Open Source Weblog

“Just like the pagination and header/footer support for Zoho Writer, which we announced a few days ago, offline read/write support is important to many of our customers,” said Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist. “People want to take their online documents offline, and we’re going to make that experience as smooth and simple as possible. Going forward, we’ll be extending offline read/write functionality to our other applications.”

There’s a video demo of the functionality on YouTube here (and yes I know, it came as a shock to me too that there are videos on YouTube that do not feature someone falling off a skateboard in a hilarious ‘face-plant’ [sic] or balancing as much as they can on their passed-out room-mate.)

To work offline, Zoho users log on to Zoho Writer and click the ‘Go Offline’ link at the top of the Zoho Writer screen. First-time offline users are prompted – hold my sides! -- to install Google Gears, the browser plug-in, if it is not already installed on the local machine. Once Google Gears is installed, the user restarts the browser, logs back into Zoho Writer, and clicks ‘Go Offline.’

Zoho Writer then automatically downloads personal and shared documents based on the sort order selected in the Zoho Writer main page. More or fewer documents can be downloaded by clicking on the down arrow next to the ‘Go Offline’ link.

Next, users are automatically redirected offline, to http://writer.zoho.com/offline, where they can view, edit, and save their documents using Zoho Writer’s browser-based interface. Users who have previously used Zoho Writer's view-only offline mode will have editing capabilities automatically enabled the next time they click ‘Go Offline’.

To return online, users click ‘Go Online.’ Zoho Writer then prompts users to synchronize their offline and online documents. It sounds a little clunky and perhaps it is, but I’m sure after the first few times people will be working offline with no sweat at all. Bathtime will never be the same again.

Digg this