.:online office:.
from the site:
not much there on the site to tell you exactly what…it…is. but, that’s okay…i’ll explain it to you…
in a nutshell:
this whole open source thing is amazing. it has certainly been around for awhile, but we haven’t really seen any real ‘consumer friendly’ fruits reaped from it until more recently. wikipedia says it best:
“The “open source” label came out of a strategy session[3] held at Palo Alto, California, in reaction to Netscape’s January 1998 announcement of a source code release for Navigator. The group of individuals at the session included Christine Peterson who suggested “open source” and also included Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, and Eric S. Raymond. They used the opportunity before the release of Navigator’s source code to free themselves of the ideological and confrontational connotations of the term free software. Netscape licensed and released their code as open source under the name of Mozilla.”
again, this is not really where it really stemmed from; rather, it’s where the phrase ‘open source’ was coined. if you want to know more about a hardcore application of opensource, just go here and read. we’re not here to talk about open source…we’re here to talk about this sweet opensource web-based software that is sweet.
if you have a gmail account and you use some of the other features that go along with it (google notebook, document editor, spreadsheet editor, etc.0, then you have a general idea of what zoho is. except zoho is like that stuff on steroids. there are a whole slew of useful pieces of software that are all accessible from the web. anything you can do in microsoft office, zoho has a web equivalent of, from more common apps like word and excel to hefty ones like project, CRM, database creator and even a little site monitoring service…all free. no, these applications are not as extremely robust (yes, i used that word) as their MS counterparts…but the great thing is that they do MORE than enough for the common user, and in most cases, they do plenty for a more advanced user. and what’s really cool is that they are continuing to release more and more products at a steady pace. today they released an alpha of zoho notebook, which is described as, “…a product that allows users to create, aggregate, and collaborate content in an online whitespace from other zoho services as well as any web content. embedded applications will work just fine as well.” translated, that means you could feasibly use notebook as a framework for an entire project that contains many moving pieces, such as documents, spreadsheets, charts, presentations…have multiple users work on them at the same or different times…and have them all web-accessible at all times.
what makes this so cool? all you have to do is think about all of those little things you hate about microsoft office, and you have reason number one. and i’m not saying that zoho is, by any means, a perfect replacement for office. however, it’s nice to have a quality viable alternative that is free. it’s also nice to think that you have a much higher chance of having something fixed (due to it’s open source nature) that you don’t like rather than have to sit around and construct creative workarounds to make seemingly simple tasks work for you (automatic formatting in word, anyone? i’m sending my blood pressure up just thinking about it…)
but what’s most important is this: with quality web 2.0 apps like zoho, it’s making the market a much more competitive place. therefore, companies like MS cannot gouge you for software that you simply don’t like because you’ll just go somewhere else. basically, more competition for you, the customer, = better pricing for you.
it’s definitely worth checking out, as it’s completely free, and they give you 100 megs of storage space to start. you can’t lose…
