ThinkFree Behind the Firewall; Zoho for SharePoint

Yesterday was "news rich" in the productivity suite market. Two small vendors, ThinkFree and Zoho, made interesting announcements.

ThinkFree released its ThinkFree Server Enterprise solution on June 22 and announced it on June 23. Basically, this allows an enterprise to take ThinkFree's SaaS productivity suite/document sharing solution and install it on an internal server behind the firewall.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on June 23, Zoho announced Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint. The e-mail I got from the PR person says,

This add-on, when installed on a Microsoft SharePoint Server, integrates Zoho Office Suite with Microsoft SharePoint.

The add-on provides users with the following functionality:

• Create new documents and save them to SharePoint in MS Office formats.
• View existing documents within SharePoint using Zoho Apps (Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show).
• Edit existing documents with Zoho Apps and save them back to SharePoint.
• Provides collaborative editing capabilities based on SharePoint's sharing permissions.

You can find more information about it in a post on the Zoho blog.

Via a server-side install, this connects Zoho to a document sharing/management application, similar to Google Apps, Microsoft Office/SharePoint, and ThinkFree--a capability that isn't offered by Corel, IBM, Novell, or Sun.

If you've been poking around, looking for alternatives to Microsoft Office/SharePoint, these are both worth looking at. With the entrance of Adobe into this space earlier in the month, the options just keep getting better and better.