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August 21, 2008 6:00 AM PDT

Zoho launches document sharing service

by Rafe Needleman

It's not YouTube, but then YouTube wasn't made for slide shows.

Today's addition to the rapidly-expanding suite of Zoho's productivity apps is Zoho Share, a straightforward utility for sharing word processing documents, spreadsheets, PDF files, and slide shows. The online app reads in several popular document formats (although not yet the .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files from Office 2007), and of course Zoho's own documents. It creates embeddable viewers for all of them. Users can comment on files, just as they can on other sharing systems.

In the pre-release beta I looked at, uploading wasn't working and I didn't see a way to create a limited share--all files are public. However, it was easy enough to tag work with the licensing method of my choice, from All Rights Reserved to Public Domain. Other limitations include the lack of zoom controls on the view. Since PDFs displayed at 100 percent magnification in the small window, most could not be read without a lot of horizontal scrolling. However, users can view any presentation full screen, which helps.

Zoho Share competes with Scribd, Docstoc, SlideShare, and other "YouTubes for documents." This feature is becoming a commodity; like with YouTube, it's the community that makes the difference. Zoho still makes sense as a sharing function for its own suite of productivity apps. Its capability to create shares for other type of documents is just a bonus.

The viewer window can expand to full screen.

See more Zoho coverage.

Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
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by AzizMusa August 22, 2008 8:55 AM PDT
Although I think that the functionality could be of great benefit, i just think that this market is quickly becoming saturated - There's just not the volume to satisfy all the demand, unless some brave organisation takes the giant leap to entirely online organisations. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
in the pudding though.

http://business-vs-technology.blogspot.com/
Reply to this comment
by ilanberger October 18, 2008 9:39 AM PDT
take a look at <A HREF="http://www.showdocument.com">http://www.showdocument.com</A>
they have similar functionality but they allow co-viewing of the documents
cool!
Reply to this comment
by ilanberger October 18, 2008 9:42 AM PDT
take a look at http://www.showdocument.com
they have similar functionality but they allow co-viewing of the documents
cool!
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