Today sees the public launch of Zoho Notebook, which promises to usher in a new era of online content colloboration. The free service has been in private beta for a while but is now available to the masses, and looks set to knock Google Notebook off its perch as the online note-taker of choice. The Web app lets you gather together content of different types, including text, images, audio and video.
You can embed content of any kind from multiple applications, including Zoho’s own range of office tools. There are a host of collaborative features that allow you to share your notebooks (or certain ‘pages’ of it) with others, as well as tracking changes. With facilities for embedding RSS, Flash, JavaScript and HTML, Zoho Notebook takes things a stage further than Google Notebook, which is essentially just a clipping and pasting tool. We would compare the program more to Microsoft’s desktop note-taker, OneNote. On the surface Zoho as more to offer than the MS solution, such as sharing and versioning. Ultimately though, Zoho will face the age-old problem of convincing the corporate world to ditch their tried-and-trusted office suites in favour of a product from a relatively unknown start-up.
