Zoho Virtual Office: here come the suites

Zoho Virtual Office, a set of integrated hosted productivity applications, launched as a beta service on Wednesday with both on-demand and on-premise versions.

Also called Zoho X, the suite is a collection of the Zoho's existing online applications, such as it Web-based word processor, with the addition of a Web email messaging service, according to Office 2.0 conference organizer Ismael Ghalimi. Techcrunch and Zoho advisor Zoli Erdos have written about it as well.

Company executives are scheduled to demo the suite at the Office 2.0 conference on Wednesday.

Zoho, which is a brand of the company AdventNet, is targeting both personal users and businesses with Zoho Virtual Office.

The service is free for individuals who get 1 gigabyte of free storage space and "slightly reduced functionality." Businesses pay $9.95 per user per month for the hosted edition or $295/year for 25 users for the on-premise version.

Functionally, Zoho describes ZohoX as a "collaboration suite" with applications for email, calendars, and document creation.

Web-based Office-style applications from Web 2.0 start-ups have typically been stand-alone applications. But there appears to be a movement toward suites, much the way PC productivity applications were eventually rolled together and sold as a unit.

In addition to Zoho Virtual Office, Google on Wednesday released Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a combination of its formerly stand-alone hosted spreadsheet and document-creation service.

Part of Zoho Virtual Office's integration lies in a single sign-in service which the company .

It allows people to use the same user name and password to access several applications at once, including Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Planner, Zoho Creator, and Zoho Chat.