Zoho is primarily about working online. We have a great set of online productivity apps which businesses find extremely useful for collaboration. Microsoft SharePoint is ubiquitous in enterprises for content management, but it lacks several advantages that cloud applications like Zoho enjoy.

Today we are pleased to announce Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint that brings the advantages of Zoho online productivity applications to ubiquitous Microsoft SharePoint.

Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint extends the value of Microsoft SharePoint by allowing users to create new documents using Zoho's office suite and then save them directly to SharePoint in Microsoft Office supported formats. Users can view or edit existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations using Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show and save them back to SharePoint.

This video gives a good overview of this add-on.

Installation video is available here. As Zoho applications are served from the cloud, you don't need any installations on desktops to create/view/edit documents. Once you install the add-on for SharePoint server, you can be more productive with just your browser.


Zoho Collaboration on Microsoft SharePoint

Apart from providing editing capability for existing documents, the add-on also provides collaborative editing functionality. Based on sharing permissions already defined in SharePoint, multiple users can collaboratively work on documents/spreadsheets/presentations in real-time. This feature basically brings one of the key advantages of an online office suite to SharePoint.


While collaboratively editing documents, you can also chat with other members using our integrated Zoho Chat.

Data Behind your Firewall

Along with small and medium businesses, we see a good percentage of departments in larger organizations using our productivity apps for collaboration. There are  businesses which prefer keeping their data behind the enterprise firewall. For such organizations, this new add-on brings in the best of both worlds - Collaboration capabilities of an online application while keeping the data behind your firewall.

If you have SharePoint installed in your intranet behind your corporate firewall, you still will be able to view/edit documents using our online applications. After changes, your documents are saved back to your SharePoint server behind your corporate firewall leaving no data on Zoho Servers.

When you open the document, a copy is transferred temporarily to Zoho servers securely. When the document is closed, it is permanently deleted from our servers immediately leaving no data on our side.

Pricing & Availability

Starting today, this add-on is available for Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and 2003 versions. You can try the 30 day evaluation version for unlimited users. After the trial period, it costs $2/user/month on an yearly subscription or $3/user/month for monthly subscription.

If you have already invested in Microsoft SharePoint, this add-on is a great compliment that brings in the advantages of online productivity applications to SharePoint. If you are able to access SharePoint, you'll be able to view/edit documents without having to invest on productivity suites for every desktop in your business.

Additional information is available @ http://www.zoho.com/sharepoint

Please do give it a try and let us know what you think. 

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Microsoft, SharePoint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. ZOHO Corp is not affiliated or endorsed by Microsoft Corporation.

Someone recently asked me how many applications we released last year. Frankly, I had no clue. So I decided to dig the brief history a bit and create a time line of launches of various Zoho Apps. Some information could be missing, but I have the information captured for the most part.

Sep 05 - Zoho Writer Alpha
Oct 05 - Zoho Planner
Dec 05 - Zoho Writer Beta

Feb 06 - Zoho CRM Released (Product + Service)
Mar 06 - Zoho Creator
Apr 06 - Zoho Sheet
Jun 06 - Zoho Show
Jun 06 - Site24x7
Aug 06 - Zoho Projects
Oct 06 - Zoho Accounts (SSO)
Dec 06 - Plug-in for MS Office
Dec 06 - Zoho Wiki

Jan 07 - Zoho Notebook
Feb 07 - Zoho Chat
Mar 07 - Zoho Meeting
Jun 07 - Zoho launched on iPhone
Jul 07 - Zoho launched on Facebook
Aug 07 - Zoho Viewer
Sep 07 - Zoho Business
Oct 07 - Zoho Reports

Mar 08 - Zoho People
Mar 08 - Zoho Invoice
Apr 08 - Zoho CRM Enterprise
Aug 08 - Zoho Share
Sep 08 - Zoho Docs
Sep 08 - Zoho Marketplace
Oct 08 - Zoho Mail
Nov 08 - Zoho Status
Dec 08 - CloudSQL

Mar 09 - Writer 2.0
Apr 09 - Chat 2.0
Apr 09 - Zoho Mobile

These are just key product releases. This time line doesn't include plug-ins, integrations, utilities or hundreds of upgrades we did in the past 3 years.

Next week, we will have a new addition to this list. Anyone care to venture a guess on what the new launch will be?

Update: Adam Behringer from Bee Docs created a nice video for this timeline.

Document management systems in many businesses are typically shared network drives. While some businesses have graduated to online document management systems like Zoho, a good percentage of them still use shared network folders or samba drives as their central document repositories, which sit behind the firewall. This means, their documents cannot be easily accessed outside the company network.

What if you need a system to make your existing document management system accessible outside your network, providing the advantages of an online document management system and not disturbing your current setup? This is where Stoneware comes in.

Stoneware provide web access to your internal infrastructure outside your network through your browser. Using their webNetwork application, your internal documents from your shared network drives can be accessed outside the firewall using just your browser.

Stoneware integrated our productivity apps - Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show - into their webNetwork application. With this integration Stoneware customers can view/edit their internal documents using just the browser and save them back to their internal network. After all, there is a reason they want to keep their data behind the firewall. So this integration does exactly that. It lets Stoneware users open their internal documents from existing shared drives using Zoho Apps and save them back to their internal network.

This remote saving capability has been available through our Remote APIs and is being used by our other partners like Box.net, Huddle etc. 

We'd like to thank Stoneware for integrating Zoho. We certainly look forward for more interesting integrations using our APIs.

Japan's NTT Communications (NTT Com) unveiled their first foray into Cloud through a concept called "Setten" in Japan starting with a suite of applications for businesses. We are very excited to announce that some of Zoho's Applications are included as part of NTT Com's offerings.

NTT Communications is one of the largest telecommunications company in Japan and they are unveiling their cloud concept 'Setten' offering virtual office environment with a suite of online applications. To start with, the offering will include

I saw a tweet from Ken Huang recently and found it interesting.

Zoho Viewer + Google Translate = http://tinyurl.com/r4697v http://ff.im/3kDch

This is very cool. If you have document you want to quickly view, Zoho Viewer works perfectly well. It is like TinyURL for documents. But in cases where the content of the document is in a different language, you can upload the document to Zoho Viewer and input that URL in Google Translate to convert the contents of the document to any language.

Here is a Zoho Writer document in Zoho Viewer and here is the translated version in Japanese.

Thanks for the tip Ken.
 

Inc.com did an article featuring '10 Free (or cheap) tools for start-ups' with direct feedback from the field. Zoho CRM is the first one on the list - Slideshow here.

It looks like Chadd Bennett of RetroRazor is using Zoho CRM and he found this useful. Here is what the article says...

Every start-up founder uses free or inexpensive online resources to get his or her company launched. Chadd Bennett of RetroRazor, a Seattle-based company that sells old-fashioned safety razors, provided us with a list of the tools he found to be the most helpful. First up, he recommends a CRM application. “Until recently, we used a Google spreadsheet to keep track of the retailers buying our razors," Bennett says. "But we just started using a program called Zoho CRM. I chose it because up to three people on each account can use it for free. Plus, it’s established enough that I don’t think it’s going to disappear. We only use it for our retail clients, not for individual customers, because we have hundreds of them and it would take too long to enter their information into the database.”

Chadd has good points in there. For Zoho CRM (also for all Zoho Apps), we start with a generous free version, which means you can start using the CRM app for FREE. And as your business grows, you can expand the usage and still not pay for the first three users - they are always free. The logic is pretty simple with the free version - Start free, you grow and we grow.

I am also very glad that Chadd realized that we are established enough that we are not going to disappear. Hopefully the recent name change of our parent company to Zoho Corporation will reinforce this.

Thanks a lot for recommending us Chadd and keep expanding your usage with Zoho.

Back in 1996, we started AdventNet (Zoho's parent company) with a focus on Network Management. In the past 13 years, the company has grown significantly serving multiple markets and employing about 1000 people globally.

Today, we are announcing the name change for our parent company from AdventNet Inc to ZOHO Corporation. This name change represents the evolution of the company. Zoho Corp will have three divisions, each focusing on different market segments.

• Zoho.com - The division focused on Online Business, Productivity & Collaboration Applications
• ManageEngine - The division focused on Enterprise IT Management and
• WebNMS - The division focused on the needs of OEMs.

In fact, these three brands/divisions represent three different phases of the company. In 1996, we started serving the needs of OEMs; We evolved by offering installable products for Enterprise IT Management. We currently serve over 40K customers under our ManageEngine brand. We then evolved from products to SaaS, with Zoho to serve a bigger and broader market. As we bootstrapped our way from platforms to end products to Online Apps, the focus has always been on building a strong business by serving the customers well. Thanks to the continued support of our customers, we continue to remain private & continuously profitable for the past 13 years with no external funding.

Zoho Corp (formerly AdventNet Inc) will continue to operate with its headquarters in Pleasanton, CA with offices in Austin and New Jersey. Zoho Corp also has offices in India, Japan, China and UK.

While the AdventNet name will be retired, we will continue to operate under the same guiding and customer-honoring principles that brought the company to prominence. We'd like to thank you all for your continued support over the years and we hope you'll let us serve you in years to come.

In one of my previous posts, I talked about integration between different Zoho Apps expanding on the following integrations.

• Sheet integration with CRM
• Writer & Sheet integration in Zoho Projects
• Meeting & Chat integration in Zoho Show
• Creator Integration in People
• Projects integration in Invoice
• Writer, Sheet & Show integration in Notebook
• Writer, Sheet & Show integration into Wiki
• Chat integration in Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook, Meeting etc

Here in this post, let us look at some of the integrations we have added since then. Here we go...

Writer, Sheet & Show integration in Zoho Docs

When we introduced Zoho Docs, we not only aggregated all your documents from Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show, we also added the ability to open these documents right within Zoho Docs. With Writer, Sheet & Show integration in Zoho Docs, we let you open documents as a tab in view-only mode within the Zoho Docs application. You always have an option to 'Edit' these files which launches the appropriate Zoho application in a new window.



Zoho Mail Integration in Docs and Vice Versa

In Zoho Mail, we added an option to attach documents directly from Zoho Docs. This is a simpler way to send documents created in Zoho. Similarly, if you are in Zoho Docs, we integrated Zoho Mail to email your documents. Additional information about this integration is available here.




Zoho Chat Integration with Mail, Docs, People & Business

When I previously talked about Zoho Chat integration, we had Zoho Chat integrated with Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook & Meeting. We now extended this integration to Mail, Docs, People & Business. This means you'll see the consistent chat bar at the bottom across all Zoho Apps allowing you to chat with members in your buddy list. With Zoho Chat supporting multiple IM Networks, you can now seamless chat with your buddies from other IM Networks no matter which Zoho Application you are in.



Zoho Meeting Integration in Zoho Chat

I previously talked about Zoho Chat integration with Zoho Meeting. This time, the integration is the other way around. We integrated Zoho Meeting in Chat. This means, while chatting with other users in Zoho Chat, if you have a need to share your desktop with other users, you can do so with a single click. As Zoho Chat is integrated with multiple IM Networks (Yahoo, Google, MSN, AIM, ICQ & Jabber), you can share your desktop with users from any  IM networks.




Zoho Meeting Integration in Zoho CRM

Zoho Meeting is contextually integrated into Zoho CRM. When you search for a contact in Zoho CRM, you'll see an option on the right to start a quick one-on-one meeting with that user with just a click. As Zoho Meeting is free for one-on-one meetings, you need not be a paid Zoho Meeting user to try this functionality.



These are some of the new integrations between Zoho Apps. We have few others which I'll expand in a future post. We also have some interesting integrations coming. Stay tuned.

If you are a regular Zoho Mail user, you probably noticed frequent improvements to the app. Our Mail team keeps pushing some goodies which we don't talk regularly in this blog, but the latest update very much needs mention as it adds some great features.

Drag and Drop your Emails

You can now drag and drop your emails in Zoho Mail. As you know, we support both folders and labels in Zoho Mail. No matter what you use, you'll now be able to effortlessly organize your emails.

To move your emails to a folder (or sub-folder), just drag your email to the folders on the left. When you drag and email, a green background color indicates that you can successfully move the email to the folder. A Red background color indicates that the email cannot be moved to the folder. This drag-n-drop functionality is similar to what we offer in Zoho Docs.





While this functionality works for Folders, the way Labels behaves is different as you can assign multiple labels to an email. To do that, you need to drag and drop your email to the label. If you need multiple labels assigned to your email, just drag and drop your email on top of t the labels.

To drag and drop multiple emails, just select the emails and move them across to either folders or labels.

Open Attachments in a Tab

Zoho Mail had the option to open your email attachments with respective Zoho applications - Writer, Sheet and Show. Previously, the attachments were opened in a new browser tab. With this update, we open email attachments as a tab within Zoho Mail. This way you can switch between your emails and attachments without leaving the application.





We previously used tabs to open documents in Zoho Docs. Now, you'll notice this consistent behavior while opening attachments in Zoho Mail.

Compose Window Enhancements

There were several improvements in the Compose window. When you compose a mail now, you'll notice that it opens in a new tab within Mail (similar to attachments). An option is available to pop it out in a new window.






You'll also notice few changes in the Compose WYSIWYG editor with fine-tuned buttons. We also added new options to insert tables, inline images and smileys.

Chrome Support

Zoho Mail now supports Google Chrome browser. With this update, we now officially support Firefox, IE and Chrome. We do have plans to support Safari moving forward.

Other Changes...

Apart from many minor bug fixes, this version of Zoho Mail gets other enhancements like the 'Edit as New' option in Mail view. We'll leave it to you to explore other features.

As always, we are looking forward to your feedback.

Earlier this week, three UC Berkeley students - Abhinav Prathivadi, Ethan Lieber & David Fefferman - did some research on Zoho and presented a case for Zoho as part of a technology competition in understanding and presenting a technology company in the productivity market.

They did dig deep into Zoho, the market, opportunity and summarized their understandings in 9 slides and presented at the conference. They were kind enough to share the presentation (embedded below).