As I write this blog post @ 30,000ft above the ground on a Virgin
America flight, flying back from Boston to San Francisco, I started to
wonder whatever happened to the 'Airplane problem' (or the
Offline problem of online apps) we all used to talk about couple of
years back.
At Zoho, we have had offline support for over 2 years now. Zoho Writer and Zoho Mail supported offline access
and I kind of used them initially, but I have to admit, I quickly gave
up using the offline versions as I never needed them. Sure, there were
times I was offline, but during those times, well, I went offline too,
grabbing a coffee or something.
My behavior is not just with Zoho Apps. Many other apps I use do support offline access
and I never bothered to use them in offline mode. This makes me wonder
if this is just me or do you also fall under the same category? I
created a quick poll (using Zoho Polls, ofcourse) to get your feedback
on this.
Share your opinion in comments section.
We've been working hard to find new ways to improve the user experience which in turn helps you to improve your productivity. Even in these days of collaboration, we find that many people tend to fall back on email rather than shared online work spaces. And this being the most popular demand from most of our users we've included this feature as part of our recent update.
Let's see what's in store for you :
Post Comments in Forums with Attachments
There may be an interesting topic going around in the
project forums and you may wish to quickly post a comment. Previously,
you had to login to Zoho Projects and then post a comment. But now you can
simply do so through an email.
Add Task Notes with Attachments
We've
provided
a unique email id for each and every task. Go to task details page. Now
copy the email address and compose a mail along with your notes and
send it. You can find your notes automatically added for this task via
email.
Add Notes for Meetings with Attachments
Similarly you can add notes and attach files for a
scheduled meeting through email. Also you can add notes for
an existing meeting through a reply mail.
It's simple, isn't it ? Learn more about the new feature addition at Communicate with Projects via Email
We feel that communicating via email in Zoho Projects will be extremely useful for virtual teams as this encourages
informal communication and team building. It's
not
just about a new feature addition - it's how you thoughtfully
apply it. So find ways for your team to play with it and you'll be amazed at how quickly they find new ways to
apply them to their work process.
We hope you'd start using these features in Zoho Projects and share your experience with us at support@zohoprojects.com
OOdesk (pronounced as voo-desk) is a virtual desktop application offering free email, storage space, file sharing etc. OOdesk users can view and save documents, spreadsheets, presentations directly online without downloading. And this is done using Zoho's Remote API.
[Click to enlarge image]If you are an ISV requiring such a functionality, do have a look at our APIs. We have a good many vendors who have successfully implemented our APIs (recently Central Desktop integrated Zoho Sheet). And it's not just for ISVs, any enterprise can make use of our APIs too.
Our Zoho Mail team recently added a couple of new features
to the Mail app. Improvements to labels and contextual options for
your folders. Let's take a look.
Labels Specific to Email Accounts
You
may know that Zoho Mail supports multiple email accounts. This means,
apart from your zoho.com email account, you can use Zoho Mail to fetch your emails from external POP accounts. By default, Zoho Mail lets you
maintain a different folder structure for each of your mail accounts
providing you a better way to manage your mail accounts.
Along with Folders, Zoho Mail also supports Labels, for those who
prefer organizing their mail boxes using labels. But previously, Labels
were common across all mail accounts. This is no longer the case. With
the recent update, you can create Labels specific to your mail account.
To create/modify/delete labels for a specific mail account, select the mail account, go to Settings > Personalize > Labels.
Contextual Right Click Options
Do you know that you can right click on mail folders in Zoho Mail? We have a contextual menu offering folder-specific actions. If you
right-click on a folder, you'll typically see options to create sub-folders, Mark Folder as Read, Rename, Delete, Archive etc. Apart from these standard options, you'll also notice an additional contextual option.
When you right click on 'Outbox' for example, you'll see the 'Send Immediately' option to send mails immediately
without holding them in the Outbox temporarily. Similarly,
right-clicking on Draft, Spam or Trash folders offers an 'Empty Folder' option.
Apart from the features mentioned here, we did add a few other features.
We will let you discover these new goodies. If you do, drop us a comment.
Online Project Collaboration application vendor Central Desktop
integrated Zoho Sheet into their application using our Remote APIs.
Zoho Sheet is integrated contextually within their application letting
users view/edit spreadsheets and save them back to Central Desktop's
storage.
This integration brings in all the goodies from Zoho Sheet into
Central Desktop's application. This integration went live this weekend
replacing EditGrid's spreadsheet application. Additional details about
this integration are available here.
Zoho's unique APIs makes it easy for applications to integrate our
office apps contextually to enhance their functionality and provide
seamless experience. Central Desktop's integration is another such
example. We'd like to thank our friends at Central Desktop for
integrating our app. We are looking forward to a productive partnership.
Related Link
Chandoo writes a very interesting blog offering tips about how to make the best use of Microsoft Excel and to chart data in general. And he announced a data visualization contest
yesterday. Contestants have to map the sales data of a
fictional company using any software. The charts or dashboards created should
help a senior manager understand how the sales people have done in the
past 24 months. The winner gets an iPod Touch 8 GB. Cool, right?
Since Chandoo announced the contest is open for sponsors, we asked him if Zoho can be the sponsor. He immediately accepted. So, Zoho Reports is sponsoring this contest and we encourage all Zoho users and readers of this blog to participate in it.
Here's the details about the contest. If you are comfortable
using spreadsheets, this should be easy for you. Try using Zoho Reports
for the task and see how different/easy the charting experience is when
compared to using Microsoft Excel. You can also try using our online
spreadsheet tool, Zoho Sheet.
Your comments welcome on how you charted the data, the approaches you followed, the software you used etc.
We wanted to let you know about two feature enhancements done during the recent update of Zoho Projects.1. Task Details View
Until recently, in Tasks & Milestones, you needed to dig deep
to add notes, log hours or associate documents to a task. If you have a task for which you may need to frequently do these operations, then it makes sense to have all these options accessible easily. Hence we've introduced the Task Details page where you can
add
notes, associate docs, log time for a task - all from a single
place.
To view the task details page :
1. Go to Tasks and Milestones tab
2. Click on the particular task to display the task details page
Here's a sample screenshot:
Apart from this, you can also set status, priority, percentage completed for a task. You can also take a print out of the entire task details page.
Now, you can see overdue milestones of your project from two different places2. Overdue Milestones View
b. From Project Dashboard
could be transformed to look like this,
this, 
or this? 
Great, right? Yes, it is possible to revamp your forms into stunning works of art. The actual forms displayed above can be accessed from
Zoho Creator offers a plethora of customizing options for your forms. You can find these options in the embed dialog. Click on the "Customize Form Properties and Look and Feel" to reveal the options. The customization options are divided into 4 sections, each section offering customization parameters for various parts of the form.
The first section offers modifications for some basic configurations for your form like the page/iframe to which the user should be re-directed to, on submitting data into the form, the success message to be displayed when data is submitted in the form, the background and border color to be applied to the form etc. For specifying any attribute involving color, you'd have to specify the rgb or hex code. You can use guides like this or this to give you the exact color codes. For example, you can specify the background color for the form in the box provided as #FF9999 or rgb(255,153,153). For standard colors like teal, cyan etc you can use the color names as well. Once you key in the color code and click outside the textbox, you can notice that the text box where you entered the code displays the color specified by you. This way you can make sure you are setting the desired color.The height, width attributes can be specified in pixels or % e.g., 50px or 50 %. And did I mention, you can also hide the form header as well? Yes you can do that too!
Coming to the most important part of your form. The fields. The third section deals with giving the field labels and the fields themselves the right look. You can set a background color for the field labels so that they are highlighted and stand out from the background, the font family, font size and font color and also the width of the label. Supposing you have a loong label and if you'd like to wrap it to your convenience, you can give a small value for the width. Or if you would not like the field label to wrap then you can give the value accordingly. For the fields, you can specify the background color, width, the font color,family and the size as well.
Now that you've splashed enough color in your form, you can set right some heights and widths. In the final section, for each field type supported in Zoho Creator, you can specify the width and height attributes. e.g., if the form contains 5 Single Line fields, the specifications mentioned here will be applied to all five fields.
Once you have picked and chosen the attributes from the various sections, you'd notice that some parameters have been appended to the code snippet. Copy the code snippet as is and paste it in your blog/website and boom! Your colorful form, looking just the way you want it to is ready to go!
Wow - Thanks! We are overwhelmed by the support everyone showed us on Twitter and elsewhere after Microsoft called us "fake".
For example, Vinnie Mirchandani at Deal Architect said:
Tim O'Reilly also tweeted about it:If this is fake, give us plenty more
The question is, what do you do when the 800-lbs gorilla in the industry calls you a fake? Well, we've come up with a checklist
Now, seriously... want to see how real the fake office is? Sign up now. Takes less than 20 seconds.
(posts) (comments)
