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ZoooS Aims for Online Versions of OpenOffice Apps

Webware has recently been covering a port to the web of the OpenOffice.org suite of productivity applications from ZoooS. If it sounds like it competes with Microsoft Office Live, it does in some ways, and it also competes with Zoho's large suite of free productivity applications hosted online. From SQL databases to spreadsheets and presentations to word processing (although applications are only previews at the moment) you'll be able to use ZoooS to work online and collaborate with others there. From ZoooS' home page, you'll also get a number of other interesting applications.

"ZoooS Office looks exactly like OpenOffice.org 3.0, using the same icons, dialogs, and help text -- everything to eliminate the learning curve," said Hisham El-Emam, CEO of ZoooS LLC, in a statement. "Many companies want to access their files from any location and any device, but they don't want to store confidential files in the cloud. Companies can run ZoooS Office locally to maintain complete control over their files while still providing local and remote access from PCs, laptops, mobile devices, and even game consoles." Game consoles--now there's a thought.

ZoooS actually reaches for more applications than just what's found in OpenOffice, and many of the extraneous applications come from the worlds of open source and freeware. There is a Firefox plug-in that will allow you to run your productivity applications from within the browser, although, at this juncture, I got an error message with it saying that it doesn't work with Firefox 3.0.1.

If you sign up for ZoooS, there is an available file manager to manage online files, and it reaches out to existing, free online services for flexibility in how you store your files. The file manager will let you store them locally, or you can do things like store them using free online service from Box.net.

ZoooS' home page even includes a document viewer, where you can enter in, say, the name of a PowerPoint presentation on your hard disk and view it, or documents that you have associated with URLs.

The applications are all under development at the moment, and ZoooS will be publicly available before the end of the year,  but you can get a good feel for what ZoooS is shooting for now. While you'll be able to use the applications online, the parallel goal for ZoooS is to sell applications for enterprise use in secure implementations. According to Webware, that type of service will cost $999 a year for 10 users.

• firefox
• OpenOffice
• Zooos

by OssFoss on Sep. 04, 2008

The brilliant naming continues!

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by Jack G on Sep. 04, 2008

A lot of players getting into this market, but will the User Experience really be slick? Google is free. How much better than Google docs will Zoooooos be? That will determine its success.

Now, if you can deploy Zooos internally within your company, that gets very interesting. But let us not forget that Google is also supporting Google Gears now, so you can work online and offline.

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