Over the past few years, Microsoft has had to contend with increasing competition from free, web-based office suites such as Google Docs and Zoho Office. And when I say contend, I mean, maybe start taking notice of. There's no doubt that MS Office is still the 800 pound gorilla in the word processing, spreadsheet, and database field. But free competitors including those online applications and desktop solutions including IBM's Lotus Symphony and and the open source OpenOffice.org can't make the folks in Redmond very happy.

So it probably shouldn't be that surprising that Microsoft Online VP Ron Markezich referred to Zoho, Google Docs, and Zimbra as services that offer "fake Office capabilities."

What was a bit surprising is how well the Zoho team took that idea and ran with it. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu wrote a blog post about the topic yesterday. And today the company launched FakeOffice.org, a site that compares Zoho's application suite with Microsoft's.

Not surprisingly, Zoho points out a number of features that it's products offer that Microsoft's doesn't. Clearly, MS Office has a few features up its sleeve that you won't find in Zoho Office, including 100% compatibility with all those Office documents your friends and colleagues keep sending you. But it's worth checking out the site for the Fake Office "work online" music video, and the little comments such as the Twitter gadget, which is powered by "Fake MS Access."

Zoho has actually been an innovator in the online office space for a while, and most of the company's web apps offer far more features than competing Google Docs. But it's tough for a company with an unusual name like Zoho to take on the big guys like Microsoft and Google. Maybe Vembu should think about permanently changing Zoho's name to FakeOffice? It does have a nice ring to it.

Unfortunately FakeOffice.com has already been registered, which is why Zoho had to grab a .org address for their site.

[via Instant Fundas]

Although Zoho offers a suite of apps that competes with Google Apps, there's no reason for them to let the huge Google Apps userbase slip through their fingers when it comes to project management. Zoho Projects, the planning and collaboration web app from Zoho, now integrates with Google Apps. You can now sign into Zoho Projects with your Google Apps login, and plug your Google Docs right into Zoho.

That's not all, though. When you schedule deadlines and milestones in Zoho Projects, you can export them automatically to Google Calendar. There's also an OpenSocial widget for Zoho Projects, so you can put Zoho Projects into Gmail or on your iGoogle homepage. It seems less like Zoho is importing your Google data, and more like it's becoming the missing project management app that Google Apps doesn't have.

Online office suite Zoho has launched a new service called Zoho Dicussions. Basically, the service lets you create and manage a discussion forum that's hosted on Zoho.com. It literally takes just a few seconds to create a forum, but you can customize your forum with subtopics, a logo, favicon, and other minor tweaks.

The basic service is free and lets you create up to 2 forums and 2 sub forums. You also get 100MB for file attachments (like pictures uploaded by users). You can also pay $25 to $75 a month for more storage space and the ability to create and manage more forums.

Advanced users may find Zoho Discussions a bit limiting. You don't get nearly as much control as you would using a self-hosted forum package like vBulletin, phpBB, or Simple Machines Forum. But there's a lot to be said for quick and easy. And as an added bonus, hosting your forum on a third party site like Zoho makes it a lot harder for users to hack your primary web page by uploading shady file attachments.

Zoho Dicussions also has a few nice features that you won't find in all forum software including the ability to bookmark a topic, add tags to a topic, or subscribe to the RSS feed for a forum.

There are plenty of apps you can use to build your own comic strip, with little artistic talent required. Various members of the Download Squad team love Bitstrips and Comic Life Magiq, but we grownups aren't really the target audience for ToonDoo, a comic strip maker from Zoho. ToonDoo is for educational use, allowing kids to make comic strips in the classroom (even if they can't draw), and letting teachers use them as instructional tools.

If kids today are anything like I was at their age, letting them loose with a comic strip maker is a recipe for fun and mischief. ToonDoo is helping teachers out a bit by introducing ToonDooSpaces, which gives each classroom its own sandbox - with comments and other social features - that the teacher can moderate. The pitch is that Spaces makes it easier to keep track of student progress, while also helping to make the learning environment a little less Wild West.

ToonDoo could be a big distraction for kids, the same way Bitstrips is for Download Squad, so it's good to give the teacher some bonus mod powers to keep the learning focused.

Because I work almost exclusively in remote-based teams, I'm always looking for new tools and services that can help me manage my daily tasks and effectively collaborate with my team members. One of the biggest problems I have with some collaboration systems is that they require everyone to login and collaborate using the web app itself. This is great if you are always in one place or in a more traditional office environment, but it becomes less problematic if you are on the go frequently and already have tools and practices in place to try to manage your life.

This is why I think that WizeHive has real potential. WizeHive was launched in late 2008 after its founders, who were unsatisfied with the current crop of web-based collaboration and task management tools, decided to scratch their own itch and launch their own service. Over the last six months, WizeHive has rolled out additional features and today, WizeHive is releasing a bevy of new features and enhancements with the aim of bring WizeHive to the masses.

I talked to WizeHive's co-founder, Mike Levinson on Monday about the product and its development and what the new release brings to the table. I was most impressed that Mike and his team use WizeHive internally to manage various projects and activities not just including WizeHive's development, but for other business tasks as well.

After playing with WizeHive a bit, I think the best way to describe the service would be that it is Basecamp meets Backpack, with a dash of Yammer on the side. Unlike some collaboration solutions like Box.net, which really do an excellent job of replicating or replacing SharePoint, WizeHive is a more streamlined way to share files and communicate details back and forth, or to keep track of task management.

After creating a WizeHive account, you can create a different workspace for various teams or projects you might be working on. Within that workspace, you can choose who you invite to collaborate in that space. Once you have invited someone to your space, they can share documents with you, make comments, assign or complete tasks, etc.

You can also create pages within a workspace to further drill down your focus. In my DLS (for DownloadSquad) workspace for instance, I can have pages for Posts, Features and Ideas. Each page can contain its own task and its own set of comments.

The thing I like best about WizeHive is how easily it integrates with other services. You can create a new task (or even a new page) using e-mail, but you can also send messages, tasks and reminders using Twitter. By sending a direct message to @wizehive, after your account is verified, you can communicate directly with your workspace and the people in your group will get notifications and can reply by e-mail, Twitter or using the web site.

Here are some of the new features WizeHive has introduced with this release:

• improved UI for tracking and managing a large numbers of shared files
• enhanced file management and version control
• an increase in the number of files that can be uploaded at one time to 50
• bump in the maximum uploaded file size to 100 MB
• embedded image viewer
• streamlined collaborative editing of documents and spreadsheets

Although you can create and edit documents using ZoHo (it is integrated) and you can save revisions, the real focus of WizeHive seems to be on tasks and communication.

WizeHive is still in beta, so you can sign-up for a free account with unlimited users. You're limited to 50MB of storage space (an additional 3GB is $8US a month), but you get every other feature and you can use the service at least until the end of 2009. Personal accounts, limited to 3 users and 50MB of space are also free. Teams or Small Businesses can get an account with support for 10 users and 3GB of storage for $39 a month.

I'm going to give WizeHive a try and see how well I can integrate it into my life.

Zoho has launched a new mobile interface for its web-based office and productivity applications. That includes a mail and calendar app, as well as word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and database utilities.

To launch the mobile version of Zoho, just visit m.zoho.com in any mobile browser. Or if you just want to see what the interface looks like, you can use the same URL in a desktop browser.

Zoho says the mobile interface supports mobile devices running Windows Mobile, Symbian S60, and Google Android as well as the iPhone and BlackBerry devices.

Zoho Mobile is available in English and Japanese. The team plans to develop mobile interfaces for additional Zoho office applications in the future.

The move means that mobile phone users who are unhappy with the built in office applications on their devices have another alternative -- although one that you'll have to use up some mobile minutes in order to use.

Zoho has launched a new feature that lets you access Zoho's suite of web office documents from Faceboo, iGoogle., Orkut, or any web page that either supports OpenSocial XML or lets you embed an iframe. Zoho Gadgets are little widgets that provide you with an overview of the following Zoho services:

• Zoho Docs
• Zoho Mail
• Zoho Calendar
• Zoho Tasks
• Zoho Contacts
• Zoho Planner

In other words, you can add a widget to Facebook that will let you see the latest documents in your Zoho Docs account, allowing you to click an item to open and edit it. Or you could add your Zoho Calendar or task list to your iGoogle page.

Using the OpenSocial XML option, you can also add Zoho Gadgets to your Gmail sidebar. First you need to enable the Add Any Gadget option in Gmail Labs. Then you just click the OpenSocial XML link next to the Zoho Gadget you want to add and copy and paste the URL into the Gadgets section under your Gmail settings.

I have to say, the Zoho Tasks gadget doesn't work nearly as well as the Remember The Milk gadget for Gmail. And when I tried adding events to the Zoho Calendar gadget they didn't show up, unlike the Google Calendar gadget that's available from Gmail Labs. But the Zoho Docs gadget worked just as you'd expect.

The one problem with adding a bunch of gadgets to your Gmail sidebar is that Google still doesn't provide an easy way to rearrange the gadgets. They show up in the order you add them. So if you want the Zoho Docs gadget to show up near the top of the sidebar, you'll have to uninstall any other gadgets you have, install Zoho Docs, and then reinstall your other gadgets. Update: I stand corrected. You can enable Navbar Drag and Drop in Gmail Labs to reposition items in your sidebar. Thanks Tom!

Zoho is adding to its line of web-based productivity apps with the launch of Zoho Chat 2.0. The service is a web-based instant messenger that lets you connect to multiple IM networks to chat simultaneously with your AOL, Windows Live, Yahoo!, Gogole, and other contacts. In other words, Zoho Chat is a lot like Meebo.

But Meebo has some features that are still missing from Zoho Chat, including the ability to create aliases for contacts and recognize contact groups that you've already set up. Meebo also lets you send files to users no matter which IM network they're using, while Zoho Chat users can only share files with other Zoho users.

That doesn't mean Zoho Chat is useless. The service does show promise. And more importantly it ties into Zoho's impressive suite of online office apps. You can launch Zoho Chat from within other Zoho applications including Zoho Writer or Zoho Sheet. And you can click a "Share your desktop" button from any chat window to launch the Zoho Meeting web conferencing application.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Zoho has launched an updated version of Zoho Writer, an online word processor that lets you create, edit, share, and collaborate on text based documents. Zoho Writer 2.0 includes a bunch of tweaks, most of which affect the visual appearance of the web app.

Probably the biggest change is the adition of a new MenuTab interface which saves space at the top of the screen by breaking up menus into both drop-down lists and tabs. Here's how it works. You can click the little arrow next to the buttons labeled Format, Insert, Review, Share, Views, or Page Setup for long lists of commans. But if you click on the tabs (not the arrows), the options in the second row of the menubar will change accordingly. For example, if you click Format, you'll see the usual font and alignment options. If you click Share, you'll see options to post to a blog, email a document, or share with other Zoho users.

The MenuTab feature is a clever way to offer a ton of functionality without a ton of icons cluttering up your toolbar area. If you'd prefer to do everything using drop down menus, you never have to click on a tab. Or you could use the tabs exclusively and ignore the drop downs.

Zoho has also updated the sidebar area of Zoho Writer 2.0, making it look more like the Zoho Sheet sidebar. For a more thorough list of changes, check out the product announcement on the official Zoho Blog.

We've covered Box.net before -- the file storage site with collaborative tools and a really great iPhone app -- today the company has launched a redesigned site and even more tools to make online collaboration easier and more effective.

Last year, Box.net added the ability to let users invite other collaborators to view or edit documents. Coupled with Box.net's OpenBox platform, you have a really slick light content management system that allows you to store, share, and group edit documents, spreadsheets, images and more. Today, even more features have been added to aid in project and team management.

Some of the highlights:

• Profile pages for each user that can be customized to show their role in the current project and their contact information and recent project activity
• Discussions that can take place across your shared workspace. You can also comment on individual files
• Bookmarks -- it sounds simple, but it's actually pretty cool because you can share a URL and the rest of the group can then comment on it and its findings.
• Updates - you can see updates across all your various projects to see what the newest discussions, edits and uploads are, all from one page.

By now, many of you are probably using web-based office suites like Zoho, Google Docs, or Thinkfree as your primary office applications. If you do and you're a Firefox user as well, you'll probably love the OpenIT Online addon.

I mentioned it previously in my list of 14 extremely useful addons, but it's been updated quite a bit since then.

When you install the plugin, the configuration wizard will help you create file associations. You're not limited to one suite, either. If you'd rather open spreadsheets with Zoho and documents with Thinkfree, OpenIT can handle that. Zoho viewer is also supported and is a nice, fast way to view files you don't need to edit.

OpenIT adds two context menu entries (which you can see in the screenshot above): one to open a file with your default viewer/editor and a submenu that provides access to all available options.

This is a great extension to add to your portable Firefox install. It's an excellent way to make sure you can open a wide array of documents on any computer.

Online productivity app makers Zoho have publicly rolled out Zoho Mail, a webmail application that's been in private beta up until today. While the world may not really need yet another webmail app, there are a few things that make Zoho Mail a notable challenger to offerings from Google, Yaho!, Microsoft, and AOL.

First and foremost, Zoho Mail offers an offline mode thanks to Google Gears. If you have Gears installed for Internet Explorer or Firefox, you can configure Zoho to download your most recent email messages and attachments so you can catch up on your email when you're stranded somewhere without an internet connection. Yahoo! offers a similar feature, but despite the fact that Zoho Mail's offline access is powered by Google Gears, Google's Gmail does not have an offline mode... yet.

Zoho Mail also has a user-friendly interface that, like many other Zoho Office apps, feels more like a desktop application than a web app. You can sort messages by labels, Gmail-style. And there are a bunch of options for customizing your display. For example, you can open emails in a split-pane mode or in a pop-up window.

There's also a "send mail as" option that lets you change yoru reply to address. In other words, if you decide that you like Zoho Mail but don't want to bother letting everyone know that you have another new email address, you can just forward your old email account to Zoho Mail and change your Email ID so that nobody will ever know the difference.

As usual, TechCrunch makes a good point about Zoho calling their offerings "still a bit all over the place." But the fact that Zoho now has over one million users and just launched Zoho Docs bodes well for the company (and the still-nascent online business suite business at large). Zoho Docs integrates Writer, Sheet and Show, allows some version controls, more organization features and access control lists. That's a powerful set of glue tying some already-useful apps together. Now we'll have to see if they continue to grow beyond their core users and make real traction in the business space. With Office Live Workspace and Google Docs + Chrome powerhouses coming on strong in Q4, it'll be one heck of a battle.

Previous coverage of Zoho:

• The launch of Zoho DB.
  
• Zoho's iPhone-tuned set of pages (we'll give them a full review soon).
• Zoho did DocX before some others, and it works well.
• Did you know you can export PPT, PDF, ODP files and send to Picasa and Flickr?
• It was only a week or so ago that they released Zoho Share, which allows you to embed docs on a page.

And here's how you can log in to Zoho with your Google Apps account.

Those folks at Zoho just don't quit, do they? Last year the company rolled out a major redesign of its powerful, web-based PowerPoint clone. And now Zoho Show 2.0 has 8 new features, some more exciting than others.

1. Export to PPT, PPS, PDF, and ODP. You've been able to export files as HTML for a while, but the addition of PowerPoint and PDF export brings Zoho Show a bit closer to being a true PowerPoint replacement
2. You can now import images from Picasa (Zoho Show already supported Flickr importing)
3. Support for up to 50 undo/redo actions
4. Support for 9 new languages: Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Portguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
5. Create contact groups for sharing your presentations with
6. Copy and paste slides from one presentation to another
7. Enhanced remote presentation user inteface
8. Advanced options for embedding presentations on a web site

You can see a demo presentation highlighting the new features after the jump.

[via Mashable]