Both Google and Zoho will be announcing new office product offerings at tomorrow’s
Office 2.0 conference. Steve
Bryant from eWeek reports:
“Google will announce tomorrow at the Office 2.0 conference a new product called
Google Docs, which will merge Writely and Google Spreadsheets into a collaboration and
document management solution, according to sources.”
Google Docs will be available at docs.google.com. Writely and Google Spreadsheets
already offer export to blog and other formats – and have similar sharing functionality.
So this seems like common sense to merge the two products together.
But once again, it all seems a tad unimaginative and piecemeal from Google – as with Google Apps
for Your Domain; which bundles together Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar and Page
Creator. As always with Google, who knows what is around the corner. A full Web
Office Suite must be in the works and it’s probably just that all the pieces of the
jigsaw aren’t ready yet – they don’t have online presentations and project management
products yet.
Meanwhile a small company that does have all the pieces, Zoho, is going to push out a new version of Zoho Virtual Office. Techcrunch is reporting
that it “will integrate most of the 10+ Zoho services already
available and add several more like Webmail and calendaring.” As of now, the product includes web-based collaboration groupware such as email, documents and calendar. So it appears it’ll be upgraded to include the rest of the Zoho product range (spreadsheets, presentations, etc). If you want a quick tour of all these apps, check out my Image Gallery on ZDNet.
As I noted earlier
this week, Zoho is planning a full Web Office Suite. But I’m a little confused by the
branding here, as it’s being called ZohoX as well. So is this a new brand, or an upgrade
of the existing Zoho Virtual Office?
Zoho Projects, their online project
management tool, also went out of Beta yesterday. There’s no question then that Zoho has
all the products required for a full web-based suite, so in that sense they are a step
ahead of Google – and Microsoft. But the space is still fairly immature and so a lot of
jostling for position is going on.
Related posts: Zoho Web Office Suite Image Gallery; Office 2.0 Podcast
Jam Kicks Off; Zoho Moving Towards
A Full Web Office Suite
Disclaimer: Zoho is a R/WW sponsor
UPDATE:Google Docs & Spreadsheets (another great name) is now live.
