As we get started with a new year, I’d like to take a moment and look back at 2008 and highlight some of the key milestones for Zoho. Year 2008 was certainly a great one for Zoho as our applications got better, deeper and business friendly. We added new applications expanding our offerings. We also crossed the million user milestone before our third birthday.

For the past 3+ years, we have built our applications one block at a time with constant improvements. Year 2008 was no different as we had 75+ important updates to various Zoho Apps. There were several other updates which were not announced. The graphic below summarizes the key updates for 2008.  The yellow blogs below represent important updates to existing apps while the Red blocks represent new Releases. Click on each of these blocks for detailed information.

Apart from product announcements, here are some of the highlights for 2008.

• Zoho wins ‘The Best Enterprise Start-up’ at The Crunchies (We are again nominated under ‘Best Enterprise’ Category)
• Zoho wins ‘Webware 100′ award
• Zoho - Baihui partnership announced
• Zoho listed in “PCWorld : 100 Best Products of 2008″
• Zoho - Swisscom partnership announced
• 1 Million Registered Users for Zoho
• Sridhar profiled in ‘The Economist’
• Cloud Ave, Zoho sponsored blog launched
• Zoho’s Third B’day
• Zoho featured in TIME.com
• NASSCOM announces Zoho as one of the Finalists in “NASSCOM Innovation Awards 2008″
• TechRepublic lists Zoho as one of  ‘The 10 most important business technology products of 2008′
• ReadWriteWeb chooses Zoho as the ‘Best LittleCo of 2008′

While we generally don’t talk about what is coming this year, I can certainly tell you that the road ahead looks very encouraging. I can promise you that 2009 will be as exciting as 2008, if not better.

This year, the focus will be more on integrating our existing applications and making them more and more business friendly. We will also keep adding new applications to complete our suite.

Looking forward to the year ahead.

Happy New Year!!

Related: Zoho in 2007

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Zoho Creator got an update today with a new feature that lets you deploy your Zoho Creator applications to Google App Engine.

Zoho Creator has been one of our applications with a good set of passionate users. The apps created in Zoho Creator have been on the rise (more than 130,000 applications created so far), which I’d like to attribute to the power, flexibility and uniqueness of the application. Today, Zoho Creator takes it one step further adding a new deployment option for the applications created in Zoho Creator.

After Google App Engine’s launch, we noted that the Cloud Infrastructure Services market is getting interesting with multiple infrastructure offerings from vendors with different layers of abstraction. We also noted…

…in principle, it would be possible to layer Zoho Creator on top of Google App Engine on top of Amazon EC2.

This is basically what we have done today with this new functionality. We have layered Zoho Creator on top of Google App Engine.

App Engine Deployment

When you open an application in Zoho Creator in edit mode, you’ll see a new option ‘Deploy in App Engine’ under ‘More Actions’ menu (on the top). This option will let you generate and download the Python code (App Engine supports deployment of Python only apps) of your Zoho Creator application which you can then deploy to Google App Engine. The following video explains this process in detail.

The current deployment process is a bit geeky at this time, but we are working to make this more seamless. When applications are deployed on App Engine, entire application and the data exists with Google App Engine.

The process of deploying a Zoho Creator application on to App Engine doesn’t require knowledge of Python. You don’t even have to write a single line of code to create and deploy an application either on Zoho or Google App Engine.

Zoho Creator essentially acts as an IDE  for Google App Engine.

The flexibility of generating Python code actually comes form the way Zoho Creator is designed. To be precise, it is the way Zoho Creator and Deluge are modeled in a database. This makes it easy to generate any kind of code. Currently it is Python and we can extend this to other languages in the future, if needed.

Limitations

The current version has some limitations. Applications with these features cannot be deployed on to App Engine currently.

• File Upload & Notes field
• Criteria based Views
• Group by Operator
• HTML, Summary & Calendar Views
• Themes support as in Zoho Creator
• Limited Deluge Scripting support (only email notifications are supported)

Examples

Here are couple of applications created in Zoho Creator and deployed in both Zoho & App Engine.

Contact Organizer:

• Google App Engine Deployment
• Zoho Creator Deployment

Issue Manager:

• Google App Engine Deployment
• Zoho Creator Deployment

With our CloudSQL release last month, we let the data free, giving you the control of your data. With this release, we are letting your applications free, offering you alternative deployment options. Welcome to the new ‘open’ model.

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Last month, when we talked about Conversational View in Zoho Mail, some of you asked us to avoid showing the subject in every thread for the conversation view. It looked like this.

Based on your feedback, we now removed the subject line in the thread showing just the content in each thread.

Thank you for your feedback and we hope you like this better.

This is one of the advantages of the SaaS model - the feedback cycle is shortened. We roll out something, you let us know what’s good or bad, and we fix/enhance it. All this takes few days or weeks. Imagine this loop for an installed product…

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We added a new feature to Zoho DB & Reports - Embedding Interactive Charts in your website/blog.

I am not sure about you, but I love the charts in Zoho DB & Reports. Its not just the ease of chart creation, but the ability to drill down to view the data behind the chart and the visual highlight on a mouse-over etc are very useful. These interactive charts can be viewed inside Zoho DB, but when you embed these charts in web pages, blogs etc, the interactivity is lost. Check out our Olympics Dashboard or iPhone Reports for example where the charts are not completely interactive.

Our recent update changes this. You can now embed Zoho DB & Report’s interactive charts in webpages, blogs etc. The commonwealth dashboard now shows the interactive charts in action. Here is an embedded interactive chart from our 2008 Olympics Database.

Tip: Move your mouse on the label on the right to see the highlight. Click on the data points to see underlying data.

Embedding an interactive chart is very easy. Select the chart you want to embed and select ‘Embed in Website/Blog’ option under the Publish option. In the dialog, the default option is ‘Embed as Interactive Chart’. Copy and Paste the given code in your website/blog and you’ll see an interactive chart like the one above. You can also let users change the type of chart embedded by enabling the Toolbar option in the embed dialog. If you enable this option, the same chart will look like this with options to change the chart type.

Tip: The chart icons on the Toolbar changes the chart type and the ‘Other Charts’ button has more Chart options.

We hope you’ll find this feature useful. Please share your feedback.

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Today, we are adding a new section to our website - Zoho Status - which displays the health of all Zoho Applications. You can visit http://status.zoho.com to see if our applications are running and responding fine. The site provides you availability & response times for the past week along with downtime, if any.

Zoho applications are monitored from six different locations - Seattle, New Jersey, Singapore, London, Germany & Australia - and the response times for each location are displayed in the status page for each Zoho application.

This is the first version of the roll out and as with other Zoho Applications, we will continue to roll out enhancements.

Site24×7 Enterprise

So, where does Zoho Status come from? Well, it is our Site24×7 application that you may not have noticed from the Utilities section of our website that is quietly serving the needs of thousands of paid customers.

We also have an announcement for Site24×7 today. We are launching the Enterprise version of Site 24×7 with more functionality. Apart from monitoring websites and applications, this version adds more funcitonality like Defining SLAs & track their compliance for applications, Enterprise class reports & many more. Here is a comparison between different versions in Site24×7.

You might wonder where the management expertise comes from. It comes from our parent company AdventNet and its ManageEngine business unit that is doing an awesome job with an impressive list of useful applications for monitoring, management and other areas, serving the needs of IT Departments. We borrowed that monitoring technology for Site24×7. Infact, we use most of the products from ManageEngine to closely monitor, analyze, secure the Zoho data centers. We hope to borrow lot more code from them going forward :).

Coming back to Zoho Status, this is one case where we hope you wont have a need to get to this page. This initiative is yet another step to being more open and transparent with our users.

If you’d like to setup similar status screens for your applications/wesbite, head over to Site24×7 and get started with a free account.

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Did you know that you can remotely access your home PC using Zoho Meeting?  Apart from using Zoho Meeting for Web Conferencing and Remote Assistance, you can use it to access your home PC remotely using just the browser. Here is how to do this…

Setup:

To get started, login to Zoho Meeting from your home PC and Create a Meeting. Give it a name - like ‘My Home PC’, change the ‘Control Transfer’ option to ‘Auto’ at the bottom and create the meeting.

Once the meeting is created, start the meeting. It’ll prompt you to install an Active-X control. Once installed, you’ll notice a ‘Meeting Started Successfully’ dialog near the Zoho Meeting toolbar. The toolbar can be minimized to the tray. This completes the one-time setup process.

Accessing your PC:

To access your home PC remotely, login to your Zoho Meeting and select the ‘My Meetings’ tab on the top. Here you’ll notice ‘My Home PC’ meeting (or whatever name you provided) started. Choose the ‘Join Meeting’ option. By default, you can choose our Flash client to access your remote PC which means there are no installations on the client side, however our Java/Active-X clients are faster for this particular case.

After you join the meeting, you’ll see your home desktop. To control your home desktop, choose the ‘Request Remote Control’ option on the top. Thats it. You’ll now be able to access your home desktop from work or while you are traveling. After you are done, you can simply exit the meeting on the client side. As long as you don’t end the meeting, you’ll be able to access your home desktop any time. The agent installed on your home PC doesn’t use suck your bandwidth when not in use.

Now the important part - because you are the only one accessing your home PC, this is absolutely FREE.

Please note that you can only access Windows desktops currently. The client can be Windows/Mac/Linux.

Hope this little tip works. Do any of you use Zoho Meeting for this purpose?

Note: Zoho Meeting currently doesn’t officially support this. This is a tip based on my usage and an upgrade could break this functionality as this is not officially supported by our Zoho Meeting team.

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Have you ever been through a scenario where you logged into an online application at your friends house to show him something exciting and later on your drive back, you start to wonder whether you really logged out of the application later?

I am not sure about you, but I certainly had scenarios like these as I don’t tend to carry my laptop with me most of the time. If you are like me, the latest feature in Zoho Accounts is going to be really useful. It lets you sign-out remotely.

To see how this works, go to https://accounts.zoho.com and select the ‘User Sessions’ link on the left (the last one). It shows your previous sessions that could be active.

By default, Zoho Accounts automatically ends all sessions older than 7 days. Active sessions for the past 7 days are listed in the sessions screen (including the current session) with additional information like Start Time, IP Address etc. You have options to end individual sessions or end all sessions (excluding the current one).

This way, even if you forget to signout at your friends place, you can take care of it when you get home.

There are some features we roll out in our apps but don’t talk about them in the blogs. This is one such feature that was rolled out few months back. If you explore, you’ll probably notice some other features/enhancements. Did you find anything interesting?

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Few months back we added the ability to login to Zoho with your Google and Yahoo! Accounts. It was an instant success as we received good feedback from users and observed more users using Zoho than before.

The approach we started with had its limitations. We used AuthSub interface which wasn’t primarily intended for authentication as were requesting permission to access the Contacts from user’s Google account. Also, with this approach, you had to grant access to Zoho every time you used your Google credentials to login to Zoho.

Today, Google released Google IDP and we are glad to be part of it. Zoho now uses Google IDP, replacing AuthSub. This means, with this new approach, when you login to Zoho with your Google account, you just authorize Zoho to obtain your email address alone from Google (unlike obtaining the entire contact list in the previous case). More details on this are available in the Google IDP Authorization page.

This new approach comes with an important advantage. As you see in the screenshot above, if you enable  ‘Allow zoho.com to remember me’ option, you can automatically sign-in to Zoho with a single click when you are already signed in to Google. This is a great advantage compared to the previous approach where you had to grant access every time you login with your Google credentials.

We’d like to thank Google for inviting us to participate in this initiative and thank our Zoho Accounts team which has been doing an awesome job under the hood to provide smoother experience to our users. The team has more exciting things coming.

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The outcome will be determined not only by whether Microsoft will be able to maintain its dominance of the Office market but also by whether it can maintain the outsized revenues and profits it has long enjoyed in that market.

A better way to explain this is obviously with a toon…

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Over the past three years, we launched several new applications in Zoho, but one particular application has been in the background silently making progress during its private-beta stage - Zoho Mail.

Today, Zoho Mail is stepping out of private-beta. This is an important milestone for Zoho as Zoho Mail plays a pivotal role in our suite’s evolution. There is lot to talk about, so let us drill down into details.

Features

Instead of talking about all the features in Zoho Mail, I’ll share the approach we have taken in Zoho Mail and let you explore all the features.

Zoho Mail supports folders (including hierarchical folders) - the ones you are used to. But then, we also see the value of having Labels in your mail client. So we added labels support too. We don’t want to decide what you should use. We want to give you the choice. So we added support for both Folders and Labels.

Along the same lines, we noticed that some users prefer seeing a list of their emails serially (Ex: the Outlook style) and some users prefer viewing the emails as conversations (Ex: Gmail style). Again, we don’t want to decide what you have to use. So we support both. In conversations, responses are listed hierarchically so that you can look at a conversation and visually see who responded to whom.

Threaded/Conversational View in Zoho Mail

These are couple of examples on the approach we used for Zoho Mail. We do support all the common features you’d expect from an email system. I have included the list of supported features in this document.

Zoho Mail also has Zoho Chat Integrated. We understand that you spend most of the time in your email app. It is important to have Chat integrated right into it. You’ll find the same version of Zoho Chat integrated with other applications like Zoho Business, Zoho Docs etc.

You can chat while you are in Zoho Mail

Apart from Zoho Chat integration, we also integrate our productivity suite. You can now open your attachments (like documents, spreadsheets) with appropriate Zoho Applications.

Offline Support

Zoho Mail also supports Offline mode. This means you can access your email when not connected to the internet. Like Zoho Writer, this functionality is built using Google Gears.

To use Zoho Mail in offline mode, you’ll notice the ‘Setup Offline’ link on the top. You’ll need Google Gears installed on your browser (IE & Firefox are supported currently) to use offline support. Once you permit access, your mails will be accessible offline. You can choose to download images & attachments as well in the offline mode.

Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes seamlessly. While offline, you can view your emails as you would normally.

We had a chat with Brad Neuberg from Google Gears team regarding offline support.

Mobile Support

Zoho Mail is also available on iPhone. If you login to zoho.com from your iPhone, you’ll find the mobile version of Zoho Mail optimized for the iPhone. We do plan to support other mobile devices soon.

If you have access to Zoho Business, Zoho Mail is also integrated into Zoho Business.

Zoho Mail is integrated with Zoho Business

Over the next few weeks we will be talking in detail about some of the key features in Zoho Mail. Meanwhile, please do give Zoho Mail a spin and let us know your feedback.

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