one to get their job done anywhere. Meet Zoho -- The Office 2.0... or perhaps a cliched, but appropriate denotation -- "The Office of tomorrow, today". Zoho, a play on words SOHO (Small Office Home Office) is an initiative of AdventNet, who are majorly into enterprise IT, networking and telecom customers; Zoho is one of them. 
Zoho Writer is part of a bigger schema of things; it comes under the Zoho Virtual Office banner which includes Zoho Sheet and Zoho Show. Zoho also offers other Web-based productivity tools such as Zoho Planner -- an online organizer with to-do lists, reminders and notes, Zoho Notebook-online note taker, Zoho Wiki, Zoho Chat, Zoho Mail, Zoho CRM, Zoho Creator -- for developing business and personal Web apps, etc. Phew! That's a lot of apps under one banner! 
We've spoken much about advantages and disadvantages of online office applications in detail previously, so do have a look at that. We would've loved to review Live-documents -- funded by Sabeer Bhatia (one of the founders of Hotmail) -- which is a direct Office 2007 look-a-like but unfortunately is in private beta as of now. But we'll definitely nail it next time whenever we procure an invite. If any of you have one, do drop in a mail. Starting off with Zoho To start off with, you would need to pick any one of the products listed at www.zoho.com, I chose the most popular and widely used Zoho Writer. The good thing is that since it's a suite, you don't need to separately register for all the remaining consumer apps. If you'd like to delve into enterprise apps like Zoho CRM, you would need additional registration. In fact, most Web 2.0 apps make it even simpler, they use a demo login to glimpse over the software before even registering for free. Registering is snap. Just enter the required essential details and you can start editing right away. I'm glad the new Web 2.0 movement has done away with tedious marketing survey registrations (remember those?). 
Working with files When logged in, the layout is very self explanatory; you have the editor with several icons related to tasks that can be performed, you can hover over them for explanations. Pay particular attention to "Minimize/Maximise" view in Zoho Writer that allows one to view further functions other than those related to the Writer application at hand. For most of the part, Zoho apps have a similar feel but not particularly a consistent interface. E.g., all Zoho apps allow to share your documents freely from a Share menu, Zoho Writer has a text menu item above the toolbars, while Zoho Sheet (Spreadsheet) has a button on the top right hand corner. These aren't show stoppers, but any application aiming towards 'Suite-wise' unification needs to be consistent across its own apps. This will of course change slowly as these apps are evolving towards a more unified structure. The Interface One thing you'll notice with Zoho Writer is that it's far more polished than the rest, and sort of sporting a "I've my own identity look" compared to the other apps in the suite. This is plainly because many of the new features are first released on Zoho Writer due to its overall popularity than the other applications in the suite. The look of which would most probably transition to other apps in the suite. Talking about the look, you can even change the default skin colour of the app to a more Windows Vista-ish dark look with "Elephant grey". 
The toolbars aren't resizable (not that you'll need to), though buttons can be switched on or off via options, which is a nice touch here. As always, it's great to know that the most used quick shortcuts work as they are supposed to. It's so satisfying to know that [CRTL+S] works and works well. Meaning, it will temporarily override the browser's Ctrl+S functionality when editing, though if you switch to another non-Zoho window, your browser shortcut will return to normal magic of Ajax programming! This really shows how much we as users have got used to Microsoft Office and define other products only in relation to it -- well, after all they're the ones who pioneered it on a large scale. Web 2.0 Features What you'll certainly like is the ability to quickly tag the files, simple text that helps search engines identify files quickly. Again, the interface is fairly inconsistent; Zoho Writer has tags placed where they should be -- below the document with a tag icon, while Zoho Sheet had it up on the right hand side with a different tag icon altogether. 
"Comments" is another nice feature -- a good way of keeping track of your thoughts or additional content while writing something. Embedded Zoho Chat has probably taken a page out of Gmail, you can easily embed chat into any of the Zoho applications with its own skin support. Embed chat of course works with only Zoho Chat. This may put some of you off, but understand that Zoho Chat isn't meant to compete with chatting clients, rather it helps when collaborating documents with other people. Zoho's apps, especially Writer, can easily be extended to other blogging services directly such as Google pageflakes, WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Live Journal, etc. Last but not least, Sharing -- you can choose to share you documents privately or publicly. Private sharing requires user IDs to be set. Offline Support Zoho recently introduced offline support for its beloved Writer app. This means that you can download files off Zoho servers on to you own HDD and then auto sync using Google Gears which you'll need to download (See Applications you need for offline support). You'll need to go to http://writer.zoho.com/offline when not connected to the Internet. 
A much more elegant solution is the add-on for Microsoft Office which can be found here. It allows one to enable syncing facility directly from Microsoft Office to Zoho under a new menu item "Add-ons". This amazingly works with both, Microsoft Word as well as Excel. Conclusion Though we unfortunately couldn't find the time to review everything that Zoho has to offer, we'd like to bring to your attention the fact that online applications are a difficult horse to review. This is because these are forever evolving (which is great from user point, a nightmare for a reviewer). By the time this review goes up, you'd probably see that some of the things mentioned here have changed, for the better (I hope). Nevertheless it's a beast that must be dealt with. All said and done, "the best things in life are free" and so is Zoho. Zoho is an extremely mature, well-designed, and a fairly responsive product. Of course, it cannot replace Microsoft Office yet, but is certainly on the way to do so with growing offline support. For most people don't really care about the bloated complexities that Microsoft Office has, Zoho will certainly fill in those gaps for free. Related Links 3 best online office apps What is Web 2.0? Applications you need for offline support
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