Zoho Viewer Fuels Document-to-URL Trend

PLEASANTON, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Zoho just made viewing and sharing files a lot easier for people who work online with today’s announcement of Zoho Viewer at http://viewer.zoho.com/. For a video demonstration, visit http://www.viddler.com/explore/raju/videos/2/.

“This simplifies document viewing and sharing for our customers, as well as other application providers”

Zoho Viewer lets users do three things: 1) view documents, 2) share document as URLs, and 3) embed documents.

Users simply upload a Microsoft Office, PDF, or other document type to Zoho Viewer, which provides a link to that document. The link can then be shared with other users, who can view the document from their browsers when they click on the link.

“This simplifies document viewing and sharing for our customers, as well as other application providers,” said Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist. “It should not be hard for users to attach or view documents. Emailing URLs, instead of documents, eliminates the recipients’ need for access to the applications that created those documents. Now, all they need is a browser.”

Users can also use Zoho Viewer to embed documents in any other Web page.

Going forward, Zoho will provide API access to Zoho Viewer for application providers who need convenient document viewing capability, e.g., online storage vendors and others with a variety of documents and document formats on their sites.

Zoho Viewer underscores a broader paradigm shift being driven by Zoho and others. In short, as more documents become Web documents, they evolve from files to URLs, becoming much more valuable in the process. As easily shared URLs, Web documents offer mobility, sharing, collaboration, communication, auto-versioning, auto-save, and other advantages unavailable to their offline counterparts. Understood as part of this bigger picture, Zoho Viewer can play an even bigger role in helping customers work online.

Initial market feedback on Zoho Viewer reveals the power and convenience of Zoho's implementation of the document-as-URL concept:

Zoho Launches One-Click Document Sharing

“Today Zoho launched the Zoho Viewer, a one-click way to share your documents. It is a bit like Flickr where each photo (or document in this case) gets its own hyperlink. Zoho is a free online office suite that competes with Google Docs. Zoho has the advantage over Google Docs, however, of being able to host Adobe PDF files and presentation documents, in addition to word processor and spreadsheet docs. ...Zoho always seems one step ahead of Google Docs, a phenomenon once again evidenced by Zoho Viewer. It is a wonder Google hasn't acquired the company yet.” Natali Del Conte, PC Magazine/AppScout

Zoho Viewer

“...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. ...Once again, hats off to Zoho!” Jim Dew, Thinking Things Through

Zoho Viewer: It’s like Flickr…for documents

“I just never know how to handle sharing a quick Word document or PDF. Photos are easy, drop them into Flickr and share away, but documents have been left out in the cold. Now Zoho, in their infinite wisdom, has brought documents in from the rainy night and given them a nice warm spot by the fire. ZohoViewer is to your documents what ImageShack is to photos — a really great place to quickly upload and share without all the hassle of accounts and logins.” Christopher G. Harris, Infomancy

ZOHO so cool in email Attachments,chat wiki,creator

“Online office suite Zoho released another product tonight, called Zoho Viewer. It is similar to Scribd (and the upcoming Docstoc) — upload an office or PDF document for easy viewing on Zoho’s website or embedded into other web pages. Google has its studio of tools, but Zoho is close on Google’s tail.” Mobilefreak

Zoho Viewer: Spare Your Colleagues The Pain Of Bulky E-mail Attachments

“The latest addition to Zoho’s ever-growing suite of online office applications wants to make oversized e-mail attachments a thing of the past. ... Using Viewer is simple. ...With more people turning to online office suites (like Zoho or GDocs) it makes sense to start thinking of your documents as URLs rather than files. ... it’s very well done and makes sharing files a snap.” Scott Gilbertson, Wired

Kiss your email attachments goodbye

“Email attachments are becoming increasingly passe and that may open some security concerns. Today, I gave the just launched Zoho Viewer a spin and liked it overall. I also happened to put it through a stress test uploading a 123 page CIA security assessment for the year 2020 (yes I have these things on my hard drive) for giggles to find that Zoho (related content) doesn’t support attachments larger than 5 MB. ...The good news: Docs are way easy to share with Zoho and other services like Scribd.” Larry Dignan, ZDNet [Note: Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist, replied, “...We have the 5MB limit this week. From next week, we will increase it to 10MB.”]