Zoho unveiled yet a new offering at the ongoing Office 2.0 Conference, this time it’s a new, paid business edition of the Zoho web applications suite. Designed to compete directly with Google’s similar business offering, participating companies will get user administration, branding, domain mapping, backup, group storage, telephone support and more.

Zoho Business edition will launch as a public beta in October with the final version expected sometime next year. Zoho Business will cost around $40 per user, per year, which is about $10 cheaper than Google.

Zoho sent me an invitation to the beta and I’ve been playing around with it this morning. The basic starting point is the desktop (which makes no really effort to mimic an actual desktop) where you’ll find your documents (divided by type), tasks, reminders, calendar and links to all the Zoho apps.

Zoho recently launched an integrated version if its office suite for non-business users which is nice, but the Business Edition has a much cleaner interface and is easier to use. All the Zoho apps are neatly stacked to left of the page and jumping between them is a snap.

Unfortunately, switching between apps causes any unsaved changes to be lost, so you can’t just casually flip between apps. However, a series of links across the top of the page allow you to quickly create a new document without leaving the screen you’re working in.

In addition to the Business Suite, Zoho will continue to offer a free version, now called Zoho Personal, but some applications, like Zoho CRM, will only be available in the Business edition and others, like Zoho Meeting, will be limited for Personal users.

Zoho also plans to offer an education suite sometime later this year.

In all, Zoho currently offers 12 applications and 4 utilities, most of which offer decent APIs and some even have limited offline support.

As with all its releases, Zoho has a video highlighting the new offering:

The main desktop view in Zoho Business:

Zoho Meeting in the Business Suite (Personal edition is now limited to 5 meetings a month):