post

Document Collaboration Just Got Easier

I often need to share a document with a few reviewers / contributors, and I hate sending attachments. Attachments are redundant, wasteful, and if you start marking up different copies of the same document, then emailing them around, you’re in for a major version-control nightmare.

The clean solution: share an online document. But which platform to use? I use Zoho applications, widely recognized to be the best. But until today, there’s been one obstacle to unlimited, open collaboration: users had to create a Zoho account first. Not that it was complicated (30 seconds?), but some people will stay away from apps requiring account registration as a principle.

The solution? Well, if you have any sort of online presence, chances are you already have an account either with Yahoo or Google. From now on you can use these credentials – yes, your Google / Yahoo account – to log in to Zoho applications. No more worrying whether the other party can access your shared documents.

The Zoho team points to a poll ran by Lifehacker last year. Obviously there are more Google than Zoho users. But look at the reason: most already have a Google account, and refuse to create another one for Zoho. Those who actually tried both system prefer Zoho by a 3:1 margin. So it clearly made sense for Zoho to remove the bottleneck and open up to their systems.

But I suspect this is just the beginning. TechCrunch France Editor Ouriel Ohayon and ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett raised the issue of mass importing one’s Google documents to Zoho. I think it would make sense, although I don’t necessarily like importing – it’s a one-time shot.

Why not just make all documents available to online users, no matter where they were created? You should be able to list your Google and Zoho documents, open them, edit them, and save to whichever format (and storage) you want to.

Either way I’m sure we’ll see more open access and collaboration coming soon. smile_regular

(Disclosure: I’m an Advisor to Zoho)

Comments

  1. I agree that I use Google purely because I already have an online account with them and can never be bothered opening up a new registration but now I’ve read you can export your docs to Zoho directly from Google I may give it a go to see!

  2. Very interesting. Thanks! You should also check out Redliner (http://www.redliner.com). I recently read about it in a GigaOM post. Simple yet powerful like Word and it has a dashboard the tells me what I need to do so I’m not sending emails wondering on the status of my document.

Trackbacks

  1. […] people to play, no matter which garden they’re hanging out it. Zoli has it right when he says; Why not just make all documents available to online users, no matter where they were created? You […]

  2. […] is mass import from Google Docs: nice, special delivery for Dennis, but I still would like to see a list of all my online docs, be it Zoho or Google, open them, edit them, and save to whichever format (and storage) I want […]

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