Google Helps Zoho Take Ajax Suite Offline
Zoho has taken its first steps to enable its web-based office productivity tools to work when users do not have internet access, using Google Gears.
The move, while it adds little new functionality in its initial release, will eventually see Zoho competing more or less directly with Microsoft Office, Sun’s StarOffice and OpenOffice.org.
From yesterday, Zoho Writer users will be able to enter an offline mode, allowing them to download and view their word processing documents using the regular Zoho web interface.
Users won’t be able to edit documents, and there will be a limit on how many documents they can download. Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna said this is so the company can load-test the new system.
Zoho is one of the first third-party application developers to use Google Gears to offline-enable its Ajax-based applications. As such, it is in virgin territory.
The open source Google Gears software is essentially a client runtime for Ajax-based web applications. It comes with a local web cache and a small database server, SQLite.
“We want to take some baby steps here, before we go to fully fledged functionality,” Vegesna said. “There are lots of unknowns. What happens when users download 200 or 300 documents? How does that scale? How do we synchronize? How do we maintain versioning?”
Zoho’s applications allow multiple users to collaborate on one document, with their changes tracked to maintain version control. This becomes trickier when users may be editing documents while offline.
Vegesna said the company will slowly increase the number of documents a user can download over the coming weeks, in order to load-test the service, and will likely add editing, synchronization and version-control features in about a month.
The offline capability will also be added to other Zoho apps, such as its CRM tool, presentation maker and Notebook, Vegesna said.
But it will likely take a longer before the spreadsheet app Zoho Sheet, makes it offline, due to extra complexity, he said. The spreadsheet number-crunching logic currently runs on powerful servers, and the code will not easily translate to the client-side, he said.
Our View
Ultimately, it seems that Zoho will be able to claim to be a real competitor to the likes of Microsoft and OpenOffice.org, in that its software will be able to run almost fully featured offline.
While concerns such as security, support and uptime would make it seem unlikely that many enterprises would want to embrace Zoho over its commercial rivals, at least in the near term, there’s a decent segment at the budget end of the market where the likes of Zoho and rivals, which include Google, could easily take market share.