Curtis Partridge at Small Business Tech blog in a post titled ‘Zoho Portfolio Continue to Grow‘ says,

One company that has been quietly building a stunning collection of applications is Zoho. They now offer an impressive array of software including office applications, invoicing, project management, and customer relationship management, database, and more. They have formed world-wide alliance partnerships around the globe to assist small business with using their products. They seem much more serious than others about developing a cloud computing business beyond the geek crowd.

In the coming weeks, we are going to dig more deeply into each of the Zoho applications and compare functionality with other online-based products.

We are eagerly waiting to hear what you would have to say about Zoho, Curtis!

Looking for a free or affordable project management app? David Glumac from Budapest, Hungary suggests some ‘alternatives to MS Project‘. David writes about Zoho Projects,

The team at Zoho is one of the coolest “Web 2.0” companies out there. Their online office suite includes tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, note-taking, wikis, CRM, project management, invoicing and other applications. Being web-native, all Zoho applications are operating system independent. It supports creating tasks, ownership, setting deadlines and tracking milestones; working with calendars, Gantt charts, reports, share supporting files—all the cool features expected in a project management package.

Anali at the MCLC Library Tech Talk blog in her ‘Talking Tech Friday - Zoho‘ post does a brief overview of some of the Zoho apps.

 Just to prove that Google doesn’t rule the world, I thought I would do a brief overview of the Zoho suite of online tools.

[Zoho Sheet] looks very much like Excel, and also allows you to import or export .xls files from or to your computer. You can embed sheets into a blog or website, collaborate with others, and use a broader variety of tools than with Google Spreadsheets, including macros. One feature I just noticed here, and is the same for Writer, is you can export in a wide variety of formats, including .xls, xml, html, pdf, open office, etc. Very handy!

The [Zoho] wiki uses a nicer WYSIWYG interface than many wiki or blog editing applications I’ve seen. No silly wiki text markup (the bane of my existence), and it looks nicer to me than the PB Wiki design. However, the wiki allows you to choose your own editor, set your own brand and logo, and manage editing and viewing permissions.

Enda Madden at his SaaS Technologies blog says ‘Run your business with Zoho‘.

The last few months I’ve been road testing the Zoho applications by using it for my own company’ day to day administration. Originally Zoho was best known for their meeting application software which was a great substitute for WebEx. Over the last year they’ve constantly added new useful apps and at this stage have almost anything that any SME business would need.

One of my personal favourites is Zoho Invoicing which is a quick and very smart way to generate estimates and invoices http://invoice.zoho.com/login/jsp/login.jsp).

Better still it integrates into Zoho CRM.

Thanks to all the above bloggers!

Popularity: 42% [?]

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As we announced yesterday, Equation Editor (with LaTeX support) is the latest feature in Zoho Writer. This one has deep personal relevance to me. My first “programming language”, in the sense that I wrote a lot of code, was actually LaTeX. It is a programming langauge for accurate typesetting of documents, that in many ways anticipated developments like HTML/CSS.

As a graduate student at Princeton, I spent countless hours writing and rewriting papers for publication using LaTeX, first with inputs from my advisor, and later from anonymous reviewers at publications like The IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Of course, my entire PhD thesis was written in LaTeX as well. The most important aspect of LaTeX I loved was its easy facility with equations. You would type in something like (Ampere’s Law - thank you Wikipedia!)

\Delta  \times  \mathbf {B} =  \mu_0  \mathbf {J} + \mu_0  \epsilon_0  \frac{\partial  \mathbf {E}}{\partial t}

and the LaTeX compiler would generate

Or the integral form of Ampere’s Law:

 \oint_{\partial S}   \mathbf {B} . d \mathbf {l}  =  \mu_0 I_S + \mu_0 \epsilon_0   \frac{d {\Phi}_{E,S}}{dt}

It was pure magic to see the compiler generate such beautiful forms. I spent four years of life with equations like that - pretty much every section, every page in my thesis had them. As a graduate student, I used to wonder if such equations could be generated via a friendly user interface - keep in mind that MS-DOS still ruled the world at that time and graduate students like me had Sun workstations. I myself had little interest in software at that time (I was going to prove theorems, so I looked down on programming as a lowly activity!) so never pursued that thought further. If someone had predicted at that time that I would end up founding a software company one of whose key products is a word processor, and LaTeX would play a role in it, I would have just laughed the idea off as absurd or in technical terms, “of vanishingly small probability”, a phrase that sticks in mind after seeing those epsilons and deltas (or \epsilon’s  \ and  \ \delta’s in LaTeX terminology!). I used to practically dream in epsilons and deltas during that period - so many of the mathematical proofs depended on them being close to but not quite zero. 

I am very happy to see the Equation Editor in Zoho Writer give shape to that user interface idea. There is a lot more potential in typesetting using LaTeX like ideas, and you will see us pursue them in due course.

Thinking back, what is surprising to me now is how little of my PhD I remember. I retrieved my PhD thesis from its long-forgotten closet, dusted it off, and it is all Greek to me. I can scarcely even believe it is my own work I am staring at. I used to be really, really passionate about proving theorems, so it seems even stranger that I would just completely abandon it. The only thing I would have gotten right with all my PhD training was to recognize that vanishingly small probability events can still happen.

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Today’s Zoho Writer update introduces three key functionalities

1. Import Documents from Google Docs to Zoho Writer
2. Equation Editor
3. LaTeX Export

1. Import Documents from Google Docs to Zoho Writer

After we accepted Google and Yahoo! sign-in to Zoho (and Google Apps accounts sign-in), we were asked to implement import capability to Zoho. We have added this feature in this update. And now you can import your Google Docs into Zoho Writer. Here are the steps :

• Login to your Google Docs account & choose the documents that you need to export to Zoho
• Click on More actions -> Save as HTML (zipped) to your desktop
• In Zoho Writer, click on Import -> Import Google Docs, select the zipped file path and click Import
• All the Google Docs documents in the zip file will be imported into your Zoho Writer account & will be displayed in the left panel

We certainly don’t want to trap your information in Zoho. We will soon provide a mass Export option to take your documents to other services.

2. Equation Editor
As you may know, a significant % of our users are students. We got a lot of requests from this user segment to build an Equation Editor into Zoho Writer. And Zoho Writer has it now.

You’ll see a new Equation Editor icon (last one in the second row of the toolbar) which brings up a simple UI to create your equations. If you are a LaTeX guru, type your equation away and we automatically generate an image of the equation on the right. If you are not a LaTeX expert (like me), you can simply select the equation symbols with your mouse and we automatically build the equation for you. Once done, the equation image is inserted into your document.

After you insert your equation, if you want to make any changes to it, right click on the image and select Edit Equation.

3. LaTeX Export
As you see in the above slide show, we support LaTeX, the document markup language widely used by mathematicians, scientists, engineers and scholars in academia. We have a new option in Zoho Writer under Export, to save such files involving equations in LaTeX format as well.

Try the new features in Zoho Writer now & we will be glad knowing your comments.

Popularity: 27% [?]

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We are delighted to announce that Zoho is part of PC World’s “The 100 Best Products of 2008“. Thanks to PCWorld’s editors & readers! We stand 49th on the list.

We were also included in similar list last year. Zoho was also included as one of The 25 Most Innovative Products of the Year from PC World late last year.
Past awards won by Zoho.

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We recently added support for logging into Zoho with your Google or Yahoo Accounts. What about Google Apps users?

Well, we support that too. Google Apps users can also login to Zoho with your Google Apps account. For this to work, you first have to login in to your Google Apps account. Here are the steps…

• Login to your Google Apps Account
• Go to any Zoho App and select Google Sign-In
• Confirm that you want to use your Google Apps account
• Grant Access to login to Zoho

If you are not signed-in to your Google Apps account before signing in to Zoho, Google rightly assumes that your are signing in with your Google account and not your Google Apps account. So you’ll have to login to your Google Apps first before logging into to Zoho.

Now that you can login to any Zoho App with your Google Apps account, it opens up some interesting possibilities. More on that later…

Popularity: 13% [?]

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Zoho Writer provides you with quite a few page setup options. For accessing them, click on the Page Setup icon (third from left, first row of the Zoho Writer toolbar). The pop-up window has 3 tabs marked General, Header & Footer.

In the General tab, you can set the font face, font size, page bg color, top/bottom & left/right margins, paper size, direction (those in the Middle-East can set right-to-left for Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu etc) & line spacing. All these properties can be set for each document by default. And if you want this to be applied to every new document you create, you can check the ‘Make it default for All New Documents‘ checkbox.

In the Header and Footer tabs you can choose what to display in the Left, Middle, Right areas of the Header/Footer sections of a document.

And the icon adjacent to Page Setup is Page View. Use it to see how your page will look while it’s printed - both width-wise & length-wise (where a page ends & the next one begins). The Page View is in Read Only mode currently & we will be extending this option to Edit mode soon.

Use the above options while drafting your documents in Zoho Writer & let us know in the comments below of how it went.

Popularity: 22% [?]

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Glad to see Microsoft supporting ODF, PDF and other document formats in Office 2007. As you may know, Zoho currently supports these formats (including OOXML). But then, going forward, do document formats really matter?

We need these formats to exchange files between computers and other users. More and more, we are seeing that the documents are moving online. We truly believe that online applications are the future where you can create and save your content online. When your data is in the cloud, your document is just a URL away. This means, you don’t attach files, you simply share them, online. You don’t need to copy files between computers. They are just a browser away from all the computers. In this pure online model, document formats doesn’t really matter. Even in the offline mode, you don’t really have a document format for browser-based apps.

We are not there yet to ignore these formats. But sure, we’ll get there one day.

Popularity: 13% [?]

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Zoho Show lets you view all public presentations in a single place. Public Presentations are the ones either created or imported to Zoho Show and made public by our users. These presentations are categorized as ‘Latest Presentations‘, ‘Popular Presentations‘ & ‘Featured Presentations‘. Of course, you can search presentations based on tags. You’ll find some really interesting material here across different topics.

You can view your public presentations here after you login or @ http://show.zoho.com/public/<zohousername>

If you want to make your presentation public but don’t want to list it in this section, you can do so under the ‘Publish’ Menu with the ‘Remove from Public List’ option.

For every public presentation you have an option to comment, email or embed the presentation. You can also view related presentations or other presentations from the same author.

Popularity: 16% [?]

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Using the web as platform allows for some very interesting possibilities. Like making a presentation to a world-wide audience sitting at your desk. Let’s see how you can use Zoho Show in doing such a remote presentation.

• In your Zoho Show account, open the presentation that you need to present to your remote participants
• Click on the Remote button
• Give the ‘Email addresses of presentation attendees (Remote Users)’ in the pop-up dialog
• You can set your own custom message for the email that is to be sent to the intended participants
• Click Send button. The participants will receive your email with a link in it to click on
• When you are ready to give the remote presentation, choose Start Remote from the Remote menu drop-down
• The remote presentation gets started & your participants join in by clicking on the URL that got sent in your invite mail

You can chat with the participants in the chat window to the right. There are other options like Show Notes & Share this Desktop (other than the Zoho Show presentation, your whole desktop can be shared, which is done using Zoho Meeting, the web conferencing tool).

Try the Remote Sharing feature of Zoho Show & we will be glad hearing about it in the comments section below.

UPDATE : As always, Zoho fans are more thorough in explaining things than ourselves!

1. Amit Agarwal @ Digital Inspiration points to the advantages of Zoho Show’s remote feature - there’s no limit to the number of participants, you the presenter is always in full-control of the presentation & the participants need not have a Zoho account.

2. Richard Byrne notes that Zoho Show’s Remote feature “doesn’t require any software to be downloaded by you or your presentation attendees”.

Popularity: 17% [?]

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We enabled a new indexer for searching group related documents on Saturday. As with search related features, the indexer was supposed to index over several days before the feature was officially unveiled. Unfortunately, we introduced a crucial bug in the new search system, which impacted one of our users on Sunday. The search results included 4 documents from other users (shared to their own unrelated groups). As soon as we got notified, we stopped the search subsystem and started a full investigation, which unearthed the bug in 3 hours.

We fixed the issue immediately after the root cause was identified.

While the fix was applied immediately, it was something we should not have let this slip in. It should have been caught in our quality assurance process. We sincerely apologize to the affected user, and all Zoho users as well.

We work hard at Zoho to keep the system functioning well. An error like this is very painful to us, and we take it very seriously. We will be even more vigilant in future. Please accept our humble apologies.

Popularity: 21% [?]

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