Zoho Start: a glimpse at future integration

Early this morning, Zoho released a new tool called Zoho Start. Now Zoho releasing something new is hardly earth-shattering news. I’ve joked with Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s Evangelist, that at the rate this company pumps out new products and updates to their existing offerings, we;ll soon see him taking suggestions from the podium at a conference at the beginning of a session and have the new release ready by the time his presentation is finished. OK… that’s a bit of an exaggeration but the pace at which Zoho works to take feedback from its users and respond with improvements is very impressive.

Zoho Start is a bit different though. Start is an early look at the approach Zoho is planning to integrate the broad range of web-based applications they’ve been releasing by providing a dashboard for launching different applications and managing the documents created with those tools. In the initial release, Start focuses on Zoho Writer, Sheet, and Show – their alternatives (or complements, depending on your perspective) to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Documents created by these three applications can be organized in a series of folders and launched, tagged, and exported from the Start dashboard.

When you launch a Zoho document (Writer, Sheet, or Show) from the Start documents list, the application opens in a frame on the Start page that provides all of the functionality and UI controls of that application alongside the folder list on the left edge of the Start page. A zoom icon allows you to expand to a full screen (inside the browser chrome) window and toggle back to show the folder list as desired. A series of tabs is displayed along the top of the screen to allow you to quickly switch from one document to another and to access the Documents screen.

Access to other Zoho applications is provided via the Zoho Apps tab in the far right corner of the Start window. Clicking on that tab displays a new screen showing all of the Zoho applications you have currently registered to use. Clicking on any of the large buttons representing each of these applications launches that application in a new tab in the Zoho Start dashboard. This is an excellent start (sorry - couldn’t resist) to bringing the broad range of applications the company has been developing into a unified whole.