ThinkFree vs Zoho Docs

The online office service ThinkFree has launched a new Flash-based document viewer called Uni Paper. It can be embedded to any web page and displays most common office formats: PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The max file size is 5MB. The readers can view and search in a document without the need to download it to desktop. And when you edit this published document in your online ThinkFree account, the changes are reflected in real-time back anywhere the Uni Paper has been embedded or shared. Besides the opportunity of publishing documents on your site, you can add it to ThinkFree public catalog, that can attract additional readers. But ThinkFree's viewer is not so advanced as one in Scribd, Docstoc, Slideshare. For example, it's missing the option to view all the pages of a document at once, and the the directory of publicly shared documents contains very little categorization, or genre-based exploration.

Online office providers EditGrid and ThinkFree announced that soon the EditGrid spreadsheets will be integrated into ThinkFree online office suite and replace the existing native spreadsheet application Quick Edit Calc. Recall that EditGrid - is excel-like application that allows to collaborate on documents in real time like in Google Spreadsheets. It also can import the table data from external sources, such as stock quote sites. In addition to the integration with the really cool application, ThinkFree can expand its presence in the Chinese market (the developer of EditGrid - is the company from Hong Kong)

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.