As the Genea-blogger Facebook group grows and matures, its members are connecting to brainstorm ideas and develop projects that will benefit all of us. While Facebook helps us connect, it doesn’t offer any serious collaboration tools – or does it???

Let me introduce you to a sophisticated set of online tools which make it easy for anyone to manage projects, conduct meetings and share documents with team members – Zoho Office. Just what is Zoho Office? It’s:

• a fully-functional online word processor.
• an impressive online spreadsheet.
• a presentation graphics application – again online.
• a wiki. Great for documenting an application or process.
• an awesome notebook for text notes or captured web content – with the ability to share with others.
• a personal planner for managing events and tasks.
• a web-based chat service. No client to install – just your Zoho user account.
• a complete project management system accessible to all team members.
• a web meeting platform with shared desktops, whiteboards and documents available to all meeting participants.

What makes this so special? The Zoho applications are much more mature than Google Docs. Like Google, most of the apps won’t cost you a dime. And, the office applications support the OpenDocument format (ODF), MS Office, OpenOffice, PDF format and more for local use.

How do you put this to use? If you are working with a team to develop a policy or procedures document, each of you can work on the same document and instantly see any changes any other member of the team has made to the document. This is a significant improvement to the current system of round-robin email document distribution and then having to reconcile the changes among each of the participants.

The wiki and notes applications are also shareable, providing team members a single location to update and manage information. While the project management application only allows creation of one free project per user, a user can be a member of any number of other projects. If you are involved in multiple projects, the initial project desktop displays all your upcoming meetings, milestones and tasks for all your projects.

Zoho Meeting allows both spur-of-the-moment and scheduled meetings. It provides the shared desktop (for demonstrating an application or troubleshooting a problem), whiteboard or shared presentation slideshow (using Zoho Show) while members use either telephone or Internet voice (like Skype) systems for the audio portion of the meeting. The Meeting platform is still in beta status and is free for all Zoho users. At this point, only Windows users can be presenters, but all operating systems and browsers can be used by participants.

And what about Facebook? Well, all you have to do is install the Zoho Office application in your Facebook account and you have instant access to all your Zoho documents, meetings and projects. Zoho already is an impressive platform, but I fully expect it to continue to grow and look forward to taking advantage of its many tools to connect and collaborate on any number of genea-projects to come.

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• WeRelate: Building Your Family Story
• Footnote Story Pages
• Conversations
• Can We Talk?
• Writing for Publication: The Use of Styles

Tags: chat, Collaboration, meeting, office suite, word processing, Zoho
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Collaboration, Reviews, Tools. Both comments and pings are currently closed.