Zoho Share Simplifies Document Sharing

Zoho, a provider of hosted productivity applications, last week introduced Zoho Share. Zoho Share addresses a long-standing user community pet peeve by bringing the documents and files created across Zoho's online applications into one interface which can be shared with other users, and, longer-term, within an organization.Sharing documents isn't really anything new, but consolidating them into a slick interface and allowing other users to browse in multiple ways -- by file type, by user, by date -- is an interesting approach. Currently supported are Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show, their word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation applications, respectively. The organization-wide sharing capabilities are expected to be part of Zoho Business, which is currently in private beta. I look forward to the public beta so I can give it a test run.

Zoho Share makes it easy to add new content, and setting permissions, such as making documents public or private, is easy. The Zoho blog calls Zoho Share "SharePoint Meets YouTube," and while that analogy is a bit of a stretch, the user interface and social aspects aspects -- chatting, user profiles -- of the site are certainly reminiscent. You also can find additional details and a good introductory video of Zoho Share on the blog.

I've been a fan of Zoho and it has continuously been adding pretty impressive improvements to its suite of tools. Most of its hosted tools -- it has more than a dozen -- are free, although a few have modest fees. If you haven't given Zoho a try for collaboratively sharing documents with another person or a small workgroup, you should check them out. I've found that it runs neck and neck with Google Docs for most applications, and even manages to beat Google out in some areas with the breadth and capabilities of its offerings.