Zoho Offers Personal and Business Office Lineup

Zoho is announcing at the Office 2.0 conference today a new product lineup split between personal and business users. This news is helping to show the business plan for Zoho in that business users will have a paid option for greater access and features. Zoho Business will offer a free and paid version with the paid version at around $40/user/year. I still have concerns about using an online tool for sensitive documents, though Zoho has one of the strongest data protection programs which they spoke about in our interview last October.

Community evangelist Raju Vegesna sent over the following list of initial features for the Zoho Business applications:

• Company level Admin Console
• Domain Management (for pointing your domains to Zoho Apps)
• Centralized User and Group Management
• Single Sign-on across several Zoho Apps
• Zoho Apps include Writer, Sheet, Show, Wiki, Notebook, Email, Cal, Tasks, Planner, Viewer, Chat etc.
• Customization Options
• Multiple levels of Security including SSL
• Remote Backup
• Telephone Support
• and more coming as they move through the beta period

Zoho Business is in private beta today, public beta in a month and open access in early 2008. It sure does look like 2008 is setting up for a Zoho vs. Google office suite battle royal. In the end, the user will win, which is exactly what both companies want.

Here is a video overview from Raju:

Editor’s note: Zoho is a current CN sponsor.