Zoho pushes ahead with Microsoft Office compatability, open APIs

Zoho, a company that is providing one of the widest selection on online office applications, continues to impress.

The company has released a plugin for Microsoft Office, and opened its APIs. The plugin makes Zoho what Microsoft’s online applications (dubbed Live) should be. It allows Zoho documents to be opened and saved in MS Office with a click (Word and Excel, at least; PowerPoint doesn’t work yet with Zoho, but will come). If you’ve got Microsoft office documents on your local drive and want them available online, you can get them via Zoho with couple of clicks. We sat down with Raju Vegesna, product manager, at Zoho, recently, and he told us about the release last night. He said Zoho will follow it up with a Open Office plugin.

The APIs will allow other developers to use Zoho applications. For example, online storage companies will be able to let users open documents through Zoho and save them back to their service without having to download the documents locally.

We’ll follow up later with more about Zoho. This is a notable company in other ways. It is part of private AdventNet, that has headquarters in Pleasanton, but 500 employees in India, and much of its product development there. You might call this one of the India’s first real product companies — compared to the “service” companies that come to mind when you think of India.