Short-Run Priorities: Inline MSDocEditing VS. Reinvent Apps

Short-Run Priorities: Inline MSDocEditing VS. Reinvent Apps

Hi,

I am extremely excited about the potential of your virtual office app.

I understand that the Zoho team is currently working on making it possible for one to do inline/browser-based editing of a Word document directly to the server without having to download, edit in MS Word and upload again. This would use the MSWord engine & functionality rather than reinventing that functionality (i.e. ZOHO Writer, Sheet, Show). What I am wondering is whether or not, in the short-term, the piggybacking on MS functionality for collaboration purposes would be more useful to VO customers than offering something which acts like an MS office App but falls short on functionality.

I was just looking at ZOHO Show and ZOHO Sheet and trying to see whether or not they'd be practical for me. While I think that the progress has been awesome, and love the potential, in both cases the answer was "no, this is not sophisticated anough to use yet". So given that 1) I want to get going and start real document collaboration now and 2) i can't stand sharepoint, I found myself wishing that more time could be spent by the ZOHO team against enabling inline/browser-based collaboration of MS Apps within VO than time spent reinventing their functionality.

That being said, I am ALL for eventual migration away from our dependencies on MS solutions in the long run, but in the short term, i have work that I'd love to start doing within VO NOW, that is just not possible until I can collaborate, within VO, directly on the server ... in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Is inline collaboration of MS Docs using their engines even poissible in all cases?

If so, what does everyone think about where priorties should be placed in the short-term?

JL