Now we’re no stranger to Zoho’s online office suite products here at Gizbuzz, in fact, recently we interviewed Raju Vegesna, Chief Technical Architect of Zoho about their current products, for the first ever Gizbuzz Podcast.
Recently, the Zoho team have been working on integration between the Zoho Office products, and they’ve come up with a sample presentation in their presentation creation program, Zoho Show, demonstrating the new integration features. Essentially, it allows you to take some content from another Zoho application, such as a chart from Zoho Sheet and import it into another application, like Zoho Show.
At the moment the process of embedding other Zoho content is fairly simple, if a bit technical. It’s a case of ‘publishing’ your original content which gives you a small amount of HTML which you then place into your target document with the insert HTML snippet option.
The results are good - a chart embedded within a presentation, for example, works quite well inside the presentation. It’s not just limited to charts, though, forms created in Zoho Creator can also be embedded with similar success. The only concern I have is that occasionally the embedded content looks a bit ‘out of place’ - the sample presentation given to demo these features has a dark blue gradient background, but the charts and forms have a white background. Having said that, even desktop office solutions like Microsoft Office aren’t immune to this problem. Also the demoed charts do look a bit pixelated - but I don’t know whether that’s just my large screen resolution (1280×960) causing the charts to be scaled up a bit.
Still, there is enormous potential for a feature like this. Desktop suites like Microsoft Office boast this kind of interoperability between the components of the suite, and you’ll find a lot of times when you need to mix the features from the different products. Zoho are doing this in the Web 2.0 application space, and it’s certainly something I haven’t seen done on the web before. It’s an extremely useful feature, and with a bit more spit and polish it could become a major selling point for the Zoho suite.
What I would work on now if I was Zoho was to make this feature a specific option - users don’t like to deal with ugly-looking HTML. If they implemented a button on the toolbar which listed all the user’s other documents (in all the Zoho products) and offered to insert the content directly into a document when clicked, I would say that Zoho integration would be a killer feature. Whatever they do, it has to be at least as easy as it would be to copy and paste data from one application to another on the desktop.
If they do, will it be killer enough to win significant market share from Google’s online office suite, or even challenge the mighty Microsoft Office? Who knows.
