Thing 9 - Online Applications and Tools

I choose to look at Google Docs and Zoho Writer. I choose those because I have used Google Docs before, but never Zoho Writer.

All and all I thought they were pretty similar. Both actually were part of a suite of tools although I only looked at the word processing tools.

I think that Zoho had a much cleaner and user-friendly interface. I thought it looked most similar to Microsoft Word which is what I'm used to using. Although there were a lot of buttons on the Zoho toolbar, and it was difficult for me to find the one that I needed.

In my work that involves people from outside of my library I have used Google Docs, and will likely continue too. It works really well for things like committee work. When I work with people in my library though, we usually just exchange documents via e-mail and use the Review tool in Word. I've thought sometimes that using Google Docs might be easier, but I don't know who is and isn't familiar with Google Docs. I do know that everyone has MS Word and is familiar with that.

The security/privacy issue would be a problem for some of the work I'd want to share. I'd want to know more about how "secure" my documents were that are saved on the Google or Zoho servers. I didn't see that information readily available...

I also looked at the Snipshot. I don't have an image editing program on my computer, so I was interested in it. It looked pretty neat, and had a number of common features. I liked that I could save my files in various formats, including PDF. I have bookmarked this application in Delicious so I can use it in the future.