This is a big day for online office today, with the Office 2.0 conference getting underway. To coincide with the conference, two companies have decided to unveil new offerings, Zoho and Google.

Zoho Virtual Office

Zoho is launching later today with ZohoX, an online office suite which integrates many of their current services into one online application. I’m a big fan of Zoho, and have been constantly impressed by the speed at which they bring innovative, useful programs to market. According to Techcrunch , ZohoX will also have webmail and calendaring software and will cost nothing for individual users and $9 per user for SMBs, a group which Zoho sees as their core market (hence the name ‘Zoho’, derived from SoHo’). I can’t get into the service at the moment, but hope to be able to do a review later today.

In other Zoho news, the excellent Zoho Projects is out of beta. We use projects to plan PodDev, and whilst it is not perfect I think it is better than the competition and is a very strong product.

Google Docs

This news is less significant, but Google have combined Writely and Spreadsheets to produce Google Docs and Spreadsheets. I am writing this post from it now Blog posting doesn’t work, but hey, its beta! It’s got a a simple interface with joint management for both documents and spreadsheet. This marks the final transition of Writely to Google, and is certainly the right approach for Google. They aren’t making the mistake that Zoho made by not integrating early. Integration is important because it encourages people to use all your products and makes it easy to have central management, something that people have come to expect with desktop office apps. The only negative point I can see thus far is that it is a lag when typing in, which they will need to fix.