Standard & Poor's publishes the Case-Shiller® Home Price Indices on the last Tuesday of every month. The indices are calculated from data on repeat sales of single family homes. The indices are normalized to have a value of 100 in the first quarter of 2000. It is calculated monthly using a three-month moving average and published with a two month lag. We imported the data released today into Zoho Reports and created a few charts to see how the house prices have performed over the years.
One of the features I love about this thing we're launching soon is how many other Zoho services it incorporates into one cool package of unrestrained productivity. And... no, it's not just a pricing bundle where we give you a number of disparate thing for one set price.
It goes beyond that. Anyway, I was just counting how many other Zoho services it integrates under one roof - no less than 5! It's actually more than that, but I won't go into details.
You might remember last week we announced the ground-breaking Zoho Office for SharePoint - which lets users store their documents in SharePoint while editing and collaborating on them with Zoho. A lot of customers, media and bloggers liked that idea. Well, this thing (that we're releasing before you leave for your 4th of July weekend) also integrates with another popular Microsoft product.
As an added bonus, here's what a screenshot of this new thing looks like:
Yeah, of course it's broken into big, 38-pixel mossaics so as to not give it away so easily. Gotta love that Photoshop.
But, if you squint your eyes and look at it for 5 minutes without blinking, the whole thing will appear in 3-D before your eyes - like those posters that were popular in the 80s (90s?). Oh, who a I kidding? I was never able to see one of those autostereograms - to this day I still think they are a cruel joke.
But I digressed. You might think that screenshot doesn't give out any info. Well, it does! Some of the things that people were guessing are not supported by this screenshot. Also... read carefully!
Rodrigo
How's that for a launch announcement? You see, we're launching this thing next week. But we're not crazy. Bear with me for the next few lines. There are two philosophies when it comes to launching a product: one is you say well in advance what you are going to launch, and when - the Microsoft model. The other is to say absolutely nothing (nor product not date) until the day you launch it, the Apple model.
So we thought it'd be fun to do something in between those two extremes. We're telling you that next week we're launching something.
But we won't tell you what that is, nor we'll say specifically when. But we promise it will be before you leave for the 4th of July weekend.
We also promise you will really really like this new shiny thing. It will change the way you _________ (can't tell you that just yet, as it'd give it away). In fact, we challenge you to try out Zoho _________ for a month, and then you'll wonder how you worked without it before.
Rodrigo
Rabbit is a web-based operating system that connects people, processes and content, combining the power of social networking into an enterprise environment. A key component of Rabbit is its information sharing capabilities, which let users work on documents they’ve uploaded to Rabbit’s web workspace, and share this with other users. Rabbit has selected Zoho for this because of Zoho's proven ability to provide high levels of functionality and performance, and to provide a smooth transition for enterprise users from working locally on the desktop to working on the web.
All documents, spreadsheets and presentations uploaded and stored in Rabbit can be opened using Zoho. The documents and spreadsheets can be edited and saved back where as the presentations can be viewed. Below is a screenshot of files in Rabbit being opened using Zoho.
New documents and spreadsheets can be created too from inside Rabbit by invoking Zoho Writer and Sheet. This video by the Rabbit team explains the functionality in detail.
Zoho is primarily about working online. We have a great set of online
productivity apps which businesses find extremely useful for
collaboration. Microsoft SharePoint is ubiquitous in enterprises for
content management, but it lacks several advantages that cloud
applications like Zoho enjoy.
Today we are pleased to announce Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint that brings the advantages of Zoho online productivity applications to ubiquitous Microsoft SharePoint.
Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint extends the value of Microsoft
SharePoint by allowing users to create new documents using Zoho's
office suite and then save them directly to SharePoint in Microsoft
Office supported formats. Users can view or edit existing documents,
spreadsheets and presentations using Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show and
save them back to SharePoint.
This video gives a good overview of this add-on.
Installation video is available here. As Zoho applications are served
from the cloud, you don't need any installations on desktops to
create/view/edit documents. Once you install the add-on for SharePoint
server, you can be more productive with just your browser.
Zoho Collaboration on Microsoft SharePoint
Apart from providing editing capability for existing documents, the
add-on also provides collaborative editing functionality. Based on
sharing permissions already defined in SharePoint, multiple users can
collaboratively work on documents/spreadsheets/presentations in real-time.
This feature basically brings one of the key advantages of an online
office suite to SharePoint.
While collaboratively editing documents, you can also chat with other members using our integrated Zoho Chat.
Data Behind your Firewall
Along with small and medium businesses, we see a good percentage of
departments in larger organizations using our productivity apps for
collaboration. There are businesses which prefer keeping their
data behind the enterprise firewall. For such organizations, this new
add-on brings in the best of both worlds - Collaboration capabilities
of an online application while keeping the data behind your firewall.
If you have SharePoint installed in your intranet behind your corporate
firewall, you still will be able to view/edit documents using our
online applications. After changes, your documents are saved back to
your SharePoint server behind your corporate firewall leaving no data
on Zoho Servers.
When you open the document, a copy is transferred temporarily to Zoho
servers securely. When the document is closed, it is permanently
deleted from our servers immediately leaving no data on our side.
Pricing & Availability
Starting today, this add-on is available for Microsoft SharePoint 2007
and 2003 versions. You can try the 30 day evaluation version for
unlimited users. After the trial period, it costs $2/user/month on an
yearly subscription or $3/user/month for monthly subscription.
If you have already invested in Microsoft SharePoint, this add-on is a
great compliment that brings in the advantages of online productivity
applications to SharePoint. If you are able to access SharePoint,
you'll be able to view/edit documents without having to invest on
productivity suites for every desktop in your business.
Additional information is available @ http://www.zoho.com/sharepoint
Please do give it a try and let us know what you think.
-------
Microsoft, SharePoint are either registered trademarks
or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or
other countries. ZOHO Corp is not affiliated or endorsed by Microsoft
Corporation.
Someone recently asked me how many applications we released last year.
Frankly, I had no clue. So I decided to dig the brief history a bit and
create a time line of launches of various Zoho Apps. Some
information could be missing, but I have the information captured for
the most part.
Sep 05 - Zoho Writer Alpha
Oct 05 - Zoho Planner
Dec 05 - Zoho Writer Beta
Feb 06 - Zoho CRM Released (Product + Service)
Mar 06 - Zoho Creator
Apr 06 - Zoho Sheet
Jun 06 - Zoho Show
Jun 06 - Site24x7
Aug 06 - Zoho Projects
Oct 06 - Zoho Accounts (SSO)
Dec 06 - Plug-in for MS Office
Dec 06 - Zoho Wiki
Jan 07 - Zoho Notebook
Feb 07 - Zoho Chat
Mar 07 - Zoho Meeting
Jun 07 - Zoho launched on iPhone
Jul 07 - Zoho launched on Facebook
Aug 07 - Zoho Viewer
Sep 07 - Zoho Business
Oct 07 - Zoho Reports
Mar 08 - Zoho People
Mar 08 - Zoho Invoice
Apr 08 - Zoho CRM Enterprise
Aug 08 - Zoho Share
Sep 08 - Zoho Docs
Sep 08 - Zoho Marketplace
Oct 08 - Zoho Mail
Nov 08 - Zoho Status
Dec 08 - CloudSQL
Mar 09 - Writer 2.0
Apr 09 - Chat 2.0
Apr 09 - Zoho Mobile
These are just key product releases. This time line doesn't include plug-ins, integrations, utilities or hundreds of upgrades we did in the past 3 years.
Next week, we will have a new addition to this list. Anyone care to venture a guess on what the new launch will be?
Update: Adam Behringer from Bee Docs created a nice video for this timeline.
Document
management systems in many businesses are typically shared network
drives. While some businesses have graduated to online document
management systems like Zoho, a good percentage of them still use
shared network folders or samba drives as their central document
repositories, which sit behind the firewall. This means, their documents
cannot be easily accessed outside the company network.
What
if you need a system to make your existing document management system
accessible outside your network, providing the advantages of an online
document management system and not disturbing your current setup? This
is where Stoneware comes in.
Stoneware provide
web access to your internal infrastructure outside your network through
your browser. Using their webNetwork application, your internal
documents from your
shared network drives can be accessed outside the firewall using just
your browser.
Stoneware integrated our
productivity apps - Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show - into their
webNetwork application. With this integration Stoneware customers can
view/edit their internal documents using just the browser and
save them back to their internal network. After all, there is a reason
they want to keep their data behind the firewall. So this integration
does exactly that. It lets Stoneware users open their internal
documents from existing shared drives
using Zoho Apps and save them back to their internal
network.
This remote saving capability has been available through our Remote APIs and is being used by our other partners like Box.net, Huddle etc.
We'd like to thank Stoneware for integrating Zoho. We certainly look forward for more interesting integrations using our APIs.
We posted about enhancements done to the pivot table recently in Zoho Reports. Here's more. Pivot tables (and charts, filters) now support quarterly and weekly intervals. This adds to yearly, monthly intervals before. This can be best explained in the sales context. What if you want to know how you did in 1Q 2009 Vs 4Q 2008 (previous quarter) or 1Q 2008 (previous year, same quarter)? Or what if you want to know how you did this week compared to last week or see the trends of the earlier weeks? It is easy now to have reports for such scenarios.
The screenshot above is for the Actual Values - Quarter & Year, sales in various quarters of each year. Seasonal/Cyclic - Quarter option differs from this as it will give the sum of Quarterly Sales summed across years.
Similarly, the Weekly option is available too. Sales figures of different regions for the various weeks in 2008 shown as a Pivot table.
The same quarter & week concepts are available in Charts and Summary Views.
You can also Filter the data using Quarter and Week timelines.
Try the new Quarterly & Weekly options in Zoho Reports and let us know your feedback in the comments.
Related Links
And by "Money" I mean not the "Show me the money" kind of money, but the Microsoft Money product. You know, the product that Microsoft just announced it is whacking.
The obvious winner in this epic battle that goes several years back seems to be Intuit, with its Quicken line of services and products - so congratulations to the Intuit team - I hope that with their major competitor out they will nonetheless continue innovating and producing a good product. But without taking away from Intuit's effort, there's also a lot to be said for on-line services like Mint.com (a personal note: I've been a user for a while and I love it). Mint in particular has been quite successful as of late, adding users and generating a lot of buzz in the media. Of course, we should also note that Quicken also offers a 100%-web (and free) money management service, Quicken Online.
What is interesting here is that Microsoft Money was, without ever being officially called so, one of Microsoft's first products to follow their "Software plus Services" strategy. Software-plus-Services is the name that Microsoft uses to justify not fully moving into a SaaS model. And Microsoft Money could have really been the poster boy for software-plus-services: buy a piece of boxed software from your favorite electronics store, install it in your computer and complement/augment it with the kind of additional value/information that you can only get on-line.
So, why did Microsoft kill Money? Well, here's the official explanation:
With banks, brokerage firms and Web sites now providing a range of options for managing personal finances, the consumer need for Microsoft Money Plus has changed...
Now, let's see... my two banks (two of the biggest ones in the nation) provide some services, but nothing close to a full solution like Mint or Quicken. My brokerage doesn't provide that centralized view either. Neither does my credit card company. So that leaves websites like Mint.com and Quicken Online as probably the biggest factors that contributed to the demise of Microsoft Money.
Well, so there you have it. Software-plus-Services just yielded its first result.
Rodrigo
ps. Credit when it is due - kudos to Microsoft for working with Intuit to help Money customers easily migrate to Quicken.
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