Sridhar took part in NBC's Sunday morning business show, Press:Here. This week's episode was hosted by reporter Scott McGrew and Sridhar was accompanied by CEOs of Immersion Corp (Clent Richardson) and Extreme Networks (Mark Canepa). The invited CEOs and the show's host discuss a host of topics from technology in the Valley to the American economy to international markets to H1Bs - Press:Here Episode 31 "CEO Show" Part 1 and Part 2.
Thanks to Scott McGrew, the NBC and the CEOs of Extreme Networks & Immersion Corp for the nice discussion.
InfoLogic's MathMagic is a desktop based equation editor software. Its latest version 6.8 for Mac users has introduced a special menu item for Zoho Writer. MathMagic can now be used as a front-end equation editor by Zoho Writer users (Zoho Writer has allowed writing of LaTeX equations since May 2008). Whether or not you are fluent in LaTeX, you can now write mathematical equations and symbols using MathMagic
easily and fast, then simply copy-paste it into Zoho Writer's Equation
Editor window. LaTeX expressions from Zoho Writer's Equation Editor can also be copy-pasted into MathMagic window to edit the equation on a WYSIWYG interface.
InfoLogic says MathMagic's Windows version will also support "Copy as Zoho equation" in the near future. We believe this new menu will help both MathMagic & Zoho Writer users.
Back in early June, James Haftner tweeted: "Holy magnolia, whatever Zoho is using for their forums is slick!". @James_Hafner. thanks for waiting, here's your answer.
If you noticed, so far this year we have been trigger-shy on new products - that's because we have spent a lot of time working on the cross-integration of our products. But today is brand-new-product-day at Zoho. We're very excited to announce our newest product: Zoho Discussions.
Zoho Discussions allows organizations to create external and internal communities where problems are solved, topics are discussed and ideas are exchanged. Businesses can create a customer support forum where solutions to problems come not only from the company support reps, but also from other users in the same situation. Customers can make their voices heard and vote on what they like - and don't like. Employees can discuss important topics in an environment that fosters collaboration much better than e-mail.
Connect with and engage customers: Customer Support Forums, Feedback and Product Innovation
Customer support need not mean endless automated voice prompts and a bad experience for customers, nor a costly expense for companies. One of the most important scenarios Zoho Discussions enables is the ability for organizations to better connect with, support and listen to customers through Customer Support Forums.
Customer Support Forums. They provide a venue where customers can find the relevant information they are looking for. But unlike the approaches of a previous generation, it doesn't stop there - customers can also post new questions or even comment (and vote!) on the accuracy of existing answers. Who answers those customers questions is also different. Customer support reps are augmented by the power of the community and customers helping each other out. When an organization sets up their own customer support forums, they can remain in full control of it. We believe that's an important point for companies as, of course, they care about their brand, customer experience, and building customer loyalty over time. For example, ManageEngine.com has built a fully customized community on top of Zoho Discussions.
The other angle of the customer engagement equation is customer feedback and innovation. Many people complain that innovating is hard. Actually, innovating is rather easy. The hard part is innovating on something that customers will actually like - and buy. That's why customer feedback at all stages of product development is so valuable. For example, Zoho Creator implemented a customer ideas forum back in April. There, we ask the community what features they would like to see developed for the product. Then we go and develop the most popular requests. Customer and Partner Communities: Intranet and Extranet
Of course, problems and ideas are not exclusive to customers. What in the customer world takes the form of a support forum, in the intranet world it means employees discussing and coming up with solutions to shared situations. Organizations can create an employee community (or for their partners' extranet). Topics can be wide-ranging: from organizational announcements, anonymous (but controlled) voting on important issues - or even where to hold the company picnic, to employee-to-employee discussions and advice (for example, what health plan should I choose?) and even product ideas - sometimes people with a fresh approach come up with the best ones.
Setting up an internal discussion board for internal use is in many cases a much better alternative to exchanging mass e-mails back and forth. Not only it helps with the e-mail overload, but it creates organizational memory: members of the organization can refer back to previous conversations - even those that happened before they joined the organization, something that is not possible with the traditional e-mail approach. It also fosters richer conversations and the most popular topics find their way to the top quite easily.Features and Functionality
I didn't talk about features before as there are just too many and I'd never end. But let summarize them in six broad areas:
| Community Engagement. Make it more attractive for your customers and users to keep coming
back: Profiles, user labels, watch lists, real-time discussions and
more. |
Topic Administration. Manage the lifecycle of your posts and discussions: Topic-specific voting, topic status, best answer/solution, announcements with expiration date and more. |
Content Discoverability. With Zoho Discussions, content in your communities and forums is easy to find: Content organization, advanced search, RSS, SEO Options, etc. |
Rich User Experience. Your users will enjoy using your forums and community: WYSIWYG post editor, threaded conversations, drafts and previews, preference management, etc. |
Branding. Take control of your brand and the customer experience in your community: Custom URLs, Branding Options, Custom Elements, Customizable look and feel, etc |
Administration. Support more users with less community administrators: Fine grained access controls, auto spam, community-marked content, user management and more. |
While Zoho's focus is on office productivity, another product from the Zoho Corp stable, ToonDoo, originally deemed counter-productive in the workplace is defining new levels of productivity in the classroom! Ever since its launch in March 2007, ToonDoo has been creatively used in the classrooms of educators from all over the world. Today, they launch ToonDooSpaces, an effort to further facilitate the safe, creative and fun use of ToonDoo in classroom environments. ToonDooSpaces combines the creative and social features from ToonDoo with enhanced safety, security and monitoring features
A ToonDooSpace is actually an independent ownership-based domain space at ToonDoo and has a unique address such as www.yourname.toondoospaces.com. Members of a ToonDooSpace can enjoy all the creative and social features available at ToonDoo while administrators can enjoy the following additional features:
Read Kevin’s full review of ToonDooSpaces. You can read more testimonials too.All spring, my sixth graders (11 and 12 year olds) were fully engaged in the use of our ToonDooSpaces site. They would walk in the door and immediately ask: Are we going to make comics today, Mr. H? And they give a little shout of “Yeah!” with a fist pump when I say “yes”.
I think ToonDooSpaces and others are on the right track. Comics seem to be a natural platform for all levels of writers. My advanced students move into complicated stories and poems while my struggling writers are interested in the art-writing element of comics. It really reaches across different levels.”
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.
Last year, we enabled users to sign-in to Zoho using Google or Yahoo accounts. This was very well received and a good percentage of our users use this option to login to Zoho. We are now extending this option to Google Apps. Thanks to recent enhancements to Google Apps sign-in, users can now login to Zoho using Google Apps credentials.
When you try to login to Zoho, you'll notice a new 'Google Apps' option in the sign-in box. This option is now available in all Zoho Apps. If you are a Google Apps user, you can choose this option to sign-in to Zoho.
Once you provide your Google Apps domain name, you'll be redirected to Google to sign-in using your Google Apps credentials. Once you authorize accounts.zoho.com, you'll be logged in to Zoho directly.
If you are logging in to Zoho for the first time using your Google Apps account, you'll be asked to choose a Zoho username. This option appears only for the first time you login.
We believe this sign-in level integration will allow businesses use Google Apps and Zoho Business Apps seamlessly.
While we compete with Google on some applications like productivity suite & email, we offer a broad range of business applications which complement Google Apps. Our business applications include Zoho CRM, Invoice, Meeting, Projects, Creator & more. With over 1 Million Businesses using Google Apps, the ability for these business' users to sign-in to Zoho using their existing Google Apps credentials gives seamless single sign-on access to all Zoho Applications which complement Google Apps.
All Zoho Business Apps have good free versions (not trial versions, but actual free versions). Please do give our business apps a try and see how they compliment Google Apps. If you already use Zoho Business Apps alongside Google Apps, please share your story with other Zoho users.
[Note : The Google Federated Login Service is disabled by default for Google Apps Premier and Education Editions. The domain admin can enable it as mentioned at OpenID-based Federated Login for Google Apps. ]
Zoho Mail will be undergoing an infrastructure related upgrade this Sunday, Aug 23, 2009 from 8:30 am to 11:30 am, PDT (15:30 to 18:30, UTC/GMT). The service will not be accessible during the said time period. Sorry for the inconvenience this may cause you.
WizeHive is an online application for collaborating with groups of people. A WizeHive workspace lets groups to collaborate on tasks, documents etc. In their recent version, WizeHive integrated Zoho Writer & Zoho Sheet to create and view documents & spreadsheets.
The 'Files' section in a workspace provides options to upload existing files from your desktop or create new documents/spreadsheets using Zoho editors. If you choose the document creation option, it launches Zoho Editors. Saving the documents in Zoho Editors saves them back to WizeHive. Existing documents can also be edited using Zoho Apps.
Josh Lowensohn from from CNet says.. Starting today, WizeHive users can create and collaborate on Zoho documents from within WizeHive, and without having to open a Zoho account. Whatever they save is also stored along with the rest of their files and projects back on WizeHive.
Thanks to WizeHive for integrating Zoho Apps.
A seamless integration like this is possible because of our Remote APIs. Any third party applications looking to add document creation capabilities can take advantage of Zoho APIs to integrate Zoho Office apps (Writer, Sheet & Show) into their environment. The nice part about our APIs is, your users need not create a Zoho account to use Zoho editors. When a document is created using Zoho Apps in a third-party application, the contents are actually saved to the partner's application and no copy is maintained at Zoho's end.
We also have other partners like Box.net, Huddle, KnowledgeTree, Syncplicity, Stoneware etc who did similar integrations using our Remote APIs. If you are looking to integrate Zoho Office suite in your application, our APIs section is a good place to start. Also, take a look at other partners who integrated our APIs.
Microsoft Access is
basically a database application on the desktop. Where as, Zoho Creator is a
powerful, scalable, and secure cloud computing platform that lets you
build and run database applications online. Some of our users call it
as 'Microsoft Access + Visual Basic for the web' (Sorry, PDF).
So, what happens when you migrate data from Microsoft Access to Zoho
Creator? Well, it can become a powerful web application. This is
basically what we are doing with our announcement today. We are excited
to announce the latest addition to our family of Microsoft plug-ins - Zoho Plug-in for Microsoft Access (EXE link).
Two weeks back, we integrated our collaborative productivity applications into Microsoft SharePoint. Last week, our project management application added the capability to import your existing projects from MS Project to Zoho Projects 2.0. This week, we have a new add-on that imports your data effortlessly from Microsoft Access to Zoho Creator and Zoho Reports and does much more.
To summarize the core functionality of this plug-in in three short points, this is what it does...Rabbit is a web-based operating system that connects people, processes and content, combining the power of social networking into an enterprise environment. A key component of Rabbit is its information sharing capabilities, which let users work on documents they’ve uploaded to Rabbit’s web workspace, and share this with other users. Rabbit has selected Zoho for this because of Zoho's proven ability to provide high levels of functionality and performance, and to provide a smooth transition for enterprise users from working locally on the desktop to working on the web.
All documents, spreadsheets and presentations uploaded and stored in Rabbit can be opened using Zoho. The documents and spreadsheets can be edited and saved back where as the presentations can be viewed. Below is a screenshot of files in Rabbit being opened using Zoho.
New documents and spreadsheets can be created too from inside Rabbit by invoking Zoho Writer and Sheet. This video by the Rabbit team explains the functionality in detail.
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