Both Google and Zoho will be announcing new office product offerings at tomorrow’s Office 2.0 conference. Steve Bryant from eWeek reports:
“Google will announce tomorrow at the Office 2.0 conference a new product called Google Docs, which will merge Writely and Google Spreadsheets into a collaboration and document management solution, according to sources.”
Google Docs will be available at docs.google.com. Writely and Google Spreadsheets already offer export to blog and other formats – and have similar sharing functionality. So this seems like common sense to merge the two products together. But once again, it all seems a tad unimaginative and piecemeal from Google – as with Google Apps for Your Domain; which bundles together Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar and Page Creator. As always with Google, who knows what is around the corner. A full Web Office Suite must be in the works and it’s probably just that all the pieces of the jigsaw aren’t ready yet – they don’t have online presentations and project management products yet.
Meanwhile a small company that does have all the pieces, Zoho, is going to push out a new version of Zoho Virtual Office. Techcrunch is reporting that it “will integrate most of the 10+ Zoho services already available and add several more like Webmail and calendaring.” As of now, the product includes web-based collaboration groupware such as email, documents and calendar. So it appears it’ll be upgraded to include the rest of the Zoho product range (spreadsheets, presentations, etc). If you want a quick tour of all these apps, check out my Image Gallery on ZDNet.
As I noted earlier this week, Zoho is planning a full Web Office Suite. But I’m a little confused by the branding here, as it’s being called ZohoX as well. So is this a new brand, or an upgrade of the existing Zoho Virtual Office?
Zoho Projects, their online project management tool, also went out of Beta yesterday. There’s no question then that Zoho has all the products required for a full web-based suite, so in that sense they are a step ahead of Google – and Microsoft. But the space is still fairly immature and so a lot of jostling for position is going on.
Related posts: Zoho Web Office Suite Image Gallery; Office 2.0 Podcast Jam Kicks Off; Zoho Moving Towards A Full Web Office Suite
Disclaimer: Zoho is a R/WW sponsor
UPDATE:Google Docs & Spreadsheets (another great name) is now live.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)