Unstoppable

They were first to release an integrated Office 2.0 suite. Then, they were first to release a single sign-on interface for it. Today, they are first to put all the pieces together into a single user interface. Welcome Zoho Notebook.

First, some bad news: Zoho Notebook was announced today at DEMO 07, but it wont be available to the general public until March. In the meantime, a happy few got access to the private beta so they could write and talk about it. I am one of them. I also got the privilege of getting a personal demonstration from Raju Vegesna, Zohos Chief Evangelist and Notebooks Product Manager.

Second, some good news: the application is absolutely amazing. As you would expect, Zoho Notebook lets you take notes online, but its a lot more than that. In a nutshell, Zoho Notebook is a place where you can aggregate any kind of content, share it with your colleagues and friends, and publish it onto the Web. You can create as many books as you want, and add any number of pages to any book. On a page, you can add some text, images, audio or video recordings, HTML code, links to external resources, RSS feeds, files, spreadsheets, documents developed with Zoho Writer, tasks, planners, contacts, calendars, anything&

But what makes Zoho Notebook truly remarkable is the ability to get access control and versioning at the object level, rather than just at the page or book level. What this means is that when you add an object to a page—say a piece of text, you can share it with whoever you want, either with read/write access or read only, while not sharing any other object on the page. And when modifications are made to this piece of text, a new version is created, independently of any modification that could have been made to the rest of the page. To be fair, this feature can also be found with some sophisticated Content Management Systems (CMS), but never has it been implemented with such an easy to user interface, which also happens to be totally free to use.

And it does not stop here. In their attempt at making collaborative content development even more effective, the good folks at Zoho added some clever support for Skype. If you share an object with someone who has a Zoho account and recorded her Skype ID into her Zoho profile, a set of Skype icons automatically appear next to the object, allowing you to engage into a discussion over Skype with the person you shared the object with. Here is yet another example of the kind of feature you get when all the pieces come together.

So what does all this mean? Well, for starters, Zoho is running faster than anybody else in developing the core technologies that are required for delivering an integrated Office 2.0 experience. You can think of it as the Office 2.0 equivalent of DCOM and OLE. For Microsoft, it took about ten years to get a first version running. For Zoho, it took less than one. Granted, we do not have the same level of integration yet, but its coming fast. Really fast&

Congratulations to the Zoho team, this one is really cool.

Disclaimer: I am an advisor to AdventNet, Zohos parent company.