As online office software tries to move into big corporations, it’s starting to work more closely with entrenched solutions — which often means technology built by Microsoft. In the latest example, Zoho just announced plans to offer its collaboration services as an add-on for SharePoint, Microsoft’s server and software for collaboration and document management.Basically, that means you can use Zoho Office as the interface for collaborative editing of documents, while the documents themselves sit safely on the SharePoint server, behind the corporate firewall. The add-on brings a more web-like interface to SharePoint; rather than having to check documents in and out as they work on them, multiple users can jump into a document and edit it at once, and also send instant messages back-and-forth within their applicaiton using Zoho Chat.This is a smart way to get Zoho into companies that wouldn’t consider making the full jump into online office applications, but want to experiment with these kinds of tools without sacrificing security or throwing away existing hardware. The financial investment is small, too — a 30-day trial period, followed by $2 per user per month if companies pay for a year, or $3 per user per month if companies pay by month.Google is trying to accommodate Microoft fans too, most recently by integrating online office software Google Apps with Microsoft’s email program Outlook.

Zoho Suite, a web-based software suite comprised of document, project and invoicing management tools, has launched an add-on that allows Zoho Office to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint. Zoho users can now create new documents and save them to SharePoint in MS Office formats, view existing documents within SharePoint using Zoho apps, and edit existing documents with Zoho Apps and save them back to SharePoint. The new add-on also provides collaborative editing functionality in Zoho with the integration with SharePoint. Zoho says the add-on costs $2/user/month on an yearly subscription or $3/user/month for monthly subscription.