I've been complaining lately about the import process for Zoho. Well, Box.net just might have that solved, along with providing a place to store ALL of my data. For mobile users needing access to their data from multiple devices, including phones, Box.net looks quite intriguing.

After I mentioned Box.net the other day, they reached out to me after reading my article, explaining how Box.net and Zoho integrate together.

We launched our OpenBox platform back in December and Zoho was one of our launch participants.  With a single click on Box.net, users can edit and preview their documents using Zoho.  What happens is when you click on your file and say edit document, it will launch a new browser window and your document shows up in Zoho.  When changes are made and you save your document it automatically saves the file back to your Box.net account. 

Box.net offers three levels of pricing

• Lite - comes with 1 gb of storage, file sizes being limited to 10mb. Free
• Individual - 5gb of storage, 1gb file size limitations. $7.95 per month
• Business - 15 gb of storage, 1 gb of storage. $19.95 per month

Box.net has set me up with an evaluation account which I'll be using over the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned for more as I put it to the test. I'll be interviewing their CEO, Aaron Levi, next week, so if you have anything you'd like to know, leave a comment and I'll try to get your question answered.

UPDATE: I just dragged and dropped a 250 mb folder of OneNote documents to my box.net account - very, very simple and easy. Upload speed is about 200 kb. I'm really interested to see how the process of editing those OneNote files will be. I'll upload my Customer project files later tonight. Looks like I might need to start a Box.net series!

Big thanks to GBM reader Nitin Badjatia for opening my eyes to Box.net!

I'm three days into my Zoho experiment and it is going well. I'm definitely learning a lot, enjoying the benefits of web-based documents, and seeing just how seamless a dedicated client like Word is with issues like printing.

I'm finding that it is best to just create documents from scratch in Zoho, rather than messing around with the importer. I just don't have time to worry with what got converted correctly.

For the most part, working in Writer has been great. There are several things I like. First, I really like the tabs. This allows me to switch between documents relatively easy. There is a downside to the tabs, though - you can't compare two documents side by side like you can with Word, without opening up seperate browser windows to Zoho. The toolbar does support a maximized option which hides the document navigation pane and top menu navigation, providing more room to work in the document. For UMPC users, that is a very good thing.

Working with the toolbar takes a little getting used to. For example, when I went to create a table, I had to click inside the create table wizard to tell the wizard I was through drawing the table. It took me a couple of tries to figure that out. Fortunately, though, keyboard shortcuts like bold, italics work just like they do in Word. Inserting images and such has been pretty seamless.

Because of the header / footer issues involved with printing web documents, printing a document without web header / footers is a two step process. Instead of just hitting the print button and the document printing, you have to go to page view, click Print as PDF, click Open PDF ( which opens it in your default PDF viewer ), then use the print option within your PDF viewer. A bit convoluted, but it works.

Zoho Writer does have an offline mode which utilizes Google Gears. It works pretty seamlessly through the web browser, and pops up a synchronize dialogue box when offline documents are different than those hosted at Zoho. I'm gonna definitely enjoy using that offline mode. I wish Notebook supported it.

Sharing documents with others comes with options. First off all, you can share a document with someone giving them read or read / write access. The person you are sharing the document with gets an email inviting them to view the document. Second, you can email the document as HTML, PDF, .doc, .SXW, ODT, RTF, or .TXT . The third way is by publishing a document online for all to see. Fourth, you can export the document to your harddrive in the above formats, too.

So far, I'm liking Writer a lot, and could see myself moving to Writer full-time. I just wish the import process were more seamless so I could transition all of my documents there rather than living between local and web mode. Most of my inking is done in OneNote or InkSeine, so I don't think I'd miss ink in Writer.

As I use Writer more over the next week or two, I'll provide some more lessons learned.

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.

I have a lot of Word documents that I'd like to import to Zoho. I've already found issues with that process:

• The only way to bulk import documents directly through Zoho is by emailng them in. Nitin Badjatia just let me know of Box.net as way of mass importing documents to Zoho that I'll check out later.
• I emailed 3 documents in last night and Zoho left out some of the embedded graphics in the document, as well as changed some of the formatting. This is not good for those of who have a lot of ink-marked up documents, as well as share documents with Tablet PC notetakers.
• Here is an example of the formatting changes. Notice what Zoho did to the text it recognized as web addresses, as well as the typeset changes.
  • Before
  • 
  • After
  • 
• Zoho wouldn't import Office 2007.docx or .xlsx files. How long has Office 2007 been out, a year???

I've been experimenting with Zoho for the past week, and have found it to be surprisingly powerful and full featured. For working in the cloud and living mobile, Zoho seems to offer an impressive offering. I'm so impressed, that for the next two weeks, I'm going to go full time with Zoho for word processing documents, spreadsheets, notebooks, and more.  I'm going to chronicle my experiences here on a daily basis, so you'll be learning with me as I give this a go. My first task is to email all of my Word documents in so I have access to them from within Writer.

First thoughts:

• I find it quite ironic that Zoho utilizes Google Gears for its offline mode.
• I wish Zoho had a way to import multiple documents rather than having to email them in.
• Project looks interesting. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to access other Zoho Writer documents I've created and associate them to a Project. I can create new documents from within Project and import documents from my harddrive, but not associate existing Zoho documents. Strange.
• Zoho Sheet handles copying and pasting between spreadsheets much better than Google Spreadsheets.

Any Zoho users out there want to share their experiences with me, and others, as I dive in?