…or should I say ‘Office for your iPhone‘. This is fun project going live in record time (thanks to our APIs and of course our team).
iZoho (no, its not an online desktop :)) is an easier way to access your Zoho Apps on your Mobile…atleast, iPhone for now. Sure, you can use Zoho Apps in their current form on your iPhone, but there is lot of stuff you don’t need on your mobile phone. So we simplified the interface and just provided simple features you’d normally use on a mobile phone.

We have three applications available currently in iZoho - Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show which lets you view your documents, spreadsheets and presentations in Zoho. Currently you can view and edit your documents, but you cannot edit your spreadsheets and presentations (you can only view them). You can also create new documents and view your presentations in landscape mode. There will be more features coming as we move along.
Frankly, we don’t know how this will work on iPhone as we haven’t tested it. It certainly works well on Safari so we hope it’ll be a non-issue. In any case, we will be fine tuning this over the next few days.

As I mentioned earlier, a device with a big screen, built in Wi-Fi, good usability and a full fledged browser will only improve the chances of practically using web apps on a mobile device.
Do give it a try and let us know what you think (support at zoho.com). Below are some screenshots.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Posted to:  Announcements, General, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Writer  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

IBM was the dominant company of the mainframe era - and at the peak of their influence they had around 200K employees. The dominant company of the PC era is Microsoft, and they had around 40K employees at the peak of their influence and power. Google is the dominant company of the emerging internet era, at around 10K employees. It is easy to see a kind of Moore’s Law operating here: the dominant company in each technology generation is a fraction of the size of the dominant company of the previous generation.  Timescales are shrinking too. IBM reigned supreme for decades, Microsoft for about a decade. Powered by technology itself, economies of scale are becoming available at smaller and smaller scales.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Posted to:  General  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

SteekR, an online storage vendor integrated Zoho Writer into their application in their recent update. With this integration SteekR users can edit documents using Zoho Writer and save them back into their SteekR Drive.

SteekR offers a free account with 1GB storage space. I like their upload feature where you can just drag and drop your files into the browser and they are uploaded directly without having to install anything. Also, if you have any photos or audio files uploaded, you can play them directly in your browser. They have a great application and we are glad to see Zoho integrated into it.

Other online storage vendors who integrated Zoho APIs include Box.net, FileDen, MyDataBus & OmniDrive. We’d like to thank you all once again for integrating Zoho Apps and we look forward for more such integrations.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Posted to:  General, Zoho Writer  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

I found out something surprising a few days ago: I was in the same hostel (Godavari) at IIT Madras as Rajesh Jha and Suri Raman, who lead Microsoft Office Live and Srikanth Shoroff, a senior manager at Office Live. Jha is the Corporate VP in charge of Office Live, while Raman is a Microsoft Technical Fellow, an exalted super-guru status at Microsoft. All of them were one year ahead of me at IIT, and we shared the same hostel for 3 years. I remember playing tennis ball cricket with them, which I consider to be much more fun than the infernal “real” cricket ball. Those used to be pretty hard-fought affairs, and alas, I also recall losing more often to them than winning, a circumstance I would conveniently blame on my less talented teammates. Jha and Raman graduated in 1988, and Raman joined Microsoft right out of IIT - interestingly the first time Microsoft recruited directly in India. Jha and Srikanth went to grad school and joined Microsoft two years later. From what I gather, 10 out of 30 of that 1988 graduating Computer Science class is in Microsoft now.

Another member of their class is Venky Harinarayan, who co-founded Junglee (acquired by Amazon) and now the founder of Kosmix, an innovative search engine start-up in silicon valley. I remember Venky was often the reason their team would win the cricket matches. Thanks, Venky, for connecting me with Jha, Raman and Srikanth.

I myself was in the Electrical Engineering class graduating in 1989, and I never thought I had any interest or passion for software. In IIT, I avoided computers after the initial obligatory Intro to Computing (Fortran!), taught in 1985 when I entered. I pretty much didn’t think of software at all until 1995. Even then it was not love-at-first-sight for software and me. It must be the Fortran …

Anyhow, it was great to reconnect with these folks. I don’t remember much of what I studied in IIT (that’s a lie, I don’t remember anything), but I remember the people, I remember the cricket, and I also remember some other things which won’t fit in a family-friendly blog (psst, my father reads my posts) so I will leave them out! And here is a piece of advice to those still in college: really get to know your fellow students, you never know who you will find as competitors 19 years later in life Make damn sure to enjoy all that time you are wasting - one of my favorite quotes is “If you enjoyed the time you wasted, you didn’t waste it after all.” And whatever you do, seriously avoid Fortran - I mean seriously.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Posted to:  General  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

Japanese users of Zoho Writer are in for a treat. Thanks to our Japanese colleagues who are putting in a lot of effort in translating the Zoho services’ UI screens, Zoho Writer now joins Zoho Sheet in providing a Japanese UI. In your Zoho Writer account, click on ‘Options’ -> ‘Settings’ and you will find the language option there.

Soon we will be adding other language UIs to Zoho Writer (and other Zoho services) as well.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Posted to:  Announcements, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Writer  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

Came across a couple of nice overviews on Zoho Projects. Chris Kasten at Solo Technology is a long-time Zoho fan. He is looking for a project management solution for his company and has started evaluating Zoho Projects first. From his illustrated pictorial overview :

I have a project, I suppose I should have some tasks associated with it. Here it gets more interesting… There’s a variety of ways this tool can be used to manage a project. For the moment, I’ve decided that I’d layout milestones, and then for each milestone I’d define tasks. In my example, I added one task list per milestone (”readiness” tasks) but you could actually have many task lists per milestone — or one or more tasklists not associated with a milestone.

Did I mention this is all “Ajaxy” and fluid? You can see (above) that I’ve defining a task without jumping to interim pages. It’s all live an “in place”.

Tasks can easily be re-ordered and edited.

There’s tons more here. Meetings scheduling, messaging, project reports, forums and who knows what else I missed. I like that the company logo can be added. I’ve not looked at the other candidates yet, but this definitely seems like it’d fit the bill for what we’re after. Performance is good, key features all seem to be there.

Brett & Randy at Circle Six Design blog are happy customers of Zoho Projects and like it very much. From their excellent blog post titled “Project Management with Zoho”

Zoho provides Gantt charts, calendars and timers. It also has file sharing and storage, with the space determined by your payment plan. By the way, Zoho is 100% free for open source projects. You can put tasks on a timeline, along with meetings and major milestones, and then see them in different formats.

There are more features that I didn’t touch here, mostly because I haven’t gotten to exploring every nook and cranny yet. But overall, I’m very impressed, and for most purposes, Zoho is very affordable. If you’re looking at project management solutions, be sure to add this to your list to check out.

Thanks for the nice overviews Chris, Brett & Randy

Popularity: 9% [?]

Posted to:  Zoho Projects  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

Dan Farber at ZDNet has a great post up Zoho sets out to challenge the software world - thanks a lot, Dan, for outing our secret plan for world domination (yeah, right!) I am going to have to pay for that title with my wife - she mercilessly punctures any delusions of grandeur I could harbor in a moment of weakness.

A couple of clarifications are in order: AdventNet, the parent company of Zoho, has an IT management software suite, very imaginatively named ManageEngine, which has been downloaded several million times, installed in over 700K sites, and since we have a generous free edition, the paying customer base is a lot smaller. In that respect, the AdventNet business model is much like that of any open source company. Lots and lots of free users (we love them!) and a subset of them become paying customers (we love them even more!). That philosophy keeps our customer acquisition costs low, so we can focus on doing what we really enjoy doing: build cool software, and lots of it. Indeed, one look at the AdventNet site will tell you how every product comes with a Free Edition.

As for quantity vs quality, it is true we ship a lot of products (over 70 if you count all AdventNet offerings, I have actually lost count!), but each of our product teams has a very strong mandate on quality. We would much rather withdraw a product offering than compromise quality. And we don’t start a product, unless we can dedicate meaningful engineering resources to it.

I bring these up, because that is pretty much the same philosophy we follow at Zoho. We want to have a very generous Free Edition, and then convert a subset of those to paying customers. Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects, both of which are commercially available, have a sizable pool of free users, from which a subset have become paying customers. We are going to follow the same policy with all our Zoho services.

Now, the big question: can Zoho survive against Google and Microsoft? Somehow I just don’t spend much time worrying about it (OK, may be just a little!). I reckon, based on our own 11 year history, if we keep shipping cool products, and treat the customer well, we will find a market. AdventNet has reinvented itself more than once in its history - Zoho is just the latest in a series of transformations, from a humble beginning with a single product 11 years ago (as an aside, anyone would like to take a guess what that first product was?) And surprisingly enough, we still ship that product, and have a strong base of loyal customers.

On the future of Zoho, there is only one assurance I can give: we will keep trying harder to offer the very best in online applications. We have a very passionate engineering team here and we love to come to work everyday.

Thank you again, Dan!

Popularity: 6% [?]

Posted to:  General  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

Now that it’s been a week since we launched Zoho Creator 2.0, it’s time for another announcement. Today we are opening Zoho Meeting to public.

We announced Zoho Meeting in March and it was in Private Beta till now. Today it steps out as a Public Beta where anyone with a Zoho Account can use Meeting. The application is free while it is in Beta.

For those of you who are not very familiar with Zoho Meeting, it is a web conferencing application where you can schedule meetings with others and share your desktop. Apart from sharing your desktop, sharing a presentation is an important part. For this reason, we integrated Zoho Meeting with Zoho Show (our presentation application) where a desktop sharing session can be embedded inside a slide. Zoho Meeting is also integrated with Zoho Chat.

One of the advantages of Zoho Meeting is that the attendees can be on any operating system to attend a meeting. Here are some quick highlights of Zoho Meeting.

• Create Meetings, share desktop with multiple attendees
• Attendees can attend the meeting from any operating system
• Comes with three viewers - Active-X, Java and Flash
• Participants can choose to control presenter’s desktop
• Meeting Viewer can be embedded into web pages and applications
• Zoho Show and Zoho Chat is integrated into Zoho Meeting
• Zoho Meeting is currently free while in Beta

Here is a quick video of the application.

Try Zoho Meeting out and we would love to hear your valuable feedback comments.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Posted to:  Announcements, General, Zoho Chat, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Show  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

We are here at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston where we just wrapped up a small Yacht Party with some friends. It was a great evening and we had fun with some great folks who joined us.

We have the photos up on Zooomr.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Posted to:  General  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

The recently released Zoho Creator 2.0 was well received by bloggers and journalists alike. Some quotes from the web regarding the release :

Marc Orchant @ ZDNet :

Creator uses a very nice GUI construction interface and a script builder (Creator’s scripting language is called Deluge) to assist even completely ham-handed people (like me) in developing very powerful and attractive applications with little more than point-and-click and drag-and-drop actions. Despite this accessibility, there’s a lot of power underneath the hood and to date more than 30,000 applications have been built by people using Zoho Creator.

Lifehacker, Zoho Creator is like Microsoft Access online :

Forget learning Microsoft Access and Visual Basic: the newly-revamped Zoho Creator is an easy-to-use online database creation tool.Set up your database’s fields (like for an address book: Name, Address, City, State) and then build drag and drop custom entry forms with different input types like radio buttons, check boxes and dropdowns. Ambitious types can add custom logic to the application using the script builder, and the whole shebang can be added to your web site or blog (say, for a feedback form or survey).

Kristen Nicole @ Mashable :

This latest version has lots of drag-n-drop functionality, for creating forms, views and defining layouts. Have more fun with drag-n-drop with the improved deluge script builder, which lets you create scripts without learning the syntax. A new user interface graces the Creator 2.0 upgrade as well, with easier ways to share content and manage multiple forms.

Scott Gilbertson @ Wired Blogs :

Zoho Creator 2.0 also includes some additional new features that bring it up to speed with other apps in the Zoho suite, like the ability to share applications with other Zoho users, new ways embed applications in your website and the ability to export your data in multiple formats.

Thomas Willingham has a detailed walk-through of creating an application :

The updated version of Creator is flexible, allowing the creation of applications using numerous options including using forms, importing spreadsheets, applying a template from the existing application gallery, or scripting.

I realize that I barely scratched the surface of this program. The application I created was straightforward and relatively simple. This is the first time I have used Zoho Creator, and I found it very easy to use. The interface was intuitive, and help was very good. The online product overview videos created by Zoho are always a nice touch.

Benoit Descary @ descary.com :

Zoho Creator est sans conteste l’une de mes applications Web2.0 favorites. Grâce à ce service, vous pouvez créer en quelques minutes, un formulaire d’inscription à un événement, un mini CRM ou encore une base de données de vos recettes favorites, en fait les possibilités sont infinies. [rough translation in English] : Zoho Creator is without question one of my favorite Web2.0 applications. Thanks to this service, you can create in a few minutes, a form of inscription to an event, a mini CRM or a data base of your favorite receipts, the possibilities are infinite. Update : Benoit also has a screencast on Creator 2.0.

Mike Gunderloy @ Web Worker Daily thought Zoho Creator 2.0 wasn’t exactly MS Access + VB on the net and he had an elaborate review :

When you log in to Creator, you get a big “Create New Application” button as an obvious starting point. This lets you start from a gallery of pre-built applications (project management, help desk, and so on), a blank application, or an imported spreadsheet. From there, you add forms, which again can come from a set of pre-built examples or start blank. The Zoho Creator form builder is an easy to use drag-and-drop environment with plenty of helpful visual cues; I didn’t have to read anything to add radio buttons or textboxes, set labels, change the options in a dropdown, and so on. Each form you build can have multiple views (single record or list), with security being applied on a view by view and action by action level. You can arrange views into tabs and control who can visit each tab of your application. Behind the scenes, Creator is building a relational database to match your forms, and there is a reasonably obvious way to link forms and so create linked tables (well, reasonably obvious if you understand the basics of relational databases).

There’s also scripting, with a new language called Deluge. Not only does Deluge allow you to attach actions such as validation or sending e-mail to typical events, but Creator form definitions themselves are saved in Deluge, so it enables you to modify forms dynamically, which is actually quite powerful. Zoho claims that you don’t need to be a programmer to use this language, and they provide a drag-and-drop script builder to put together some simple actions. But the “you don’t need to be a programmer” claim was hogwash in Access and VB, and it’s hogwash here; if you don’t understand the rudiments of things like events and boolean logic, Deluge will make no sense to you, and you’ll stick to the easy user interface stuff.

Overall, Zoho Creator is quite impressive for its niche. The learning curve is very shallow, and it’s almost trivially easy to bang out quick data collection and editing applications. Deluge is not a difficult language if you have any experience with programming, though as I said I remain skeptical of its universal appeal.

Zoli Erdos @zoliblog

Here’s a good example of Christopher Conway, Professor of Literature, a non-techie in his own words building a course database in Zoho Creator - and that was in the “old” release. Getting back to the journalism question above: yes, it is useful if you can build simple database application, but you really no longer have to learn coding anymore. Don’t take my word for it: go ahead, play with it.

Cale @ palmit.commentary :

ZOHO Creator makes it easy to create a simple, or fairly complex, database (complete with a UI) in minutes. They’ve made it really easy to share the UI for data-entry - you can even post a code snippet to your website or blog to make the data-entry UI available anywhere you want. It’s free, it’s slick, and I’m completely surprised more people aren’t talking about this.

Thanks everyone, for your reviews & feedback! More to come in Zoho Creator …

Popularity: 7% [?]

Posted to:  In the News, Zoho Creator  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article: