- Image via CrunchBase
I’ve spent a couple of evenings looking at the comparative offerings of Google and Zoho in the web based document management market. There are bits of each that I like, and bits of each that I don’t like.
As far as I know, both services support the OCR’ing of text, but never managed to get either of them to do anything sensible on that front.
Both support the input and output of documents in PDF format. But there the similarity ends. I haven’t tried entering a non-searchable PDF yet, to see if they OCR it. When it comes to viewing PDF files, Google has a really nice zero footprint PDF viewer, Zoho on the other hand throws the document into a frame and uses the browser’s PDF plugin. Of the two strategies, Google’s is far superior, and faster.
It seem’s that neither supports conversion to searchable PDF, which is a shame. Although possibly good news for someone like me 
TIFF is the most common file format for scanned documents, and is the only image format with support for multiple pages. It seems odd that Google don’t support TIFFs at all, and Zoho simply rely on the same frame technique to display the TIFF; but of course, most browsers can’t display TIFFs, so you just get a broken image icon.
In conclusion, it seems that although Google Docs and Zoho are effective MS Office disruptors, neither are of huge value to someone wishing to take their paper documents and go paperless. I can see a solution begging to be implemented which combines Zoho’s rich document editors, with real paperless technology support e.g. TIF support, conversion to searchable PDF etc.
Watch this space.
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