They say the best things in life are free…But on the internet, ‘free’ is a whole different world.

With hackers always searching for new ways to con the innocent, ‘free’ on the web usually means ‘potentially dangerous.’  It’s no secret that free downloads of music and video, for example, often contain malicious software secretly embedded inside.

However, when it comes to Microsoft and the fierce battles to gain market share, free can mean access to a pretty darn good product.  As you may know, Google Docs is a suite of online tools that can do just about everything Microsoft Office can do.  Google Docs is free.  The idea is to offer the software for free so everyone will jettison Microsoft Office and migrate to Google Docs.

Zoho (www.Zoho.com ) is another player in this market space.  They, too, offer a set of free online tools for a wide range of applications.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing with their Wiki and I must say I like Zoho a lot.  It’s intuitive, user friendly and useful for both home and business.

One of the challenges we face as a company is how can we efficiently capture and disseminate knowledge.  Standard operating proceedures are critical to ensuring quality of service and smooth operations.

In the old days, we would have created a 3-ringed binder describing how to do specific tasks.  New and veteran employees would reference the manual as-needed.

Using Zoho Wiki now as an internal, password protected handbook, we’re able to accomplish everything we need plus two new benefits:

1. It’s readily available anytime/anywhere online
2. Anyone can contribute to it anytime, so the content is fresh and relevant.

We also use Zoho for our corporate clients.  Instead of having each employee send troubleshooting request to us via email, we have employees post action items on on an internal, Zoho-based bulletin board.  They can now assign levels of urgency, management can help prioritize requests, and the SuperGeeks can post messages next to each action item.  The bottom line:  The whole support process is now infinitely more effective and efficient.

To learn more about Zoho and how it may fit into your home or office, see:

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoho

Tools for teachers: http://zohochallenge.com/OnlineTest/Candidate.do

Gadgets for geeks: http://gadgets.zoho.com/zc/index.do

CRM for business: http://crm.zoho.com/crm/login.sas

Planner for families: http://planner.zoho.com/login

Have fun exploring Zoho.  I am confident you will be pleasantly surpised.