Zoho, the online office suite which we’ve reported quite a lot on has just added a new feature – integration with OmniDrive.

Huw reported a while back that Zoho were not planning to release their own ‘Zoho Drive’ application:

Raju confirms in the comments [of this post] that Drive will not now be released. I have mixed feelings on this. In some ways it helps them maintain the focus, and maybe Zoho/Adventnet isn’t the right company to do it. However, I liked the premise of it, and it is radically different from what the storage companies are interested in at the present.

Well, it seems that the OmniDrive integration announcement will fill this gap, and I’ve taken a quick look at the new integration features between OmniDrive and the Zoho suite.

More after the jump.

Straight away, going to File > New > Word document in Omnidrive’s very Vista-reminiscent interface opens a new window, where Zoho Writer opens up and starts editing the document.

Similarly, I’m told that once you’ve uploaded a Word document into your Omnidrive account, double-clicking it does the same, opening a Zoho Writer window. Unfortunately, Omnidrive didn’t seem to like my browser setup and I couldn’t upload a file (the desktop client wouldn’t work as well, as I’m on Linux) so I couldn’t test that.

Interestingly, however, there is no reverse functionality – documents created in Omnidrive won’t show up on your Zoho Writer documents list (and your Writer documents don’t automatically get moved into an Omnidrive account either). In fact, from what I can work out, the Omnidrive portion of the application is separate from the Zoho account – so you don’t need to be signed up with Zoho to use the embedded Writer.

Having a centralised storage solution has been one of the big things ‘yet to come’ to online office suites, and this announcement does put Zoho in a very favourable position, and now significantly ahead of the competition in the form of Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

What I am slightly disappointed about is the fact that the storage is so focused around Omnidrive, and not Zoho. While the current setup is brilliant if you’re an Omnidrive user, if you’re not (like I was until I signed up to test this) it’s not as enticing. Obviously, part of this deal between Adventnet and Omnidrive will be the cross-pollination of both services by each other, so it makes sense that Zoho push more people to get Omnidrive accounts and vice-versa.

Don’t get me wrong – this is an awesome feature and is a valiant (and successful, in my opinion) attempt to yet again reduce the number of reasons why you shouldn’t use an online office suite.

Zoho have thrown down the gauntlet again, this time with the help of Omnidrive, and it will be very interesting to see what Google and Zoho’s other competitors in this space can do.

The features include easier replying, new message notification, chatting online, forward-to-all, and a native Mobile Gmail. Several of these features are features that are “why didn’t I think of that” type features. They’re all deceptively simple, yet effective and incredibly useful additions to Gmail. Hopefully other webmail providers will follow suit.

After the jump: summaries and screenshots of the new features.

Reply on Top
In the past, when you had long conversations and needed to reply, you had to scroll endlessly until you reached the bottom and could press the reply button.

Fortunately – our days of scrolling are done thanks to “Reply on top”. Every message in a conversation now has a Reply button, with a small drop-down icon next to it allowing you to easily access other features such as “Reply to all”, Forward, Print, and others (see screenshot).

New Message Notification
I was lead to notice Reply on top because of this future. As part of Oratos Media, Huw, Jacob, Peter, and I maintain a mailing list for easy communication. Often someone sends a reply to a conversation, while someone else is just typing their own reply, invalidating it! Then we’ll have to add another reply, and clutter up the list even more.

It’s a bit frustrating sometimes, but Gmail has fixed this problem. If, while you’re viewing or typing message, someone adds a new reply, you’re notified, and you’re offered the option to update the conversation with the new message. If you’re typing a reply, you won’t lose your reply (I tried). This is a wonderfully simple yet brilliant feature that shows why Gmail stays on top in terms of features.

Forward All
Forward your entire conversation instead of just the most recent message.

Chat offline
Traditionally, chat worked simply, when people were online, you typed your message to them and they typed back – in real time. Google has thrown this to the wind with Chat offline. As they say, “if you’re chatting with a friend who goes offline, your friend will be able to see whatever you were typing the next time he or she goes online.”

This doesn’t just apply to the ‘newly offline’ though, any offline chatter, no matter how long, will receive a message a next sign-on. This can be useful if you don’t want to launch Gmail but have Gtalk open – just pop open a chat window and send your message.

Gmail for your Mobile
Gmail is now available as a native mobile application, instead of a pared-down web interface. It’s been blogged into submission so I don’t have much more to add.

Why I am covering this again? Well, Arvind who works at Zoho dropped me an email about the new changes. I decided to take another look because some of these new updates further address the issue of online office integration, the lack of which is one of the major disadvantages to using an online office solution at the moment.

Now while this feature doesn’t directly deal with integrating Zoho’s systems into the desktop, it is still important.

In desktop office suites like Microsoft Office, you can embed data from other applications into other elements of the suite (for example you can embed an Excel spreadsheet in a PowerPoint presentation). Now Zoho Sheet offers this functionality, but you can embed your Sheet spreadsheet on any webpage.

This obviously offers a benefit as if you want to display a spreadsheet on a public webpage; your visitors don’t need to have a copy of any particular spreadsheet software on their desktop. It also means the user doesn’t have to download and view the spreadsheet in a separate window. Without a universal document exchange format like PDF existing for spreadsheets (ODS isn’t widely accepted yet), this is especially important for the spreadsheet medium.

Of course, there are situations where this isn’t appropriate – for example when the spreadsheet contains complex macro stuff, or isn’t a public document but does want to be distributed over an intranet, for example.

You can see an example of an embedded spreadsheet at the Zoho Blogs post on the subject.

I think this is also an important step for Zoho and this feature also appears to work within other Zoho applications. This gives an advantage over a desktop solution, but Zoho have still got an uphill struggle to convince people to use an online office suite. The landscape for applications is inevitably changing, and it could be in the very near future that we will all be using an online solution in place for many of the desktop applications we use now.

There also were a couple of other new features which you can read about on the Zoho Blogs here and here.

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.

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.

That’s not to say that Zoho and Google don’t recognise the importance of integrating their products, or that they aren’t working to achieve that. They are, but in very different ways. I thought I’d take a look at how they’re going about achieving integration, since I am a strong believer that if Zoho or Google integrates better and faster than the other, they will win the online office war.

There are a few opportunities for integration, and I’ll be looking at them in a series of posts. First up is the ‘Online Drive’, which I’ll look at tomorrow.

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