We’re excited to announce the release of a brand-new service, Zoho Marketplace.

Zoho Marketplace is a service that brings users and business application developers together. It provides a growing catalog of business applications that users can try and purchase. If you like an application you can buy it from the developer (some applications are even free) and ‘Install’ it in your Zoho account. Contrary to what happens with installing old business software, the installation is really pain- and worry- free for use. Because everything is set-up, hosted and arranged by Zoho, it only takes a few minutes to start using the application.

But what if the user can’t find the *exact* application he is looking for? No worries. Customers can also post their exact requirements to the Zoho Marketplace, and get help from third-party developers in creating the application they need.

For developers, it provides a place where they can post and market the applications they have developed in Zoho Creator – free of charge. Yeah, you read that right. There is no fee a developer has to pay Zoho to list his application.

In short, just like you can buy “stuff” in Amazon or eBay, you can also get your business applications in Zoho Marketplace.

But wait! That’s not all we have in store for you.

Today we also released a major update for Zoho Creator. Zoho Creator allows regular folks like me to create power data-driven business applications that can be kept private, shared with a group or published to the world. We call those ‘Situated Software‘. But it can of course also be used by more advanced developers to add complex logic, interaction with other sites and more.

This release focuses more on the latter. We have added many new features and capabilities which make developing rich business applications even easier. These include:

• Custom HTML pages. Allows developers to create dynamic, fully customized HTML pages that are part of an application and embed forms, views, widgets, videos and more.

• Layout Customization. Makes it easy to create great-looking applications in seconds. Choose from a variety of layouts and themes. And of course, you can also create your own.

• Stateless Forms. Stateless forms allow developers to take advantage of all the Creator tools and environment, but gives them full control over where their data is stored.

And there’s of course many others – like full support for CRUD operations, the ability to share/un-share an application (or just components of it separately), easier to create mashups by fetching and processing data from other websites, creating maps on the fly and some others.

To celebrate these two releases and to give you an overview of Zoho Marketplace and Zoho Creator 3, we’ve prepared a ‘different’ kind of video for you. If there were and Oscar category for “Best Video Demo Award”, I’m sure this would get one!

In addition, there are two other videos you can check out:

• Zoho Marketplace & Zoho Creator video and demo for customers looking to buy/build business applications.
• Zoho Marketplace & Zoho Creator video and demo for software developers or people who would like to publish applications using Zoho Creator and Zoho Marketplace.

Rodrigo Vaca

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Yankee Group recently released a report - ‘Business Collaboration Tournament: And You Thought the Madness Was Over‘ that matches up 16 of the top business collaboration vendors in a head-to-head contest. We are glad to see Zoho included in here along with some industry heavy weights. Its a good read. The complete article is available here (Sorry, its a PDF).

These are the 16 vendors considered for this article divided into two pools - like a Basketball game.

In the first round, Yankee matches up Zoho and Google. Here is what they have to say…

Collaboration fans could not have asked for a more exciting first round matchup. However, the misinformed fan might want to double-check where to place his or her bets. To the average fan, Google is the clear winner because a. it’s Google and b. all journalists in the space use Google Apps as their example when referring to web-based productivity suites. However, like Apple, Google is a consumer company and in a matchup against SMB-focused Zoho, Google’s business solutions do not stack up.
….
Google’s Gmail (e-mail), Calendar (shared calendaring) and Talk (IM with VoIP, presence and file-sharing capabilities) are top-tier online collaboration and communications solutions. However, Zoho is SMB-focused and Google is attempting to kill two birds with one stone. IT departments have not been convinced that the service-level agreements (SLAs) Google offers with Google Apps Premier Edition are worthy of a total conversion to cloud computing. Both Google and Zoho suffer from this roadblock, among others. But for Zoho, it’s do or die; whereas for Google, it’s do or continue to make billions in online search and advertising.

The last comment above is interesting. If this sounds familiar, this is because Sridhar already talked about this.

…but in the end, Zoho’s Head Coach pushes it into the Elite Eight in a decisive victory over Google.

According to Yankee, Zoho wins over Google in the first round.

The round of Elite Eight is an interesting one with Zoho positioned against Verizon. This is an interesting comparison.

This Elite Eight thriller has some interesting mismatches on the floor between the telecommunications powerhouse Verizon Business and the agile web-based collaboration and productivity services provider Zoho.

With detailed analysis, Yankee advances Zoho to the next round.

In the end, Zoho squeaks by Verizon Business into the Final Four and continues its Cinderella run in the Yankee Group 2008 Business Collaboration Tournament due to its product road map. Without a focus on community-centric solutions, Verizon Business’ game is too communications-centric and therefore too old-school to make it to the Final Four in 2008.

This puts Zoho in final four against Microsoft, IBM & Cisco. These are some big names to be compared with. The analysis goes on to describe how Microsoft goes on to win against Zoho.

Sure, we are not the winner here nor do we expect to be so. Being considered as part of the final four is a privilege. As we always said, we understand that this is not a zero sum game. We are focused on building great affordable apps and let the market decide.

The article contains lots of other details about all 16 vendors covered. It is a good read with good analysis of the existing business collaboration market.

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Jason Calacanis wrote a valuable post on how start-up companies can cope with the “collapsing” economy. A few months ago, Marc Andressen called it the “oncoming nuclear winter” - and that was before the collapse of AIG, Lehman, WaMu and so on. I have shared that pessimism for a while myself; I sold my house in 2004, and chose to rent for the past 4 years, which tells you my view of the housing bubble. While I was too early, prices are well on their way to 2004 levels and lower. This kind of pessimism is not uncommon among tech geek circles. What is going on here? Why are we so pessimistic?

Many tech geeks tend towards libertarian economics or the so-called Austrian School economics - the best way to get into it is at http://mises.org.  No, don’t confuse libertarian economics with the “free market capitalism” claptrap coming out of the Wall Street financial complex; when Wall Street gunslingers touted the miracles of “capitalism”, what they really meant was their government-conferred right to borrow easy money from the Federal Reserve, leverage themselves up 20 to 1,  even 40 to 1 while speculating with that easy money, paying themselves tens of billions collectively in bonuses, finally inflicting hundreds of billions, soon to reach trillions, of losses on the taxpayer when those speculations predictably failed . The Wall Street version of financial capitalism has about as much to do with real savings and investment led capitalist wealth creation as alchemy has to do with with chemistry. The alchemy analogy is particularly appropriate: much of the Wall Street “business model” was really transmuting pools of highly risky, toxic mortgages into nearly risk-free “golden” securities.

A lot of geeks like myself got a real education on this in the last NASDAQ bubble, where the alchemy of the time was transmuting stock in unprofitable private companies into strong “currency” to be used for rewarding employees and to “pay for” acquisitions - the very words “currency” to “pay for” acquisitions, common at that time, connote the realization of the alchemist’s dream. That bubble was also aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve’s easy credit policy, as all such bubbles are. It was that bubble that led me and many other geeks to discover the Austrian School.

The predictable solution the Federal Reserve came up with to fight that bubble’s aftermath was to unleash even more easy credit, this time directed to housing and Wall Street. Even as early as 2004, it was obvious there was a bubble forming in housing, as documented by sites such as The Mess That Greeenspan Made or Prudent Bear which I have been reading for several years now. To give credit where it is due, there is one politician who has taken a strong, consistent stand against the bubble blowing policies of the Fed, warning of the dangers ahead, for several years: Congressman Ron Paul. Just as price to earnings ratios reached the stratosphere in the NASDAQ bubble, price to income, price to rent and mortgage to rent ratios reached historically unseen levels during the housing bubble. To anyone who witnessed the NASDAQ bubble and its collapse, it was a strong sense of deja vu, yet policy makers like Greenspan and Bernanke simply saw nothing wrong. Bernanke, in particular, came up with absurd excuses such as the “global savings glut” to explain the housing/Wall Street bubble, absolving the Fed of any responsibility. It is instructive to keep that track record in mind, because the same policy makers who got us in this mess are still in charge, still making decisions for all of us. No wonder there is such pervasive pessimism in tech geek circles.

Finally, Japan. Anyone in technology industry realizes quickly how important Japan is in the global tech industry. At Zoho, our first big corporate customer is from Japan. That is part of a pattern: in 1996, our first big OEM customer for our network management was Japanese. In fact, it was our Japan connection that first taught me about destructive bubbles, because Japan had its own mother-of-all-bubbles in the late 80s. The Japanese have paid for that financial bubble for nearly a generation. Cocky American economists like Paul Krugman, now a leading NY Times commentator, but at that time only a leading economist, gave the Japanese useful advise like “PRINT LOTSA MONEY” (sic), to get out of their doldrums. Krugman merely reflected the common view among American economists at that time - the Japanese were economic rubes, and if only they listened to the smart American economists their economic problems would be solved. Keep in mind that while Krugman has his issues with the Bush administration, he was cheering Greenspan on in 2003-4 to keep interest rates low and credit flowing freely, which enabled carry-trades of various kinds to run amok, worsening inequality dramatically by shifting wealth to those financially well-connected; Krugman now fully supports the Bernanke Fed and its endless series of bail-outs, while shedding progressive tears for the inequality that the easy credit policies engendered. This misbegotten government policy also has the effect of zombifying companies, freezing bad investments in place, something Japan experienced.

Well, let’s just say God must have a delicious sense of irony. We are all Japanese now.

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In the last post about Zoho Wiki, we saw how Zoho Wiki can act both as a help authoring tool and to host the help documentation. Zoho Wiki can be used to host business portals also. We will see a couple of examples below.

ManageEngine is the flagship brand of AdventNet. And ManageEngine has a separate portal for its partners, called ManageEngine Partner Zone. This portal is hosted on Zoho Wiki.

As you can see, the web site’s look and feel is completely customized. And some of the pages there require authentication to view. Thanks to the fine-grained access control provided by Zoho Wiki, you can have a web site where some pages are visible to all visitors of your site (in ManageEngine’s case, visitors who are interested in becoming partners) and other pages are made accessible to a defined set of people (to those who end up becoming ManageEngine’s partners).

The Zoho Alliance Partner Portal (ZAPP) is on Zoho Wiki too (requires login for viewing).

Other than the above partner portals, ManageEngine’s MSP Center Plus documentation is also a wiki.

How are you using Zoho Wiki?

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Happy to announce the availability of one of the most requested and long awaited features in Zoho Invoice – “Google Checkout Integration”

Yes, we have integrated our service with Google Checkout.  We have already integrated our service with PayPal and now this integration gives more options to our customers.  Now they have the option to choose either PayPal or Google Checkout for accepting online payment from their customers.

Configuring Google Checkout in Zoho Invoice:

Configuring Google Checkout in Zoho Invoice is easy and can be done by following the steps below-

1. Sign-in to Zoho Invoice and click on the “Settings” link at the top right.
2. In the settings page that comes up, click on the “Payment Gateways” link under “Invoice Settings” on the left.
3. Specify your “Merchant ID” and “Merchant Key” and click on the save button.

Updating the invoice balances:

When your customers pay you online via Google Checkout, we can automatically update your invoice balances.  For us to do this automatic update, you will have to do the following-

1. Sign-in to your Google Checkout account and go to settings.
2. Click on the “Integration” link on the left.
3. Now set the “API callback URL” to “https://invoice.zoho.com/gnh.ma”

Getting notified when customers pay you online:

Over and above updating the invoice balances, we can also notify you when your customers pay you online.  Just select the “Notify me on online payments” option in the payment gateway settings page to receive the notification.

Sending payment thank-you to customers:

We can also send payment acknowledgement mails to your customers when they pay you online.  Just select the “Send acknowledgement to customers” option in the payment gateway settings page to send the thank-you mails.

What next?

We definitely have plans to add support for more payment gateways.  If you want us to add support for any specific payment gateway, let us know.  Based on the number of requests, we can prioritize and add support for it.

You can try out this feature by signing into Zoho Invoice now. We would definitely like to hear your comments and don’t forget to drop us a note when you enjoy using this feature.

Regards
Siva

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Introduction here. As I have stated at least twice now we have a LOT of leads in our system and we needed a solid process to manage all of these leads. In the previous post on Sales Roles I explained how each person on the D-Tools sales team has a specific role and and how we use our Zoho CRM system to manage the job function for each specific role.

One of the things that Zoho CRM does really well is the creation and management of custom lists for each entity in the system. An entity in Zoho is a list of related information like leads, or cases, or accounts and so on. Actually calling a Zoho entity a list is somewhat of an oversimplification but I digress.

So we have these “lists” (entities) of data, and each list contains x number of records and each record can have x number of fields. That is a LOT of information that needs to be listed and sorted to whatever the job function is of the person who needs to work with the specific entity. Different people in D-Tools need to work with the same entity but only need a subset of the actual data, not the entire list

Zoho CRM comes with a number of editable, predefined views that can change depending on the Zoho login and role of the login. For example one of the predefined views is ” My Leads”. Zoho assumes that “my” refers to the person logged in and will show a list of “their” leads.

This works great but where Zoho CRM really shines is in the ease of which any user can create their own custom view of the entity without any programming or advanced knowledge of the system. For example, say I am a salesperson we just got back from a trade show. I could easily create a custom list that had all of “my” leads from that show with just the company name, email, phone number and Pre-Qual score. This is how it is done:

1. Go to whatever entity you want to work in and click the Create View link
2. Give the custom view a name like “My CEDIA Leads”. CEDIA being a trade show
3. Specify the criteria as Lead Owner = me, or whoever you want that has a login to the system
4. Click Add Criteria and add CEDIA 08 (trade show name) as the Sub-Lead Source
5. Choose what columns you want to see in the view
6. Check the Show this Custom View only to Me option. This is a great feature because it gets rid of the “custom list pollution” I have seen in other systems. You also have the option of showing this list to everyone, specific users or specific roles in the system. Very well thought out feature set.
7. Hit Save and you have the custom list. You can always go back later and edit this list.

You now have a list that can be easily sorted by any of the columns so the person using the list can easily find the relevant information. When the user clicks on the actual Lead Name it opens the record. A neat trick is to right click on the link and open the record in another window or tab so you can easily get both the micro and macro view of the list.

Easy to create and manage entity views are a critical part of any CRM system and Zoho CRM does it better than any other system I have ever come across. The only issue I have found is that there is no way to create a list that queries more than a single entity. This makes it impossible to send mass emails to contacts of a specific account type.

Also these is no ability to “clone” a custom list. This would come in handy when the SAM is creating custom lists for number of people where the only change is the owner of the record. For the most part you can clone just about anything in Zoho but not these custom lists. Both issues seem like oversights to me. I have let the Zoho CRM technical team know about these issues and I am confident that they will be updated in a future release.

Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.

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Quick shout out to the Zoho CRM technical team.  As anyone who has read my posts here or on the D-Tools blog would know that I sepnd a lot of time in Zoho CRM managing our system.  Zoho gives the CRM admin a plethora of tools to use for this process but when I first implemented the system I found that  they conspicuously left out the ability to search for a blank field, as in give me a list of all records where the email field is blank or empty.

This seemed odd because searching for blank fields is a common maintenance task.  I mentioned this to the CRM technical team and in a few weeks I had the “is empty” criteria as part of filter.  OK, great but why stop there?  How about a filter I can use to find a field that contains information or “is not empty” criteria?.  Pretty basic stuff and only interesting in it’s absence.

Anyway, I was digging around in our system today and found the “is not empty” criteria.  One of the nice things about a well managed and architected SaaS system is that it incrementally gets better and better on its own.

Thank you Zoho CRM team!

Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.

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There was an era (not very long ago) when shooting videos and sharing them on the internet was an esoteric art. Then YouTube and some easy-to-use video cameras and software came along and made it easy for regular folks like you and me to shoot anything and post it on the web.

This is what some people refer to as the ‘democratization of the tools of production’. It was a concept popularized by the ‘Long Tail’, a best-seller book by Chris Anderson. Regardless of your own views of that book (there is some controversy about it), the concept of the democratization of the tools of production is evident in YouTube, blogs, music and some other cases.

Where am I going with this? Bear with me for a second.

Not long ago, ‘geeks’ were the only people who could create data-driven applications on the web. And there was a reason for that - doing so required quite a bit of training, and even years to master just one of the many components involved in creating applications - the operating system, database, application server, web server, security…

But that’s not the case anymore. Zoho Creator is another example of the democratization of the tools of production. In this case, it is about the tools for creating web, business and data-driven applications. With Zoho Creator, everyone can create applications for their own particular need.

But the question is – what kind of applications? There are many kinds of applications out there, and while Zoho Creator can certainly be used by professional developers looking to commercialize their applications, but right now I want to focus on the kind of applications that everyone can create on their own, for themselves and their own consumption.

Let me explain with a simple 2-by-2 matrix.

On the horizontal axis we have the ‘Complexity of the Application’ - how advanced they are in terms of their logic, the formulas and algorithms they use. On the other vertical axis we have ‘Uniqueness of the Requirements’. Lower in the scale means more people share those same requirements. And these two axes are a continuum, but for the sake of this discussion, we’ll imagine just two scenarios for each axis.

So in the high-complexity/common-requirements quadrant we have those applications like ERP and CRM. They are complex applications which required a lot of logic, but millions and millions of people share the same basic requirements. Sure, people spend a lot of time (and money) customizing their ERP system, but most of that has to do with the underlying business process than with the software itself.

In the high-complexity/unique-requirements quadrant we have those applications that land rockets on the moon. Don’t expect to just ‘buy and install’ those applications.

Then there are those applications which are low-complexity and share common requirements - that everybody needs. Say, a calendar or calculator application. Pick one, they all yield pretty much the same result and are used pretty much the same way.

But then there are those applications that are not quite as complex as a rocket-launching system, but they are so unique to a particular situation that you can’t readily get them off the shelf either. What should we call these? Luckily, Clay Shirky already came up with a name for them - “Situated Software“.

Situated Software is the kind of applications people need to collect, share, keep track and report on a variety of data. But they are not long projects that warrant the formal involvement of your IT department, formal methodology and end-less meetings. They might be short-lived projects, almost bordering on disposable software, or they may be applications created to be used for a long while.

In a business environment it might mean keeping track of their IT assets, people registering for an event, managing contacts in a simplified way, tracking bugs, issues or customer requests/comments, etc. For a school, situated software might be about keeping track of student information and their parents, or a simple library records app. There are as many examples as unique ‘situations’ for people – that is, too many to list.

How many? Well, there are already more than 100,000 applications created with Zoho Creator. Zoho Creator makes ‘Situated Software’ possible for everyone. No, we’re not all turning into Star-Wars-and-Star-Trek-loving software developers. We can continue to be regular folks, but we can write our own (situated) software every once in a while.

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GigaOm has a guest post on how start-ups can survive the financial crisis. We have some experience at AdventNet on this, which I want to share. First a bit of history: AdventNet was born as a bootstrapped company in 1996. Our initial business was selling software to network equipment vendors. By 1999-2000, there was a raging bubble in networking and telecom; while the media focused on the flashy dotcoms, it was really telecom service providers and their equipment suppliers that had by far the bigger financial bubble, amounting to over a trillion dollars of capital eventually written off, split between debt taken on by service providers to finance new network construction and the venture capital raised by their equipment suppliers. For every dotcom that raised $5-10 million rounds, there probably was a SONET or WDM start-up that was raising $50-100 million. There must have been a hundred of them just in the San Fransico bay area, but Boston, New Jersey, RTP in North Carolina, Dallas and Toronto all had their fair share of bubble companies, and I must have visited each of these places at least 5 times during 1999-2000.

I had a really good vantage point on the bubble because I personally must have visited 80% of those equipment companies, as a software supplier. Fortunately for me, I was aware of the Japanese bubble of the late 80’s (when Japan was going to take over the world) and its painful aftermath in the 90’s. So even in the middle of the telecom bubble as a supplier, I could not help feeling it was going to end badly. There was a point when I realized that the same exact pitch was made by dozens of companies, yet most of them didn’t know so many others existed, pursuing the same exact business plan.

Having said that, I have to admit even I wasn’t mentally prepared for the extent of the carnage to follow. In 2000, I would have thought may be 20% of the start-up companies would survive. It turned out may be 3 out of 200+ survived. By 2003, over 90% of the companies we had supplied to in in 1999-2000 had gone out of business. That is something to keep in mind on the extent of wreckage bubbles cause - for those keeping score in the bay area or in Chennai for that matter, it is worth considering that real estate prices in Japan eventually fell 80% from the peak they reached in 1990.

So how did we overcome that shock? Here are the things that helped us.  In 2000, there was a venture capitalist who was offering us $10 million for a 5% stake, in order to enable us to grow faster. After careful thinking, we turned that money down, because we felt the industry was going to shrink, not grow, and we didn’t want to commit to a growth projection when our instinct told us to get ready for contraction. We felt if we were to be honest to ourselves, we had to tell the VC we expected to shrink, yet the money was coming in at such a high valuation that it needed growth as far as the eye could see to justify it. One of my friends in venture capital did tell me I was a fool - but that folly saved us.

We didn’t expand our headcount in line with revenue in 2000. We simly banked the cash - which came in really handy in the subsequent nuclear winter. Indeed, it was that cash that enabled us to diversify in 2004, and that was ultimately what led to Zoho.

It seems clear that we are heading into another nuclear winter, this time led by housing and financials. It is going to impact the tech industry, but this time as suppliers not as direct bubble-blowers.  Companies that have a strong balance sheet (we prefer zero debt), and the ability to adapt and flex will survive the wreckage. Customers are hurting, so attractive pricing is a must - there is going to be price deflation in tech. These are the rules we live by at AdventNet & Zoho.

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Received an email with a docx attachment and finding it difficult to view/edit it since you don’t have the latest MS Word 2007 in your desktop? No probs. With the latest update, Zoho Writer allows you to import docx documents. Import the document into your Zoho Writer account and you can view it online using your browser.

Note that the docx email attachment you received is now on the cloud. You can view and make changes to the document where ever you are, from any computer. And you can either share this document to the intended recipients or export it back as a docx file & send it as an email attachment (for the old-timers who still insist that you send the document as an attachment).

You can now import and export the below document formats in Zoho Writer.

Import : html, doc, docx, sxw, odt, rtf and txt
Export : html, doc, docx, sxw, odt, rtf, pdf, LaTeX and txt

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