Zoho have announced several new features in their online office suite set of products.

One of these new features is a browser add-on called Zoho QuickRead. It’s available as both a Firefox extension and an Internet Explorer plugin.

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What’s interesting about this is that it addresses one of the problems involved with online office suites – integration.

Once you’ve installed QuickRead, right-clicking on a link to a Microsoft Office file (Word, Excel and PowerPoint at the moment) offers a new option – Open with Zoho Writer/Sheet/Show. This then opens a new window/tab and loads the document into Zoho Writer/Sheet/Show.

I’ve used this on a few documents I’ve found here and there and the process appears to work flawlessly, loading in the document to Zoho’s online office applications and rendering the document.
This is an absolutely vital step to making the Zoho Office suite a real alternative to Microsoft Office. This functionality is certainly attractive to people who don’t, or can’t run Microsoft Office on their machine.

My only complaints about the add-on (bearing in mind I’ve only tried the Firefox version) is the fact that the extension installs an options dialogue on the Tools menu, but doesn’t list any preferences in the Extensions window. Also, I haven’t been able to get the documents to open in a new tab, despite changing that setting (then restarting Firefox).

Other than that, this extension is a very strong incentive to use Zoho over a desktop office suite solution and has a real benefit to users who don’t have a copy of Microsoft Office. This works well for documents that are stored online, but what I think Zoho should do now is integration with the desktop (Windows Explorer, the Mac Finder and Linux file managers etc.). A piece of software to register the Zoho Office applications as handlers for office documents would really make the difference in terms of convincing people to use the online apps full-time.

Zoho didn’t just release the add-on, however. Zoho Writer now sports a WordPress (and other compatible blog) blog system, so you can post directly from Writer. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but I’ll give it a go soon! Also there are a couple of UI enhancements and fixes for Internet Explorer.

Oh, one more thing – if you’re not on Firefox or IE or don’t want to install add-ons, you can use these URLs to open a document from the web:

http://www.zohowriter.com/publicimport.im?url=[[document url]]

http://www.zohosheet.com/view.do?url=[[spreadsheet url]]

http://www.zohoshow.com/publicimport.im?url=[[presentation url]]

UPDATE: Open in tab seems to be working fine now. I did try restarting Firefox after changing the setting, but it only appears to have updated it a day later. Ah well, it’s working now. Also, I said above that QuickRead only works for Microsoft Office documents. I should really have mentioned it also works for OpenDocument Text, the old OpenOffice.org 1.x formats and .csv for spreadsheets.