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...

• Integration with Google/Yahoo Signin
• EchoSign Integration with Zoho Writer
• Flickr & Picasa Integration into Zoho Show
• Paypal, Google Checkout & Authorize.net integration into Zoho Invoice
• Integration with multiple IM Networs in Zoho Chat
  

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.

According to Ali, this is what the book is about...

• How to use Zoho.com as an at home and work office and productivity tool. Work but have fun as well.
• What Cloud Computing is and how it is important and is used in practice.
• Adopt Zoho.com as your daily business and at home
• Do it yourself (DIY) solutions, that requires little or no technical knowledge nor is support required.
• See how Zoho can play a key role in the future of business applications, to increase productivity and collaboration, while at the same time minimizing and all but eliminating costs and overhead.
• How to use all of the major Zoho applications; and how to incorporate them into daily activities.
• How to increase productivity and collaboration in business using these applications.
• How to be more productive in using Zoho itself, by learning shortcuts, tips, and miscellaneous tools and plugins.
• Extending Zoho.com to your iPhone or Microsoft Office and much more…

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.

Similar to other Dummies books, you'll notice good quality content and those unique cartoons. Here is one for you...

The list price of the book is $29.99. It is currently available on Amazon for $18.82. Grab your copy now.

Zoho is about offering Online Business, Productivity & Collaboration applications. These apps are delivered from our data centers serving millions of users worldwide. Apart from our standard public cloud offering, some of our applications are deployed with strategic partners and within large enterprises, behind their firewalls.

We currently have partners like NTT who deployed Zoho in Japan serving the local market. Similarly, Baihui currently offers Zoho Apps in China with a local deployment. Some enterprises have also deployed Zoho Apps behind their firewalls. In all these cases, our apps are deployed on Zoho recommended hardware. What if an enterprise wants to run our apps on a different hardware or VM?

We are excited to announce a new relationship with VMware. Zoho Apps can now run on VMware's vSphere. Enterprises will now have an option to deploy Zoho Apps behind their firewall either on Zoho recommended hardware or on VMware's vSphere. We will be showcasing this new deployment option at VMworld this week at the vCloud Pavilion.

We are excited about this new relationship/offering with VMware and it is great to see the same level of interest from VMware as well. To quote Dan Chu, VP of emerging products and markets, VMware:

Customers are continually looking for ways to simplify their IT environments. For customers that wish to run their Zoho applications on-premise, VMware vSphere™ 4 provides the foundation for delivering these applications as a private cloud service inside their own firewall and datacenter — retaining the Web-based simplicity and efficiency benefits of Zoho’s applications while keeping the applications and data in-house.

For large enterprises, 'keeping the applications and data in-house' is the key. We recently offered 'Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint' along the same lines - keeping the data behind the firewall while taking advantage of cloud applications. Now, with both apps and data behind the firewall, it opens up new integration possibilities with other enterprise applications.

With this new private deployment model, we bring the benefits of cloud applications to enterprises. This deployment option is currently available for businesses with over 10,000 employees.

If you are at VMworld, drop by the Zoho booth at the vCloud pavilion.