Zoho Viewer

I’ve gotten behind in documenting the ongoing saga of using online documents provided by Google and Zoho. I’m still playing with both and am still inclined to prefer Zoho. My slowness is partially due to the fact that Zoho continues to crank out new products and capabilities at an amazing pace. I can hardly keep up. I think their idea is to provide all the software a small business might need online. I think they’ve done it. Their latest offering, Zoho Viewer, may be the most useful of all. It allows you to put your documents on the Web (whether you use Zoho or not) with a good level of privacy, i.e. a URL that’s not scanned by search engines. This is far better than using attachments in e-mail, since it doesn’t clog up everyone’s e-mail pipes. It also solves a problem with publishing using Zoho Writer (or Google Docs, for that matter). When you publish a document, all subsequent changes are published instantly. This means your interim updates are potentially visible in an awkward “middle of update” mode. With Zoho Viewer, you can simply upload a new version which has a new URL, a neat solution to version control. So you can now safely have an online doc, publish it through Zoho Viewer (rather than the normal Publish option), update at your leisure, download when you’re ready to re-publish, and then upload it again. Neat! Of course, this assumes that access to the “current” version is controlled by a link which you modify once you’ve published the update. I suppose somebody’s bad bookmarking could ruin you, but life is full of risk. I’m not sure this is what the Zoho folks had in mind, but it solves a huge publishing problem for me. Once again, hats off to Zoho!