Holly L. Hanson is the COO of Techström, a business coaching and solutions company. Holly partners with Jeffrey Watts to work with their clients in developing the right solution for them. Holly wrote in to tell us about how Techström is using Zoho Projects.

Techström has over 25 years of experience in business coaching, strategy development and software implementation. We manage many different types of projects at once - marketing, planning, direct mail campaigns, software implementation, equipment purchases and CEO training. In the past, we tried to manage projects through Microsoft Project and Projixx. Microsoft Project was too cumbersome. It took longer to build the project specs than it did to do the project. Projixx had less set-up time but lacked the multiple levels of functionality we needed.

Recently, for one of our consulting clients, we reviewed several project management software. As we reviewed Basecamp, Projixx, Google Business with add-ons, we could see Zoho had the superior product. The client we were reviewing this product for had multiple offices nationally and internationally. With Zoho Projects, each of their team members can have their version in their language and the client chose to go with Zoho. Since this decision, we have turned 2 more clients on to Zoho and we will continue to recommend it to our clients as an excellent hosted solution. Over all, we have approximately 25 users across 3 companies with 3-10 projects at each location.

With Zoho Projects, we could create templates for the different types of projects saving time and creating a workflow for our process. This assists us much as we add more people to a project. Having a hosted solution also helps. We no longer need to purchase software or back-up software as it is all handled through Zoho.

Our business is about collaboration and creating systems that run smoothly. Zoho Projects facilitates the collaboration and keeps the conversations going. We use the forum function much as we continue to develop our communication in Projects.

Our company uses the Tasks and Milestones to create our project plans and keep our team on track. Being able to share files and upload the supporting documentation for each project has improved communication on projects tremendously and has kept our team organized. When we first looked at Zoho Projects, we were thinking of it as an internal tool. We are now inviting clients and contractors to view and collaborate on projects within the Zoho system.

We have been so impressed with Zoho Projects that we have created a Zoho Business account and are continuing to advise our clients to switch to the Zoho platform for all of their business needs.

If you are using Zoho Projects, do let us know how you are using it.

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We get this query very often - to clarify where exactly to put different info in Zoho CRM. The query usually comes from users migrating from other CRM systems as terminologies differ or users new to using a CRM app. Let me try to explain some of the modules (tabs) - Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Potentials - in simple terms.

Leads : Suppose you have a free product that you offer for download at your website. And during installation you ask for the user’s details to be filled in. Or, you have a whitepaper on your website and you ask your readers to fill in details before accessing it. Or, you attend a tradeshow and collect info from people visiting your booth. Such collected user information belongs to Leads. Your sales guys typically call or email these Leads and see if they are interested in buying your services or products.

Contacts : Let’s say you followed up on a Lead and have made a sale. Now, you have a happy customer who you will be interacting with on a regular basis. You move her from Leads to Contacts.

Accounts : Accounts is where you put the company information of all your customers. You typically have one or more Contacts associated with an Account.

Potentials : This module helps you track the value of sales potential pipeline. A Potential is associated with a Contact and an Account. Suppose you have Contacts A and B in a customer Account C. And you are discussing sales of goods worth $2,000 with A and $4,500 with B. Your Potential sales pipeline for Account C is worth $6,500 then.

The above is just one simple interpretation of how to use the various modules in Zoho CRM. Zoho CRM allows extensible customization. You can rename the tabs to suit the industry/business you are in. And you can even add custom fields in each module.

As a blogger, I use Zoho CRM extensively. But my use is limited to having everyone in my Contacts list. For a full take on how a typical business is using Zoho CRM, please follow the excellent series of posts being written by Adam Stone of D-Tools. And if you are looking at using Zoho CRM, have a ton of info to be moved from another CRM or from a csv/xls file, please email us and we’ll be glad to help you migrate.

For those of you who are already heavy users of Zoho CRM - it would be great if you can share your best practices of how you are using the above modules in Zoho CRM in the comments.

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Are you using Zoho Mail and want to make it your default mail client in Firefox 3.x? Login to Zoho Mail and copy-paste the following URL in your browser address bar.

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","http://mail.zoho.com/mail/compose.do?extsrc=mailto&mode=compose&tp=zb&ct=%s","ZMail")

Click on “Add Application” which appears underneath the address bar when prompted from the browser and in the pop-up window that opens, set ZMail as your option.

Now, whenever you click on a mailto:johndoe@abcinc.com link on a web page, it’ll open up a Zoho Mail ‘Compose’ window.

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Making a Zoho Creator app and embedding a form in your blog or website is easy. Let’s see a couple of typical scenarios that you might face.

1. Say you are conducting an online survey in your blog or website and you want to collect some feedback data from your visitors. But you don’t want to show all the data that is being collected when the survey is on (as that may affect your survey outcome).
2. Your survey ends and you want to display the data collected but not the form you used to get the data (so that your visitors don’t add any more data once the survey has ended).

For the first scenario, the collection form is to be made Public so that anyone can access the form.

• Let’s say you have created the application in Zoho Creator. By default, it is Private (that is, it is accessible only to you upon logging in)
• Go to the Edit mode of your application and click on the Share tab.
• From the left panel, click on the Form that is to be embedded. In the center of the page, click on the Change link.
• The form is now Public and you should see the Anyone can enter data into this form message now.
• Click on Access this application -> More Actions -> Embed in your website. Copy-paste the iframe code given there to your blog/website page
• Log out from Zoho Creator and see if your blog/website page displays the embedded Zoho Creator form properly
• Test your application by submitting some data
• You should be able to see the data submitted only after logging to your Zoho Creator account

For the second scenario, you will just have to reverse which of the application part - here, it is the ‘view’ part - that is to be made Public (and marking the ‘form’ part as Private).

Hope that helps when building your next Zoho Creator application.

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It’s been a couple of months since we launched Zoho Docs, the integrated console for all your business-related files. Let’s look at some of its useful features in detail.

1. Multiple-level folders : With Zoho Docs, you can create a folder hierarchy structure. For those of you Web 2.0-ers, Zoho Docs also supports tags (labels).

2. Re-arrange files and folders : You can click on one or more files, drag and place them in a particular folder. Folders can be re-arranged too by drag-and-drop.

3. Upload zip files : You can zip your desktop files and have them in Zoho Docs as an online backup. After uploading a zip file, you can unzip it inside Zoho Docs. The same folder order that you had zipped them in gets re-created in Zoho Docs.

4. Share multiple files with a group : You can share multiple files to one or more of your friends, colleagues or contacts. Make a group by listing the email addresses of the persons and choose the files to be shared to this group.

5. Search : You can search within your Zoho Docs files.

Try Zoho Docs. More features coming soon.

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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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Mani did a little exercise by ccing mails to 5 different people in Zoho Mail and GMail. This was to see how a typical conversation involving many people got shown by the two apps. GMail’s help page about conversational view says, “When you open one message in a conversation, all of your related messages will be stacked neatly on top of each other, like a deck of cards”. The conversation that we’d appeared in GMail as below.

Zoho Mail offers a hierarchical, threaded conversational view, accessed by clicking on the speech icon of any email in the conversation.

It’s obvious which view the Zohos who took part in the above exercise preferred Which view do you prefer and why?

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The latest Zoho Writer’s update brings in another much asked for functionality. Click on the Page Setup in Zoho Writer’s toolbar and you can choose to have your document in Portrait or Landscape mode. Save the changes in the Page Setup option and also the document. Click on Page View and you will see the document in the chosen mode. And this is the orientation the document will get printed in.

Like with Zoho Mail and Zoho Business, Zoho Writer now sports the white background theme too. This is another move towards standardizing the UI of various Zoho services.

Test drive the latest Zoho Writer and we would be glad hearing your comments.

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Kelly Kilpatrick over at CareerOverview blog has compiled a list of 100 links related to Zoho. The list consists of tools, tips, resources, tutorials and articles on Zoho and should be useful for all Zoho users.

The Ultimate Guide to Zoho: 100 Tips and Resources to Better Use the Web Office Alternative

Thanks to Kelly & Career Overview.

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Glad to share with our readers how toneee.com is using Zoho Projects. toneee.com is a company offering web development solutions. They not only design websites but also provide database development, document imaging, merchant services etc. Tone Williams, who owns the company explains in his own words, how he and his team are effectively using Zoho Projects.

Our Design Process involves dozens of tasks divided into 6 phases. We are able to quickly incorporate our existing process into Zoho Projects using the Tasks & Milestones area. We group tasks into Task Lists, and Task Lists into Milestones, which matches the phases of our design process. Furthermore, the system is flexible enough to create “Project Templates”, which inserts all tasks, task lists, and milestones into a brand new project in a single click! This saves our Project Manager an enormous amount of administrative/set-up time and practically eliminates human error during the set-up process.

The Dashboard allows our team members to review what is going on with a particular project, including the most recent documents uploaded, the most recent forum entries, and the items assigned to that member for the entire week. The Dashboard is referred to several times a day, since things change regularly with every project.

One of our most frequently used areas is the Forums. This is our central place of communication between our employees, contractors, suppliers, and customers. We oftentimes use categories to organize our conversations, since a single project may involve several services. In the above example, the client has a Web Maintenance Plan, and can request us to update the company website on-demand. Because the client also uses us for Merchant Services, we categorize e-commerce related enquiries/posts under “Merchant Service Items”.

More details about this case study here. Do tell us how you are using Zoho Projects in the comments or by filling up this form.

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