
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.
-------
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.
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.

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.








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).