One of the main challenges facing Web-based office productivity suites that hope to take on Microsoft Office is their general inability to access and work with content when users aren't connected to the Internet. Now, Zoho hopes to overcome that problem with an offline version of its Zoho Writer word processing app.

Zoho Tuesday released a version of Writer that can view documents when users are offline, as well as when they are online. Zoho uses Google's new Google Gears to enable synchronization and offline viewing of Writer documents. Users must download a browser plug-in in order for Zoho to work offline. In the initial offline version, Zoho Writer only supports viewing files, but Zoho hopes to add offline editing in coming weeks.

The new version of Zoho Writer gives more credence to an idea championed by Microsoft and others that the near-term future of software will be defined in part by hybrid online-offline functionality where applications installed locally and Internet-based services complement one another with the respective strengths of local computing resources and the social, low-footprint Internet. While some companies like Salesforce.com declare software dead, more online-offline hybrid apps are appearing, undermining that notion.

Zoho is one of the more popular offerings in a landscape of online office suites that also includes the likes of Google Docs & Spreadsheets and ThinkFree. ThinkFree already has an offline version, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets may not be too far behind, especially since Google Gears is, after all, a Google project.

This isn't the first foray into the online-offline world for Zoho. The company already has a plug-in for Microsoft Office 2007 that lets users create documents when they are offline in Microsoft Word and Excel and then sync them directly to Zoho Writer and Sheet, respectively, when they go back online.