Both Zoho and Google are working on equivalent products, respectively called Zoho Drive and Google Drive. Zoho’s product is going to be released in the short term, and has already been formally announced, and GDrive’s existance, whilst not officially acknowledged, is well known following the famous presentation leak.

The basic principle, as explained by the Chief Architect of Zoho in the Gizbuzz Podcast, is that once you have uploaded a file to the internet, you shouldn’t have to download it again. Thus if you upload a .docx Word document to your online drive, in future when that is opened, it should open in a Rich Web Application, such as Zoho Writer or Writely. This makes version control, sharing and collaboration much easier, as simultaneous editing is possible and it is only ever necessary for one copy of the file to exist.

Once Zoho Drive has been released, all the documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. that you create in the rest of the suite will be stored in the Drive rather than separately. Such an online ‘drive’ is also not limited by conventional file systems. There is the possibility to base the file system entirely on metadata rather than physical location (think Artist and Album tags on an MP3 file, rather than the folder in which it is located). This is infinitely more powerful in a number of circumstances. For example, a company could store its documents based on what client they related to, the specific client matter and the employees creating the documents simultaneously. The same document could even relate to different clients.

To sum up, the notion of an online drive offers a great chance for integration of Rich Web Applications as it provides a centralised storage system which plays to the strengths of an online app as opposed to its desktop equivalent.

This post is part of the Online Office integration series. To read the rest of the series, click here.