Zoho, the online productivity and business applications developer has opened up its tools to Google and Yahoo users.

From today members of Yahoo and Google services can sign into Zoho services, meaning that they can try them out without having to join up to another service.

“We noticed that users prefer our applications to online alternatives,” said Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist. “For Google and Yahoo! users who are curious about Zoho but don’t want to set up another account, we’ve removed that hurdle. Users don’t have to create a Zoho account to use Zoho applications. We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to try our online apps.”

Interested users should watch out for the "sign in using…" option on the Zoho web site, this redirects them to their usual provider, who in turn will redirect them to the Zoho services - once they have signed in.

The functionality extends through to collaboration across the applications, meaning that a document created in Zoho could be viewed and worked on within the Google apps service, and vice versa.