Zoho Day 2: Notebook is a total Wow!

One of the most impressive tools I have used on Zoho is the Notebook. It totally knocks Google Notebook on its butt. Zoho Notebook is the closest I’ve seen a web app replicate OneNote, except of course for ink, OCR image searching, and Outlook integration.

• Support for multiple notebooks and pages within those notebooks
• Sharing of notebooks, pages, and objects in the page with other people
• manipulation of text and other objects is very similar to OneNote, allowing the objects to be moved anywhere on the page.
• embedding webpages in a page
• Insertion of audio, video, text, RSS, files, and images
• Record audio and video directly from computer and auto-inserted into the web-based notebook. Check out this video I recorded within Zoho notebook and then published publicly for all to see. I did have a problem getting the audio to work, though. Very cool.
• Unlimited vertical and horizontal page growth
• Versioning and suppport for comments on the page and object level
• There is Firefox support for clipping text, images, and webpages to a notebook; however, there is no IE plug-in support :-( I have found the clipping support to be a little unstable, though. For example, I’ve had a lot of trouble sending images to the notebook, while text and webpages seems to work fine.  Another negative on the clipping is that a browser tab with the Zoho notebook running must be open in order to clip stuff and store it in a notebook page. Google’s notebook, while not nearly as powerful as Zoho’s, works seamlessly with web clipping and doesn’t require a notebook to be open. Plus, the Google notebook web clipping supports IE and Firefox.
• ability to insert, create, and edit documents / spreadsheets / shows within the notebook. That is quite powerful, and could totally change how a person organizes their work. Imagine working with a Word document directly in OneNote and that Word document being a page within your OneNote Section.

Zoho Notebook has tremendous potential, especially if they had an IE plug-in that worked as seamlessly as Google’s and OneNote’s Send To feature. Without support for ink, I’m not sure I could make a total switch. In addition, I’d really like to have some type of offline-client so I can take notes offline and have them auto-sync back to the online Zoho Notebook. Having online access to all of my notes in a format very similar to OneNote is quite tempting, though. I wouldn’t be limited to a particular platform. I could use my Tablet PC or Mac to create / read / edit notes.  Using InkSeine for ink note-taking and Zoho for all the rest might be a good overall solution. I’ll definitely be using Notebook a lot more over the coming weeks.