Online collaboration and productivity tools are really quite popular at the moment. You can use Google Apps to write documents, share files and much more.

Zoho has been competing in the online application market, and winning, against Google and Microsoft.

The Zoho suite of applications include:

• Mail – web based mail
• Writer – word processing
• Sheet – spreadsheets
• Show – presentations
• Docs – document management
• Notebook – note taker
• Wiki
• Share – central public file repository
• Planner – organizer
• chat

As well as some business focused applications:

• Projects – project management
• CRM – customer relations
• Invoice
• Meeting – web conferencing
• Creator – online database
• DB and Reports – reporting
• People – human resource management
• Business – business solutions

This certainly is a comprehensive collection of applications. Zoho is ideally targeted at the home to medium level business user environment. You can gain limited access to some of the business applications for free. The personal applications are free to use.

The interface of the Zoho application suite is good, and is feature rich in comparison to the Google Apps alternative. The applications even support the common .doc, .xls and .ppt file formats from Microsoft. Zoho is easy to use and their web site has a nice little collection of demonstrations for each of the different components.

I haven’t been a fan of online applications in the past, but gradually they are getting better and doing the right things. If you’re a small business why would you spend the money to buy Microsoft Office when you can get access to very similar products for free? Of course you need to be connected to the Internet to use the applications so don’t forget to think about contingency planning as well.