Zoho joins the supporting ranks of Office Open XML

Online word processing and document collaboration suite Zoho Writer received an update which has made it compatible with Microsoft's Office Open XML file format.

Zoho's free online productivity suite already offered many of the same features as Microsoft Office, and even went so far as to coyly address the need for Office to a Zoho user, mentioning that there's an plug-in for Word and Excel that lets you save directly to Zoho.

But with today's update, Zoho has announced its support of Microsoft's DocX format, the OOXML file format for Word. Zoho adds that to its support of ODF, RTF, PDF, DOC, TXT, HTML, and SXW formats.

In additional to the various versions of Office (including Mac OS X and Windows Mobile 6 versions), Apple's iWork '08, TextEdit, and iPhone (read only), Corel WordPerfect X3, Gnumeric, QuickOffice for Symbian and Palm OS, all support various Open XML file formats.

Zoho is in a currently growing market of competing online suites that all more or less follow in the big footsteps of Google Office including ThinkFree Online -- another OOXML supporter, Peepel, and gOffice.