Zoho in the News

Arvind  August 31, 2007 08: 30 am    Comments (0)

Sridhar got interviewed by Ashish of pluGGd.in. From the interview :

[Ashish] Building a competitive engineering workforce is a huge challenge in India - especially for product companies. Please share some of your experiences/insights on the same.
[Sridhar]
We have been fortunate that we started out as a product company in 1996 and stayed the course. We built a culture of creating a product, selling it to customers, which is a lot tougher than building the product in the first place, supporting customers and so on. Creating that culture is what I regard as the most important first step.

It also helps that we don’t put that much weight on paper credentials - the kind of college a person attended, their academic performance and so on. We have found that most of that is not very useful in predicting job performance. By ignoring such conventional metrics, we truly broaden the pool of people we draw our team from.

Of course, the Indian IT market is hot, and anyone with experience has a multitude of opportunities to choose from. We are fortunate in that our people, by and large, choose to stay in AdventNet/Zoho, because they like the challenge here, and they like the culture of the company. Without that team and the culture, we couldn’t have come as far as we have come.

[Ashish] Your tips to entrepreneurs
[Sridhar] It helps to have passion. It helps to keep in mind that there is no template to succeed - there are so many paths leading to success, and so many paths that result in a dead-end too, and nobody can tell you which is which in advance. Each person has to find their path, tuned to their inner nature and self. Like a grandmaster, it helps to study past chess games, while keeping in mind that each game is likely to be unique, so often the only way to know the outcome is to actually play out the game.

Ashish had earlier interviewed Raju.

PC Magazine has released its Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites (hat tip - Mashable. Thanks, Pete!). The list consists of their “picks for the top new or under-the-radar sites of 2007. You may not know many of the sites on this list, but you should” and Zoho’s part of it.

Blog Online University Lowdown in its post titled “Top 20 Facebook Apps for Entrepreneurs” lists Zoho prominently at number 2. And Pete Prestipino at Website Magazine writes in the post, “Zoho: Office Suite Game Changer“,

I’ve been meaning to write about my experience with Zoho, the increasingly popular web office suite for quite some time, but each and every time I start, they seem to roll out either another application or feature which brings me back to phase one. As such, let’s look at the office suite products provided by Zoho right now because more than anyone else they are a real game changer and if I wait any longer they will roll out another service and I’ll have to start new all over again.

All Zoho applications are web-native, meaning no client-side software is required (no download). All you need is a browser and an Internet connection (perfect for those who are always on the road). It’s also a real boon to those needing some level of collaboration on the documents or projects they are working on.

Thanks, all!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Introducing Zoho Start

Arvind  August 29, 2007 05: 57 am    Comments (0)

No, this is not a new application from Zoho, instead it’s an integrated start page for your Zoho Applications.

Many users know Zoho as a set of independent applications. Today we are taking our first step towards integrating Zoho Applications under a single page.

There is one important change we did in our home page. We added a login section. Earlier you had to go to individual applications to login. You can now login directly @ http://zoho.com and in a few days time you will be redirected to http://start.zoho.com from there which will evolve as an aggregated start page for all Zoho Applications.

The current version of Zoho Start integrates Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show. You’ll now be able to organize your documents, spreadsheets and presentations in folders. You can also tag, share or export them from a common interface. Presence status of your buddy list (from Zoho Chat) is also available from the same interface.

You’ll also see ‘Zoho Apps’ section on the right which lists other Zoho Applications you have access to. All of these applications are opened in a new tab in Zoho Start interface.

Try Zoho Start and we will be glad hearing your valuable feedback as always.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Using Zoho Wiki for Zoho CRM Help Docs

Archie  August 29, 2007 04: 38 am    Comments (0)

We are using Zoho Wiki for the Zoho CRM Help Documentation. So, when you click on the Help link, you are actually directed to http://zohocrm.wiki.zoho.com.

The Wiki-approach helps achieve collaborative editing. The knowledge of the masses is easier to collate and aggregate with this method. So, even you can edit the Wiki document and add/edit to it. There may be times when you would like to share how to achieve a particular implementation. Then, go ahead, edit the wiki! This will enable others to grow with you too as others benefit from your experience. This makes the entire experience with the product more wholesome.

We plan to enable the users to register  for Zoho CRM right from the Zoho Wiki pages too! Gopal is working on it and we hope to have that feature integrated by EOD today.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Questions for Zoho Creator’s Chief Engineer?

Raffic  August 28, 2007 04: 04 am    Comments (0)

After Suganya on Deluge Script and Sriram on Infrastructure, Security. Charles will be interviewed by Pete Thomas at ‘Land of Zoho Creator‘. Charles is Zoho Creator’s Chief Engineer. A very energetic and enthusiastic guy, he is responsible for the entire back-end development which involves feature planning, development and release.

charles.jpg

Pete has posted few topics which Charles will be answering. Here’s your chance to get know about Zoho Creator’s current features, upcoming features and whatever you wanted to know about the service.

You might also want to know what keeps him on his toes, NO……not for being alert or active but unable to be at his desk for long ;)

Popularity: 5% [?]

Zoho from around the web

Arvind  August 28, 2007 03: 50 am    Comments (0)

While Zoho Creator was the first Zoho app to have an exclusive blog dedicated to it, Zoho Sheet became the first to have a complete help book made for it. Check out the book at devGuide.net. Many thanks to Jacek Artymiak!

Lynn Aleshire
of Anchorage, Alaska has been using Zoho Projects to help her daughter with her school work. And this got referenced in an article titled
Checking the Kids’ Homework Over the Internetby Christopher Lawton at the Wall Street Journal as well.

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb is having a series of posts on Web Office this week and this post has a poll on word processors. Vote for Zoho Writer if it is your favorite.

At Bootstrappr, Jessica Hupp in a post titled “The Green Entrepreneur’s Toolbox: 100 Networking Resources, Guides, and Links“, lists Zoho as one of the green tools that entrepreneurs can use for a paperless office.

Zoho Office Suite: The Zoho Office Suite has lots of great tools, but the greenest one is Zoho Meeting. You can use this tool to share desktops, hold online meetings and more, reducing the need to travel for collaboration.

We got a tremendous response for Zoho Writer moving offline using Google Gears. Blog search results in Ask (our favorite as it gets the most comprehensive results!), Technorati and Google. Thanks to all bloggers and analysts who wrote about this interesting development!

Popularity: 32% [?]

‘Land of Zoho Creator’ Gets Two New Contributors

Raffic  August 27, 2007 12: 53 am    Comments (0)

I am really excited to see Alan Bradford and LockWorld contributing to ‘Land of Zoho Creator‘. So, you can expect good variety in the coming days. ‘Land of Zoho Creator’ was started a month ago by a passionate user, fan and a well wisher of Zoho Creator - Pete Thomas. Since then he has been exploring Zoho Creator deep into its very root and is coming out with many intelligent apps.

Alan Bradford writes interesting stuff (technology, education, and business) at his blog: Big Ugly Couch. He was the key person who dug-up and suggested Zoho Creator to K. Hovnanian® Homes™ for its business use. We have the case study on K. Hovnanian® Homes™ here.

Lockworld, a web surfer, provides some useful technical tips for the web entrepreneur at his site The Web for you. He blew our mind away by setting up the PayPal-integrated product catalog using Zoho Creator.

With Pete Thomas + Alan Bradford + Lockworld, I am sure ‘Land of Zoho Creator’ is going to be an informative and fun place to visit for all the Zoho Creators.

landofzc3.jpg

Get going guys, our best wishes are with you!

Popularity: 6% [?]

Chat with Google Gears team on Zoho Offline support

Raju Vegesna  August 23, 2007 03: 52 pm    Comments (3)

We got a great response for Zoho Writer offline support announcement from our users, bloggers, media….and also from Google Gears team. Members from Google Gears team congratulated us on the integration. We’d like to thank them for their support and are looking forward to working with them closely on this open source project.

We had a great time with Dion Almaer from Google Gears team who visited our offices yesterday to talk about our integration. Here is the video from Google Developers Channel.

Update: Dion talks about this on Google Gears Blog.

Also check out the posts from Donna Bogatin from Insider Chatter & Zoli Erdos.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Zoho Creator Maintenance

Charles  August 23, 2007 01: 56 pm    Comments (0)

We need to do a maintenance for Zoho Creator. Hence service will not be available between August 25th 1:00 a.m P.D.T to 4:00 a.m P.D.T.
We regret for the inconvenience this may cause.

[Update] Due to unavoidable reasons, maintenance is extended to another one hour. Service will be available by 5:00 a.m P.D.T.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Offline Support & Comments in Zoho Writer

Raju Vegesna  August 21, 2007 04: 50 am    Comments (0)

We just rolled out an important update to Zoho Writer. This update includes two important features. Offline support & Comments.

Offline Support:

We are taking our first steps towards offering Zoho Writer offline. With this update, you’ll now be able to access all your documents offline (Mac or PC) in read-only mode. We will offer offline editing capabilities in the coming weeks.

Zoho Writer Offline capabilities is based on Google Gears. Many thanks to Google for a great open source project. We plan to support and contribute to this project.

In Zoho Writer, you’ll now see ‘Go Offline’ link on the top. Clicking on the link for the first time will prompt you to install Google Gears. Once the installation is complete (and your browser restarted), click on ‘Go Offline’ to make your documents (both personal and shared docs) available offline. By default 15 documents are downloaded to be available offline. You can change the options by clicking on the down arrow beside ‘Go Offline’ link to download more documents. To go back online, click on ‘Go Online’ and you’ll be redirected to the online version of Zoho Writer.

Once you download your documents, you can access them @ http://writer.zoho.com/offline whenever you are offline.

This brief video talks about this functionality.

Comments is another useful feature we rolled out in today’s update. You can now add comments within the content of your document by clicking on the new comment button in the toolbar (picture-3.png) or just right click and select ‘Add Comment’. When a comment is posted, it is shown with a comment icon (picture-1.png). Multiple users can add comments making it a discussion as you see below.

picture-5.png

Clicking on the comments icon on the status bar (picture-4.png) shows all the comments inside the document.

Do give these features a try and let us know what you think.

Also, we plan to add another useful feature to Zoho Writer next week….any guess on what that would be?

Popularity: 23% [?]

Zoho Creator’s Lead Architect, Answers…

Raffic  August 21, 2007 12: 17 am    Comments (0)

Sriram - Zoho Creator's Lead Arcitect

Sriram, Zoho Creator’s Lead Architect has given an interesting interview (well I shouldn’t say… go check it out for yourself) and a nice peek into Zoho Creator’s Infrastructure, Security and more…

Here are some interesting tidbits from the interview:

ZohoCreator is completely based on relational model and Deluge was a natural fit. Gradually when we integrated Deluge, ZohoCreator transformed from a simple Form Builder to a complete Online Database Application creator.

Migrating ZohoCreator to the Grid Environment was a huge effort. Some part of the data model for the ZohoCreator had to be modified. Especially with regards to sharing. With a standalone service, there is only one database and all the users data resides in one database. Whereas in a database cluster the user information is distributed across the clusters.

The performance aspect of ZohoCreator is bit unique among all other Zoho services. ZohoCreator hits the database more than any other application. There are more write operations compared to other services and hence the database is heavily loaded. These database queries are very dynamic in nature.

We are preparing to host and replicate the data in multiple data centers across the world, so that our customers are not affected by any catastrophic database failures or prolonged network outage. This way even if one of the data center is affected, the others would work fine.

We have developed both REST API’s and XML-RPC/CSV-RPC. So stay tuned for the API release

Here is full length interview of Sriram by Pete Thomas at Land of ZC.

Charles Zoho Creator’s Chief Engineer will be interviewed next by Pete. Watch out this space for an announcement soon.

Previous Interview at Land of ZC: Suganya about Deluge Script

Popularity: 6% [?]

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