Last year, Zoho won the Best Enterprise Start-up in the first Crunchies Awards. We have been selected as a finalist for this year’s Crunchies too. Thanks to all of you who nominated us for this year as well! Do vote for Zoho in the Best Enterprise category by clicking on the badge below.

Thanks in advance!

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The year-end has brought a couple of awards our way. Jason Hiner of TechRepublic includes Zoho as one of “The 10 most important business technology products of 2008“. From his post,

While Google occasionally adds new features to its online productivity applications and Microsoft is rumored to be preparing an online version of Microsoft Office that it can release as soon as its market share comes under serious fire from online competitors, Zoho has quietly been building an impressive fleet of Web-based productivity and business applications that are far more numerous and sophisticated than what Google offers and truly take advantage of the Web rather than just bringing offline apps into the browser. Especially for small businesses, Zoho is a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and it not only saves money but also provides productivity benefits with online collaboration.

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb awarded us with the “Best LittleCo of 2008“. Excerpts from his post :

We felt that Web Office vendor Zoho best represented the ‘LittleCo’ ethos this year, due to its David vs Goliath effort in competing head on with products from several very large companies: Microsoft Office, Google Apps, Salesforce.com’s core CRM platform.

Zoho made two of our year-end Top 10 Products list - in the International category and in the Enterprise catagory. It is an Indian startup that offers a number of office tools, project management software and CRM solutions. It made serious advances with its office productivity suite during 2008, reaching a milestone of 1 million users in August this year.

Some of the specific highlights this year include: updating Writer at the beginning of 2008 to include support for the DocX file format, along with several other features; adding support for Visual Basic compatible macros to Zoho Sheet in April, then macro record and playback four months later; releasing a marketplace in September; Zoho Mail emerging from private beta in October, while offering offline support via Google Gears.

Thanks to Jason & Richard. And most importantly, thanks to all you users out there for your continued patronage & support.

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Sridhar got interviewed by Kamla Bhatt of LiveMint Radio. You can listen to the interview or read the transcripts here - Part I and Part II. Excerpts from the interview :

Kamla: Describe to us the different products that you have. What are the new products that you are going to be introducing by the end of the year?

Sridhar: We have just this year, for example, we completed the office suite with a really good e-mail solution and we have a CRM, and project management. And one of our most interesting products is called Zoho Creator that allows anyone to develop applications on it. Alongside we launched Zoho marketplace. So that is really what we have done this year. Our next year’s priority is going to be around integrating all of these applications. That is the top request for our users is to integrate seamlessly. Mostly for example CRM with e-mail and office documents with CRM and those kinds of integration. We still have new products but those will all be for example CRM adding support modules those are the new things that are coming up. Really a lot of the focus is going to be on integrating these applications and to make a coherent integrated suite. So that is the part of the vision.

Kamla: You described Zoho as an Indian company with a skeletal staff here in the US. What were some of the early pitfalls and problems that you encountered working on Zoho because we know about the success but what about the pitfalls?

Sridhar: Sometimes in anything new you do, you simply have to figure out a lot of things like how to write software efficiently to run as a web service on the internet. All of these we have to figure out and those are the engineering challenges, then the market challenges so figure out what for example in CRM market is. But I didn’t come from a CRM background, we came from a different background so figuring that out. So those are the challenges but we have smart people that we have developed internally a cadre of managers and engineers who are come up in the system and they are really smart and they observe a lot of companies. Basically we are also a business school and so they learn and they put their lessons to work, the next generation. So that is how we are. It’s very much an organic process its not like day one when we think of doing something and we get that right. Its like we launched something and then we learned a lesson, sometimes it’s a failure and then we analyse why we failed, go back do it again. We have done that with even our CRM for example; our first ten ships were in 2004 as a product we didn’t ship it as a web service. The whole CRM was a product. And then we decided no that is not the right way to talk in this market so we actually reloaded as a web service. So that is the ability to learn from your mistakes and adapt. That is what I think is the key to success.

Kamla: Here is a question that I often encounter from start up folks in India. They say that there is no big exit of an Indian start up in India so they are looking for role models and stories-successful stories. You have been very vehement against an exit strategy. You want to keep your company private. How would you answer this question if an entrepreneur from India came and asked you we don’t have good role models so we don’t have companies that have exited? How would you answer that question?

Sridhar: Well I don’t, each person has to decide for themselves what they want in this life and I am not interested in exit because I like working in this company and I like coming to work everyday why would I want to exit or would I want to sell and get out? I am not interested in it. So that is the reason it is not because I am philosophical opposed to it but I just personally don’t like to do it. Exit is something which is not in your control. Whether Google is going to acquire or yahoo is going to acquire or some Indian company is going to acquire that is not in the control of a person starting the company. So my advice would be to forget that as a plan, focus on serving the customer and making money. Then may be exit will happen or may not happen. In our case we are not interested in an exit so it is not part of our strategy at all. But even if you want an exit may be it is a better idea to just forget about it and build a real company, serving real customer and making money. In that case then the exit is a bonus if it happens and if its not its not. So that is what my advice would be.

Thanks Kamla, for the excellent & elaborate interview!

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Zoho Creator got an update today with a new feature that lets you deploy your Zoho Creator applications to Google App Engine.

Zoho Creator has been one of our applications with a good set of passionate users. The apps created in Zoho Creator have been on the rise (more than 130,000 applications created so far), which I’d like to attribute to the power, flexibility and uniqueness of the application. Today, Zoho Creator takes it one step further adding a new deployment option for the applications created in Zoho Creator.

After Google App Engine’s launch, we noted that the Cloud Infrastructure Services market is getting interesting with multiple infrastructure offerings from vendors with different layers of abstraction. We also noted…

…in principle, it would be possible to layer Zoho Creator on top of Google App Engine on top of Amazon EC2.

This is basically what we have done today with this new functionality. We have layered Zoho Creator on top of Google App Engine.

App Engine Deployment

When you open an application in Zoho Creator in edit mode, you’ll see a new option ‘Deploy in App Engine’ under ‘More Actions’ menu (on the top). This option will let you generate and download the Python code (App Engine supports deployment of Python only apps) of your Zoho Creator application which you can then deploy to Google App Engine. The following video explains this process in detail.

The current deployment process is a bit geeky at this time, but we are working to make this more seamless. When applications are deployed on App Engine, entire application and the data exists with Google App Engine.

The process of deploying a Zoho Creator application on to App Engine doesn’t require knowledge of Python. You don’t even have to write a single line of code to create and deploy an application either on Zoho or Google App Engine.

Zoho Creator essentially acts as an IDE  for Google App Engine.

The flexibility of generating Python code actually comes form the way Zoho Creator is designed. To be precise, it is the way Zoho Creator and Deluge are modeled in a database. This makes it easy to generate any kind of code. Currently it is Python and we can extend this to other languages in the future, if needed.

Limitations

The current version has some limitations. Applications with these features cannot be deployed on to App Engine currently.

• File Upload & Notes field
• Criteria based Views
• Group by Operator
• HTML, Summary & Calendar Views
• Themes support as in Zoho Creator
• Limited Deluge Scripting support (only email notifications are supported)

Examples

Here are couple of applications created in Zoho Creator and deployed in both Zoho & App Engine.

Contact Organizer:

• Google App Engine Deployment
• Zoho Creator Deployment

Issue Manager:

• Google App Engine Deployment
• Zoho Creator Deployment

With our CloudSQL release last month, we let the data free, giving you the control of your data. With this release, we are letting your applications free, offering you alternative deployment options. Welcome to the new ‘open’ model.

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We brought in more control over whether you want your wiki pages to be crawled by search engines. Click on Settings -> Robots and you can specify your robots.txt configuration options here.

By default, your public wiki pages will *not* be crawled by search engines. You will have to change the Disallow: /* to Allow: /* for making search engine bots visit your Zoho Wiki. You can become a little more imaginative here and specify which pages need to be crawled and which ones not to be crawled. Refer to this help page for more info about the robots file configuration.

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NASSCOM (The National Association of Software and Services Companies), India has announced the finalists of the NASSCOM Innovation Awards 2008. 24 companies have been shortlisted. 4 winners and 4 runners up will be felicitated and recognised for their outstanding contribution to the Indian IT sector. We are proud to have made the final list.

Earlier in 2006, Zoho/AdventNet made it to the NASSCOM’s 100 IT Innovators list. Our profile [pdf] then.

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UPDATE : The forums have been successfully migrated. More details.

Zoho forums is being migrated to a new platform. The forums will be down from December 3, 7:30 pm PST to December 4, 3:30 am PST. For the most part during this period, you will be able to view the forums and search past topics, but you will not be able to do any posting.

If you need clarifications or support during this time, you can mail our support team by clicking on the ‘Feedback’ link found at the top-right of each of the Zoho services. The support email addresses are also listed here.

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Today, we are adding a new section to our website - Zoho Status - which displays the health of all Zoho Applications. You can visit http://status.zoho.com to see if our applications are running and responding fine. The site provides you availability & response times for the past week along with downtime, if any.

Zoho applications are monitored from six different locations - Seattle, New Jersey, Singapore, London, Germany & Australia - and the response times for each location are displayed in the status page for each Zoho application.

This is the first version of the roll out and as with other Zoho Applications, we will continue to roll out enhancements.

Site24×7 Enterprise

So, where does Zoho Status come from? Well, it is our Site24×7 application that you may not have noticed from the Utilities section of our website that is quietly serving the needs of thousands of paid customers.

We also have an announcement for Site24×7 today. We are launching the Enterprise version of Site 24×7 with more functionality. Apart from monitoring websites and applications, this version adds more funcitonality like Defining SLAs & track their compliance for applications, Enterprise class reports & many more. Here is a comparison between different versions in Site24×7.

You might wonder where the management expertise comes from. It comes from our parent company AdventNet and its ManageEngine business unit that is doing an awesome job with an impressive list of useful applications for monitoring, management and other areas, serving the needs of IT Departments. We borrowed that monitoring technology for Site24×7. Infact, we use most of the products from ManageEngine to closely monitor, analyze, secure the Zoho data centers. We hope to borrow lot more code from them going forward :).

Coming back to Zoho Status, this is one case where we hope you wont have a need to get to this page. This initiative is yet another step to being more open and transparent with our users.

If you’d like to setup similar status screens for your applications/wesbite, head over to Site24×7 and get started with a free account.

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In an article about Microsoft’s announcement-of-an-announcement regarding its web-based Office offering, Anita Hamilton writes about Zoho and quotes our Raju Vegesna. Excerpts :

“I think it’s about time the Office suite is free,” says Zoho’s tech evangelist Raju Vegesna. “We paid $500 for an Office suite when the price of the hardware was $5,000. Now the price of the hardware has come down to $500, and it doesn’t really make any sense for a piece of software to cost $500.”

For most users, however, free Web apps are really all you need. And they’re getting better all the time. Zoho has spreadsheet, word-processing, presentation and organizing programs, and lets you work both online and off; it even has an iPhone app.

Before you pay even the lowest price for Microsoft Office, give Zoho or Google Docs a try. They aren’t confusing, and they won’t make you feel stupid. To make absolutely sure, I became my own guinea pig. I typed this story in Zoho Writer, even though I had never even tried it until this week.

Thanks to Anita & TIME.

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Few months back we added the ability to login to Zoho with your Google and Yahoo! Accounts. It was an instant success as we received good feedback from users and observed more users using Zoho than before.

The approach we started with had its limitations. We used AuthSub interface which wasn’t primarily intended for authentication as were requesting permission to access the Contacts from user’s Google account. Also, with this approach, you had to grant access to Zoho every time you used your Google credentials to login to Zoho.

Today, Google released Google IDP and we are glad to be part of it. Zoho now uses Google IDP, replacing AuthSub. This means, with this new approach, when you login to Zoho with your Google account, you just authorize Zoho to obtain your email address alone from Google (unlike obtaining the entire contact list in the previous case). More details on this are available in the Google IDP Authorization page.

This new approach comes with an important advantage. As you see in the screenshot above, if you enable  ‘Allow zoho.com to remember me’ option, you can automatically sign-in to Zoho with a single click when you are already signed in to Google. This is a great advantage compared to the previous approach where you had to grant access every time you login with your Google credentials.

We’d like to thank Google for inviting us to participate in this initiative and thank our Zoho Accounts team which has been doing an awesome job under the hood to provide smoother experience to our users. The team has more exciting things coming.

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