It’s a battle all right – Buzzword vs Zoho writer vs Google apps vs MS office.

Zoho upped the ante today by introducing a host of new features;

• DocX Support – ho hum, whatever. No relevance to me but I guess it makes for ease of use for those working in an MS Office/Zoho mixed environment
• Thesaurus (in 10 languages) – cool, I use a thesaurus a fair bit and having one built into an on demand office app just removes another barrier to use
• Enhanced Endnotes/Footnotes – maybe useful for academic or legal writing but not overly useful for me
• Enhanced Headers/Footers – as above
• Sharing with Groups – killer app. The biggest area that on demand office productivity apps will prove corrosive to installed incumbents is in collaborative environments. This new functionality allows one to;

…share documents with groups. This makes it a lot easier to share documents with multiple people avoiding entering of multiple email addresses each time you share a document. To share a document with a group, click on ‘Share’ and select the ‘Share with Groups’ tab. You can create new groups in your ‘My Account‘ section. These groups will be visible across all Zoho Applications.

All in all some great extra functionality and amazing considering that Zoho is primarily a free product without the funding behind it of a behemoth. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with ownership of Zoho over time – methinks the sharks are already circling.