Google or Zoho

I tried Zoho Write this morning.

I decided to give up desktop office for an online office.
So far I used mostly Google. I use Spreadsheets a lot, and Documents less but also a lot. I tried Presentations and did not like it at all.

Now its time to see if Google is best of breed or not.

So today I tried Zoho Write . I did not try their spreadsheets or presentations.

My conclusions are as follows. As you probably know, I am a software developer and one of my company products works with Google Spreadsheets, so I might be biased.

Google Documents is, in my experience, more responsive then Zoho Write. I had to wait until Zoho loads. Zoho has a more pleaseing (subjectively) UI.

Both are far inferiour (except for collaboration and price of cause) to MS Word.
Main drawback – inability to create Styles without going into CSS (a very dirty technical term). This is not a big problem for me, as a software developer, but a no-go in a general purpose application, IMHO. Even with CSS, one can only modify headings 1 to 6 and couple of other things. One can’t easily create new styles, or at least I don’t know how. Zoho seems to be the same way. The difference is that Google keeps CSS with the document, and Zoho wants you to point to outside CSS, which requires someone to own a domain or at least have ready access to hosting. It makes it even harder on a non-tech user. The advantage is instant consistency of the documents look, which is good for corporate.

Which is exactly the point – Zoho is business focused. They have many more applications for business users, like CRM. Google is more consumer oriented, or at least their business focus is less obvious.

If I am to complain about Google Documents (though of cause I like it and use it), here is a short list. Editing long documents sucks. Bugs sometimes scroll you all the way up, and you have to scroll back down. “Normal” style formatting applied to a paragraph often is lost and you have to reapply it again (Ctrl-0). With long documents “Outline mode” of Microsoft Office is important. Google does not have it (neigher does Zoho). Table of content (TOC) is important and both Google and Zoho offer it, but Google’s (don’t know about Zoho) always have 2 levels. It is not good if you, like I, create an outline of the document first. Your table of content is too big and occupies too much space to be useful. I need to be able to have level1 only.

The big winner is Google Spreadsheet which is almost as good as Excel, if you don’t need advanced features. A terrific applicaiton. I am slowly but surely move most of my bookkeeping to it.

Importantly both Google and Zoho have APIs which means 3rd party applications / addons will be available. I can personally vouch for the quality of that of Google. Google do want to encourage addons. One example, salesforce.com and its developement platform Force.com, has Google Document integration built in.

Google also wins in the brand recognition area. Everyone knows it. People learned to trust it. Zoho is a virtual unknown to most of people I bring it up with. Google has a good promotion vehicle – gmail. It offers open attached documents online.

So I shall keep using Google, try Zoho other applications and keep my eyes peeled for other online Offices. There are two more (even less known then Zoho) to review.

Online flowchart applications: Gliffy vs Flowchart.com

I am slowly moving over to online office. I try and do all my new documents in Google, Spreadsheets in Google. Presentations I still do on my computer, because my last experience with Google Presentations was so painful that I’ll wait another year before I return to it.

For Documents I often need pictures. Mostly those are screenshots, sometimes diagrams. Very rarely – illustrations.

I decided I want to give online diagramming a try.

There are two that I knew of, gliffy.com and flowchart.com. Gliffy was around for a while. I once fancied an idea to write my own in Silverlight, but looking around I found Gliffy and decided it is good enough for me to not bother replicating. Flowchart.com is new, currently (March 2009) in private beta.

I did a little in both. Flowchart.com is a richer in functionality, more intuitive to me, and I think more of a technological achievement being AJAX, while gliffy is Flash.
Flowchart has better collection of clipart.

Yet I decided to stick to Gliffy for two reasons. Its editing a bit snappier, but more importantly it exports vector based SVG.
Flowchart only exports PNG (raster) and PDF. I could have probably extract vector information from PDF if I had to, but Gliffy is an alternative good enough.
There is one feature of Gliffy that might annoy many – for a free account anything you create is public. If you want private diagrams, you have to get premium account. I don’t care for my diagrams to leak, but some might.

For web application it is crucial to export in as many formats as possible because its results are to be used in concert with other applications, and one can make no assumptions as to which.
SVG is a standard. For a vector application not to support it is tantamaunt to not caring of its users or wanting to lock them in and deny any chance for interoperability or both. I wish flowchart.com will remedy their missing of SVG soon.