Zoho adds support for Microsoft DOCX

Stuart Corner
Monday, 03 March 2008 08:47

Business IT - Technology

Online office applications provider, Zoho, has added support for DOCX, the Microsoft Open Office XML format for Microsoft Office Word 2007 and says it intends to support all Office 2007 XML-based file formats. The move will make the software-as-a-service more attractive to the enterprise market. At present Zoho users can export their online documents as DOCX files and will later be able to import DOCX documents. Zoho Writer has also gained a thesaurus, group sharing support and enhanced support for footnotes/endnotes, headers/footers, and document structure.

The enhancements will make Zoho considerably more attractive to the enterprise market, which is increasingly Zoho's focus. When it first introduced support for footnotes/endnotes, headers/footers, last November it flagged this as a key feature needed by the enterprise. Google Apps is also being pushed aggressively into the enterprise market, by Cap Gemini.

Footnotes and endnotes are supported in DOCX, ODT, SWC, and RTF in addition to previously supported DOC and PDF formats. On export, footnotes and endnotes in Zoho Writer documents can be transferred in all six formats. On import, footnotes and endnotes in DOC, ODT, SWC, and RTF files are transferred into Zoho Writer. Also headers and footers can now be exported in DOCX, ODT, SXW, and RTF as well as previously supported DOC and PDF formats. page-no and page-count fields are also supported fully in all six formats. Manual page breaks are now transferred on export to DOC, DOCX, ODT, SXW, and RTF formats. On import, manual page breaks are transferred from DOC, ODT, SXW, and RTF files.

Users can now create a group of email addresses and assign it a group name, which is used to share documents with the people in that group. Zoho now has 17 applications and claims more than 500,000 users.