New Trial Version
If you are a Zoho Wiki user subscribed to the free plan, you can now test drive the more feature-rich Basic plan for free. All you have to do is log on to your Zoho Wiki account and click on Help -> Pricing at the top-right.



You'll be taken to the pricing page with the prominent 'Let me try the 1 month trial version of Basic plan' at the top.



We are offering this one month free trial of the $12 Basic plan without you furnishing details of your credit card. And taking this trial plan will allow you to test the Custom Domain feature. That is, allow you map your domain to your Zoho wiki. And of course you have other options like creating 5 wikis and having 250 MB of attachment space.

Export/Import Wiki
Click on Wiki -> Settings and you will see the Export/Import option.

The export option allows you to take all your wiki contents (including embedded images, file attachments and comments) as a zip file whenever you need. And you can import the contents back (say copying it all to another Zoho Wiki) if need be. Going forward, we would be giving import function from other Wikis.

Newer Themes
In the menu Wiki -> Settings -> Wiki Themes, you have a variety of readymade themes to choose from. Recently added to the mix are two new themes in the Nature category - Green Valley and Penguins. The specialty of these two themes is that they are of fixed width (960px).

Give Zoho Wiki a try.

Amit Agarwal has a nice blog post explaining how to download all your documents from Google Docs as a zip. If you want to have a back up of your Google Docs online, you can do so using Zoho Docs. Zoho Docs allows uploading of zip files and you can upload the zip file downloaded from Google to Zoho Docs. The slide show below shows the steps involved in backing up your Google Docs in Zoho Docs.

Recently we announced the integration between Google Apps and Zoho Projects. That integration allows you to attach a Google Docs file to the Documents module of Zoho Projects. We are coming up with more such exciting integrations soon. Stay tuned.

Related Posts

• Backup your Gmail in Zoho Mail
• Announcing Zoho Projects for Google Apps
  

Sridhar took part in NBC's Sunday morning business show, Press:Here. This week's episode was hosted by reporter Scott McGrew and Sridhar was accompanied by CEOs of Immersion Corp (Clent Richardson) and Extreme Networks (Mark Canepa). The invited CEOs and the show's host discuss a host of topics from technology in the Valley to the American economy to international markets to H1Bs - Press:Here Episode 31 "CEO Show" Part 1 and Part 2.

Thanks to Scott McGrew, the NBC and the CEOs of Extreme Networks & Immersion Corp for the nice discussion.

InfoLogic's MathMagic is a desktop based equation editor software. Its latest version 6.8 for Mac users has introduced a special menu item for Zoho Writer. MathMagic can now be used as a front-end equation editor by Zoho Writer users (Zoho Writer has allowed writing of LaTeX equations since May 2008). Whether or not you are fluent in LaTeX, you can now write mathematical equations and symbols using MathMagic easily and fast, then simply copy-paste it into Zoho Writer's Equation Editor window. LaTeX expressions from Zoho Writer's Equation Editor can also be copy-pasted into MathMagic window to edit the equation on a WYSIWYG interface.


InfoLogic says MathMagic's Windows version will also support "Copy as Zoho equation" in the near future. We believe this new menu will help both MathMagic & Zoho Writer users.

At Zoho, we provide APIs for a good many of our products and they have all been well received. A sample list of our API partners here. The latest one to join the list is Elementool.

Elementool provides web based project management tools for help desk, bug and defect tracking and time tracking tools. Elementool has implemented Zoho's API in their Docs module. All uploaded documents, spreadsheets and presentations to the Elementool's Docs module can now be viewed using Zoho. Not just viewing, you can edit the file too and when you save the file again, all changes get reflected in your uploaded file in the Elementool account.

Such a functionality is useful if you are uploading a lot of your project/work-related documents, spreadsheets & presentations online and want them viewed or edited then and there in the browser itself (instead of downloading each of them and editing them using a desktop application). Try Elementool out and see if it fits your needs.

We have a couple of other API collaborations happening too which we will blog about in the days to come. Stay tuned.

The first Interop show at Mumbai happened from Oct 7 to 9. We had a booth there representing Zoho and ManageEngine. For a show's first edition, all the arrangements were real good. The show had a good number of exhibitors and there were a lot of sessions going on simultaneously. We were a little apprehensive of the traffic that the show might attract but we were happy when we started having a lot of visitors to our booth from day one. The traffic continued on days two and three as well.

It was my first tradeshow/conference representing Zoho and my business card had my designation as Market Analyst / Blogger. The blogger tag was a bit intriguing to many and it acted as a good conversation starter :)

Cloud computing and SAAS were a big draw. Infrastructure Management Services (IMS) aka RIM also invoked good interest. A lot of our visitors knew Zoho, ManageEngine or our former name AdventNet. We got good feedback from our Indian users on many of our products/services. Other than the photos above, I posted a few photos of the other exhibitors' stalls in my twitpic account. Overall, it was a good show to remember and makes me look forward to the next edition.

Let's see the niceties that the latest Zoho Wiki update has brought in.

Tag Cloud
Tagging of pages is there in Zoho Wiki for quite a long time now. But having all tags as a tag cloud has been the missing part. This has now been included. Under Wiki -> Settings -> Customization, you will find the tag cloud as one of the side panel elements.

You can click on a tag or search by tag and get all the pages matching that tag listed.

New Widgets
Zoho Wiki allows embedding of quite a few widgets. New ones for blip.tv and W3Counter have been added. The tag cloud described above can be added as an embeddable widget in a page, and there is a widget for breadcrumbs too.

Other Usability Improvements
The drop-down menus at the top-right have now been improved. Sub-menus under Wiki -> Settings and My Menu -> My Settings have been added.

Hope you like the new changes in Zoho Wiki.

Microsoft previewing its Office Web Apps (which are to be released in 2010) is news now. And we have some good hands-on reviews like this one.

Robert Scoble interviewed our CEO Sridhar Vembu recently and the 'Microsoft Office coming to the web' news prominently figured in the discussion. Sridhar talks about how Microsoft (who till a year ago were reluctant to admit the web based versions) now announcing their intentions validates the market. He further speaks about how the web-based apps offer productivity gains and at the same time costing less, how email and the office suite are becoming commodities and how they need to be integrated with systems like CRM & your workflow to give you real value etc. View the interview in full:

In a separate interview, Scoble and our Evangelist Raju Vegesna explore various ways a SMB can use Zoho. Raju offers many tips that businesses can take advantage of when using the diversified yet increasingly-being-unified Zoho suite apps.

Thanks to Robert Scoble & the Building43 team for the thought provoking conversation and Rackspace for sponsoring the interview.

While Zoho's focus is on office productivity, another product from the Zoho Corp stable, ToonDoo, originally deemed counter-productive in the workplace is defining new levels of productivity in the classroom! Ever since its launch in March 2007, ToonDoo has been creatively used in the classrooms of educators from all over the world. Today, they launch ToonDooSpaces, an effort to further facilitate the safe, creative and fun use of ToonDoo in classroom environments. ToonDooSpaces combines the creative and social features from ToonDoo with enhanced safety, security and monitoring features


A ToonDooSpace is actually an independent ownership-based domain space at ToonDoo and has a unique address such as www.yourname.toondoospaces.com. Members of a ToonDooSpace can enjoy all the creative and social features available at ToonDoo while administrators can enjoy the following additional features:

• Safety! Security! Privacy! No outsiders or outside content is allowed. Users can only view toons created by other users or administrators. All content and activity can be monitored by administrators.
• Ease of management and administration! Designated administrators can monitor and manage all aspects of their ToonDooSpace with just a few clicks. This includes creating multiple users in one go (no email addresses required), blocking inappropriate content, hiding inappropriate clipart, featuring selected toons, snd monitoring user activity.
• Customizable Homepage! An easy-to-use administrative interface lets administrators customize how their homepage will look to visitors.
• Special clipart! Characters, props and backgrounds specially created from an educational point of view are already available. Students and educators can also upload their own clipart to a special gallery (subject to administrator review and approval.)

• A true translation of ‘Who says learning can’t be fun?’
• A unique out-of-the-box approach to learning
• An engaging and fun-filled way for students to learn new concepts, skills or languages
• A powerful storytelling tool for students to express their creativity and flow of thought
• A productive deviation from the traditional approach to learning and teaching
• An effective medium to encourage collaboration between students
• An interesting method for educators to evaluate student learning
• An instrument to identify and encourage career oriented talent within individual students
• A powerful social network within schools

Douglas MacMillan @ BusinessWeek features Zoho's role prominently in a story about the online business productivity software market in the Asian countries, India & China in particular. Excerpts:

Prithwis Mukerjee, a professor of management at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in eastern India, needed a convenient and low-cost way for his students to create spreadsheets. But rather than turn to Microsoft, the granddaddy of spreadsheet software, he opted for a lesser-known maker of free, Web-based software that gives his students more flexibility than Microsoft's Excel. "Many people don't have Excel, and that becomes a big challenge," Mukerjee says.

Aiming to meet that challenge are two California-based upstarts. One is Google, owner of the most popular Web search engine, and the other is Zoho, the maker of online business productivity tools that won over Mukerjee as a customer.

Because many new computer users in India lack familiarity with Microsoft's Office and other desktop software, they're generally more open to the idea of cloud computing, says Zoho Chief Executive Sridhar Vembu. "There's a whole set of new companies that have no apprehensions" about Web-based software, Vembu says. "We are now starting to see this as a major market opportunity."

Since opening an office in Vembu's former hometown of Chennai, in 1996, Zoho has attracted about 400,000 users, or 20% of its base, in India and China. It now employs more than 300 workers in the office. In China, Zoho distributes its wares in partnership with local company Baihu. With demand for PCs, mobile phones, and broadband Internet growing more quickly in these markets than in the West, Vembu predicts that a decade from now the majority of Zoho's revenues will come from customers in China and India.

Businesses use the software to equip salespeople in the field. In 2008, Mumbai-based data hosting company NetMagic Solutions signed up to use Zoho's customer relationship management (CRM) software to help sales teams in different offices share information about customer leads. At first, a lack of connectivity in many parts of India was a problem. "There were complaints from the salespeople saying that they were unable to connect to Zoho" while traveling, says Jayabalan Subramanian, the company's chief technology officer. Now that AT&T is rolling out more of its 3G wireless broadband network throughout India, NetMagic says that has become less of a concern.

If you happen to run a business in India or China, we believe you are giving online services like Zoho some serious thought, for the economic and productivity benefits they provide.

Thanks to Doug & BusinessWeek!