Mark Gibbs at Network World, in his widely read Web Applications newsletter wrote about Zoho recently. He reviewed Zoho Writer in particular. Some excerpts:
This service provides a familiar screen layout with a document management bar to the left with buttons for creating a new document, importing documents from your local machine's storage, and deleting documents with a larger editing panel on the right. The document panel is divided into four sections: My Docs, for your current private documents; My Templates, you can save any document as a template; Shared Documents, for documents that others have shared with you; and Trash.
The editing panel is tabbed so you can have multiple documents open simultaneously. The WYSIWYG editor, which provides automatic backup, has all of the usual text editing features such as styles, fonts, font attributes, tables, links, and anchors.
A menu bar over the editing panel provides access to the document's history (Zoho Writer includes versioning and difference display), local printing, export and import of documents by e-mail, document preview, save as template, and save. Formats supported for e-mail and locally save documents are HTML, Microsoft DOC, PDF, and OpenOffice SWX.
At the bottom of the editing pane are links to share the current document publicly or privately. Public sharing provides a URL that you can give to anyone and the document can be set to allow user comments. Any documents that you publicly share are also listed in an RSS feed.
So what we have here is a remarkably full featured document creation, editing, sharing, and collaboration system with extensive support for online integration making it the best online alternative to Word I have come across so far.
We are honored by the title he gave - 'Zoho aims to beat Microsoft Office'!
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