File storage, sharing and publishing is one of the first things you want to get right with Office 2.0. As described in a previous post, you want to use the right tool for the right file. Currently, I use Salesforce.com to store most of my documents, but this approach is not really adapted for documents that I would like to share with others and happen to be large in size (over 1MB). First, because Salesforce.com does not support document sharing with users who do not use the same corporate account. Second, because Salesforce.com only offers a meager 1GB of storage per user. Note to Marc: please increase storage capacity to at least 10GB.

In order to work around this, I have started to use a new service developed by the Zoho folks called Zoho Planner. To be fair, Zoho Planner does much more than just storing files, and can be used as an Office 2.0 alternative to a Personal Information Manager, but I use it only for file sharing, for most of my planning task are already handled by Salesforce.com in a much more powerful manner. The reason why I like Zoho Planner is that it offers a user interface similar to the one developed for Zoho Writer, and sharing a document with someone is as easy as entering that person’s email address. I find it especially useful for sharing analyst reports that cannot be published on the web but can be shared with a limited number of colleagues.

Integration with Salesforce.com is achieved through the use of a custom ‘Link’ object where I record the URL of the document stored into my Zoho Planner account. It’s simple, it’s fast, and it respects most of the rules for Office 2.0 any service I use must comply to. A couple of things could be improved though: First, it would be great to be able to publish documents instead of just sharing them, much like Zoho Writer does today. Second, a document is attached to a page, but it seems that there is no way to get to the URL of that page, therefore I have to record the URL of the attached document into Salesforce.com, instead of recording the URL of its parent page.

Now, here is the best part: when I started using Zoho Planner, I tried to upload a 5.1MB document, but somehow it did not work. I used the feedback link that shows up at the top right of every page, asked for help, and was told a couple hours later that there was a 5MB limit to the size of files that could be uploaded. A week later, the good folks at Zoho came back and told me that they had increased the limit up to 10MB, which usually is plenty enough for most analyst reports I read. Since then, most of the large documents I used to store onto Salesforce.com have been migrated to Zoho Planner, and I can easily share them with my peers and Board members. Here is an other great service that made it into my Office 2.0 setup.