Create your own 'office' apps easily
If you've ever wondered how you could create 'office' style web apps of your ownm then you can do worse than look at the Zoho API.
Zoho is an online suite of applications that has probably the richest set of apps. I just gave it a go and it is very impressive. To me, it certainly gives Microsoft Office and Google a very tough challenge. I have been using Google Docs and find it far from being a satisfactory replacement for MS Office. And MS Office still lacks a web presence that I need for anywhere access to my documents (there is of course Office Live, but I've not used it so can't comment, but apparently it isn't all that). To fill in this gap though, Zoho has come up with a neat solution - a Zoho plugin for MS Office that lets you edit and save your Zoho docs from within MS Office. The only thing is it only works on Windows, which is crap because I've just switched over to a Mac.Anyway, for developers, there's Zoho API, which lets you use their word processing, spreadsheet and presentation apps from withing your web app! I think this is pretty amazing as your web app can now not just store documents, but also allow your users to edit them. For example, if you have some sort of online team-collaboration tool for your geographically dispersed team members, which has some sort of document upload/download feature, you can now add 'edit' functionality to all your uploaded Word, Excel or PowerPoint docs online. Your team don't even need to have MS Office installed to work on these documents. Imagine if something like Basecamp had this in their Files section.The basic process of implementing this is the following:- Submit a form to Zoho sending with it the file to edit
- Zoho will then return the editor page with your document loaded
- When you save the document, it will submit the document to a URL you specified
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Posted
by Farez Rahman
