IBM Docs vs Zoho Docs

Almost a year ago, IBM promised to launch its own alternative to Google Docs and Office 365 - LotusLive Symphony. And the company has fulfilled the promise. True, the service is called differently - IBM Docs and for now it has no relation to the SaaS-platform LotusLive. IBM Docs is now in Beta the status and located on the strange portal Lotus GreenHouse. It's strange because, first, why it's Green, while the company is Blue? And second, IBM doesn't clearly explain the purpose of this portal and how long it will exist. It provides several IBM services for free, including Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime, Lotus iNotes. Moreover, the portal has less restrictions than bugs. But let's get back to the IBM Docs.

Unlike the Google Wave team, nobody disturbs Google Docs developers, so they continue to add useful and not useful features to the suite. This time they changed the Google Docs interface in order to help users more easily manage lists of documents. They added a right pane with preview of the selected document and relevant information about it: history, versions and users who have access to it. The new Google Docs homepage now shows the most frequently used documents (an extension of the GMail Priority Inbox idea). The list of documents can be filtered by file type or you can show only images / videos (they are be displayed as thumbnails). For images the new slideshow-viewer has been added:

We have become accustomed to the fact that Zoho is mainly a step ahead of Google Apps. But today's Zoho new feature is especially insulting for Google. It is Zoho, but not the search giant, who is first to deploy the unified search in the online office. Zoho Search indexes data from Zoho Mail, Docs, Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook, Discussions, Contacts and allows you to find all the contextual results for any request from those sources. The search results can be filtered by application or date range. Found emails and documents can be opened directly on the search portal, without opening the appropriate service. Besides. directly in the search results you do different actions - for instance, reply to an email. Meanwhile Zoho Search works only as a separate service (with an interface very similar to google.com). But soon the universal search box will appear in all the suite apps.

Still, Google should think about buying Zoho. And not in order to get rid of the competitor or to utilize Zoho services, but to attract this Indian developers team that can create 10 updates, while Google's team is working on one. For example, today in Zoho integrated Google Docs into its online services. No you can upload documents from Google Docs to Zoho Docs, attach documents from Google Docs to the records in Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects, view them in the Zoho editors and send Google documents in Zoho Mail emails. Why Google has not still implemented the ability to attach their documents to emails in GMail, and pages in Google Sites - it's not clear. Why Zoho integrates Zoho Docs, though its own document editors are even better - it's quite reasonable.