Our Zoho Mail team recently added a couple of new features
to the Mail app. Improvements to labels and contextual options for
your folders. Let's take a look.
Labels Specific to Email Accounts
You
may know that Zoho Mail supports multiple email accounts. This means,
apart from your zoho.com email account, you can use Zoho Mail to fetch your emails from external POP accounts. By default, Zoho Mail lets you
maintain a different folder structure for each of your mail accounts
providing you a better way to manage your mail accounts.
Along with Folders, Zoho Mail also supports Labels, for those who
prefer organizing their mail boxes using labels. But previously, Labels
were common across all mail accounts. This is no longer the case. With
the recent update, you can create Labels specific to your mail account.
To create/modify/delete labels for a specific mail account, select the mail account, go to Settings > Personalize > Labels.
Contextual Right Click Options
Do you know that you can right click on mail folders in Zoho Mail? We have a contextual menu offering folder-specific actions. If you
right-click on a folder, you'll typically see options to create sub-folders, Mark Folder as Read, Rename, Delete, Archive etc. Apart from these standard options, you'll also notice an additional contextual option.
When you right click on 'Outbox' for example, you'll see the 'Send Immediately' option to send mails immediately
without holding them in the Outbox temporarily. Similarly,
right-clicking on Draft, Spam or Trash folders offers an 'Empty Folder' option.
Apart from the features mentioned here, we did add a few other features.
We will let you discover these new goodies. If you do, drop us a comment.
Online Project Collaboration application vendor Central Desktop
integrated Zoho Sheet into their application using our Remote APIs.
Zoho Sheet is integrated contextually within their application letting
users view/edit spreadsheets and save them back to Central Desktop's
storage.
This integration brings in all the goodies from Zoho Sheet into
Central Desktop's application. This integration went live this weekend
replacing EditGrid's spreadsheet application. Additional details about
this integration are available here.
Zoho's unique APIs makes it easy for applications to integrate our
office apps contextually to enhance their functionality and provide
seamless experience. Central Desktop's integration is another such
example. We'd like to thank our friends at Central Desktop for
integrating our app. We are looking forward to a productive partnership.
Related Link
Online applications are ideal for collaboration, especially for
collaborating with users from multiple locations. These browser based
applications offer convenience, mobility among many other advantages.
But when you have to depend on a locally installed application, to open
a document for example, breaks the flow. Integrating document editing capability
within in the browser can offer seamless experience and can make users
productive as well as remove the hurdle to have an installed
application.
We have seen collaboration vendors like Box.net, Huddle, Knowledge Tree etc offer
seamless online document editing experience using Zoho editors. Today,
another online collaboration & project management vendor,
Glasscubes integrated Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet into their application.
If you upload documents or spreadsheets into GlassCubes documents
section, you'll notice an additional option to edit the document.
Choosing the 'Edit Document' option opens the document (including 2007
formats) in the appropriate Zoho Editors. You can make changes to the
document and save it back to the Glasscubes application. Thanks to our
Remote APIs, Glasscubes users need not have a Zoho account to use this
functionality.
Rob Hallums explains this integration on their blog. We'd like to thank GlassCubes for integrating Zoho.
When
we have a broad set of apps like Zoho, the real value kicks in when
these apps are integrated. So we started integrating our apps with each
other (and more to come) as well as integrating them with External apps. In one of my previous posts, I talked about how we integrate our
apps with external apps. Some of our previous integrations include...
Ali Shabdar, one of Zoho users came up with a great new book on Zoho titled Foundation Zoho: Work and Create Online. It is currently available on Amazon for $19.79.
We are very happy to see more books on Zoho. Previous books on Zoho include Zoho 4 Everyone and Zoho For Dummies. We'd like thank Ali for his contribution.
Our friends at Box.net have been busy lately with some exciting
integrations. Today they announced the integration between Box and Salesforce.
As you may know, Zoho is integrated into Box.net. Box is one of our first partners to integrate our APIs into their storage system. You can edit your documents, spreadsheets and presentations within Box using Zoho editors. We are glad to see this functionality available in Salesforce as well.
We have had many users asking for Zoho editors within Salesforce. Given our history, it didn't happen. If you like Zoho apps for editing docs, check out the new Box.net's integration with Salesforce.
When you visit Amazon.com, the customized page that is served touches around 300 sub-systems each connected through APIs. This is the web architecture where each individual sub-systems talk to each other offering a unique integrated experience.
Do you have a similar system for your business? Does the software in your business talk to each other?
This is one of the problems we typically see in businesses where multiple applications are deployed for each need/department and these apps don't talk to each other resulting in data being trapped in silos. This is typically the case because each of these applications come from different vendors and they are not integrated well with each other. If you are an Enterprise, I guess you have the money to spend to integrate these individual systems. But if you an SMB, you are probably out of luck.
This is one of the key values we bring to the table. At Zoho, we offer a broad range of apps to run your business online. Zoho is evolving to become a well integrated suite to run your business. Because these are SaaS applications, integrating them is fairly easy compared to integration between on-premise apps.
Our Email integration with CRM is a good example of what we are trying to do. There are several other integrations we have been working on to knit together productivity, collaboration and business applications. As we have a broad portfolio of apps, the integration possibilities between these apps are endless. That said, we are not restricting these integrations between our apps. We are integrating Zoho Apps with other external systems as well.
As always, we'd like to hear from you the kind of integrations you'd like to see in your business.
Not very often we see external videos talking about our products in detail. Palm Breeze CAFE did a three part series talking about Zoho taking a closer look into some of our apps. Instead of trying to explain what they talk about, let me just embed the videos here.
We'd like to thank Lee Keller, Kim Cavanaugh and their team for taking a deeper dive into Zoho. You can also download/view the videos on iTunes or on their YouTube channel.
When we rolled out our APIs for Zoho CRM, we were looking for some interesting integrations between Zoho CRM and external applications. Well, we are excited to talk about a new integration between Zoho CRM and an Online Email Marketing application from Contactology.
Contactology is an online email marketing application that lets you send and track emails, newsletters etc. Today, they are announcing a new import driver for Zoho CRM. This means, you'll now be able to automatically export leads and contacts from Zoho CRM to Contactology's email marketing app with just a few clicks - without having to manually export and import between applications. Once the info is in their system, you can send out emails/newsletters from their application.
Contactology built this import driver to meet their own needs. They use Zoho CRM internally and wanted an automated way to import contacts from Zoho CRM to their application. This driver is now available for everyone. To see how this import driver works, take a look at the video here.
We'd like to thank the Contactology team for integrating Zoho CRM. Here is a list of our other API Partners.
Time goes by fast. We almost forgot our fourth birthday this week. While we were busy with updates, Zoho turned four on Sep 15th. We launched Zoho Writer, our first hosted application 4 years back. Since then, we have added several applications, utilities, plug-ins and more. 
While we have been in business as AdventNet for 13 years, we launched the Zoho division in 2005. These past four years have been amazing for Zoho, we even changed the name of the company to Zoho Corporation this year.
In the first three years, our focus has been on launching new applications to build a broad suite. For the past year, the focus has been around integration between our apps. We will continue to focus on integration while occasionally launching new apps to round out our suite. As always, your feedback drives our road map.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all our users who helped us get to where we are today. Thank you for your continued support.
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