We are delighted that Swisscom (incumbent telco in Switzerland) has chosen Zoho for a six month pilot for its Zoho Business Suite which is now available on their Software-as-a-Service portal Teamnet.

Zoho and Swisscom have teamed up to create a custom version of Zoho Business, with Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook and Meeting now available to its 300,000 business customers. Even though Swisscom is the incumbent telco operator in Switzerland, it is taking a bold approach by extending its offerings to the SaaS space.

Increasingly, Service Providers are looking to add value on their existing networks and have started to include online applications like Zoho to their portfolio of services. In the past, one would not turn to the telephone company for productivity applications, but this is changing with the wider adoption of SaaS in the marketplace. We are glad that Swisscom is taking a lead in this regard and will keep you posted on other developments and partnerships as this trend picks up momentum in coming months.

“The goal of the pilot is to provide our business customers with a value added web offering they can evaluate as part of a turnkey solution from their service provider. Zoho is an ideal partner that combines a wide and very innovative range of applications as well as a very solid engineering team to deliver the capability we wanted.” said Michael Gmuer, Head Business Process Optimization of Swisscom.“.

Zoho and its Alliance Partner Program offer service providers multiple paths to increase ARPU (average revenue per user), the holy grail that telcos seek to maximize by adding additional services to their existing infrastructure. The program offers partners a flexible means to bundle various Zoho services for both consumers and business users.

While we are starting small with the Swisscom project, it is a significant step towards a broader Zoho distribution channel in Europe. This follows our recent partnership with Baihui in China.

Thank you Swisscom for choosing Zoho and for your investment in the project. We look forward to feedback from your users and to a successful venture together.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Posted to:  API, Announcements, General, Partners, Web 2.0  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

Zoho DB & Reports offers a wide range of data types (column types) to store your tabular data. So far, the options offered for formatting the data stored in these column types have been limited. We have addressed this in our latest update.

Zoho DB & Reports now offers a wide variety of formatting options for each data type. With these options you can choose how you would like to have your data displayed in the various reports created.

How to format a column?

1. Select the table or tabular view in which the columns are to be formatted
2. Right click on the column that is to be formatted
3. Set the necessary formatting option in the dialog that pops up
4. Click OK to apply the formatting changes

Immediately you will see the formatting options being applied over the column. Zoho DB & Reports also ensures to carry over this formatting set for a column across all the reports (chart, pivot, summary & tabular) created including this column.

Formatting options supported include Text Alignment, No. of Decimal places (for all numeric data types), Currency Symbol (for currency type), Negative Number Display (for currency type), Date display format and Include thousand separator (for all numeric data types).

Customize Chart Coloring:

In Zoho DB & Reports the colors used in charts have been system generated so far. With the latest update you can now change the colors used in a chart to suit your taste. Follow the below given simple steps to customize the color in a chart:

1. Select the Chart whose colors are to be customized
2. Click Edit Design and go to edit mode
3. Click on any of the category colors listed in the legend (seen on the right side of the chart) to change the same.
4. A color chooser will pop up
5. Choose the color required
6. Click Apply to apply the color Or Click on Use Default if you would like to revert to system generated colors.

Auto-recognizing currency data during Import:

Now Zoho DB & Reports has included the intelligence to auto-identify a data column as currency when you import it into Zoho DB & Reports. You do not have to manually set the data type of those columns as currency, which had been the case so far. The data could be in any of the accepted currency formats (with currency symbol or abbreviation eg., $, USD etc.,) of any country. Auto-recognition would be applied when you import data into Zoho DB & Reports from any of CSV or .XLS or HTML files

Hope you find the above features useful. As always do give it a try and let us know your comments….

With regards,
Clarence
Zoho DB & Reports - Online Reporting & BI Service

Popularity: 3% [?]

Posted to:  Announcements, General, Zoho DB  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

Open IT Online is a Firefox extension that allows to open and edit documents and images from everywhere. Thanks to this extension, you will be able to open several types of documents directly in Firefox using online services (such as Zoho) without needing any software to be installed. In other words, it adds an option to your Firefox “Open With” dialog to let you open Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more file types in the Zoho suite, Google Docs, ThinkFree Viewer & others. You can configure defaults for every file type - nice and convenient for fans of online editing. Open IT Online is a free download and it works wherever Firefox 2 or 3 does.

Here’s more screenshots & a nice video of how to use Open IT Online to view documents online with Zoho. Install the Open IT Online Firefox add-on to view/edit files directly online without downloading them.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Posted to:  API, Announcements, General, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Viewer, Zoho Writer  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

Syncplicity, a document synchronization tool integrated Zoho into their application recently. This Sync tool lets you synchronize your documents from your desktop (PC-only currently) to their web application.

If you have Syncplicity installed on your computer, you can right-click on a document on your desktop and choose  the ‘Edit in Zoho’ option for editing your document. This opens up a window with the Zoho document editor. When the ‘Save’ button is hit in Zoho editor, it saves the file to your local folder and also your Syncplicity account, thus keeping your document in sync. This works with Zoho Writer & Zoho Sheet Apps now with Zoho Show to follow.

Similar editing option is also available in their online application to edit documents online. After you save the changes, the documents are saved on their servers.

And here’s a nice screencast done by the Syncplicity team, demonstrating the integration.

We’d like to thank Syncplicity for integrating Zoho. Our other API Partners are here. If you have integrated Zoho into your application, do let us know so that we can profile you here and list you as a partner in our partners page.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Posted to:  Announcements, General, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Writer  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

We’ve scheduled a maintenance for Zoho Business on Sunday, June 29, 2008 between 9:30 PM PDT and 11:30 PM PDT(2 hours). During this period, access to Zoho Business will not be available.

We apologize for any inconveniences that this may cause and appreciate your patience.

[Update] Maintenance has been completed successfully. Access to Zoho Business is available now.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Posted to:  Announcements  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

As you may know, there were recent updates to Zoho Sheet and Zoho Writer. Continuing on the series of updates, the below new functionalities in Zoho Show are now available.

1. Export to PPT, PPS, PDF, ODP : Zoho Show has long had the ‘Export as HTML’ option. Now we have added the much needed ppt, pps, pdf & odp file export options as well. After opening a presentation, click on the Export button. You will find the new options

2. Languages support : 9 new languages. In addition to English, the Zoho Show UI can now be set to one of these languages too : Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Europe), Spanish & Swedish

3. Personal Groups and Contacts support : Click on Share. You will see the Add Contacts, Add Groups option.

Group the email addresses of your contacts (work, family etc). Useful when repeatedly sharing presentations (need not type all the email addresses again). Also, all your Zoho contacts - the ones who you have shared documents with, from your Zoho Mail account etc - get listed while you share a presentation (auto-suggest feature which will help you in easily picking up who to share a presentation with.

4. Undo/Redo : You can now undo/redo upto 50 actions. You can see the new undo & redo buttons in the toolbar

5. Picasa Integration : Click on the Insert Image icon. You can see Picasa listed along with Flickr (which was already there). You can insert public pictures from your Picasa account

6. Remote Presentation - UI enhancements : Click on Remote -> Make Remote. Try making a remote presentation. You will see a chat tab to the right. The Notes tab is open (for the presenter alone) below the slide area. And the slide area size can be adjusted (to accomodate notes)

7. Embed Enhancements (Advanced Options) : Click on Publish -> Embed in Website/Blog. You will see the ‘Advanced Options’ link. Clicking on it opens a new window. There are options like how big you want the embedded preso to be, if you want the toolbar included etc. You can see that the embed HTML code snippet changes according to the options being chosen

8. Copy/Paste slides from one presentation to another : Open two presentations in separate browser tabs. You can copy-paste from one to another.

Do test the new features in Zoho Show and we would be glad hearing your feedback.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Posted to:  Announcements, General, Zoho Show  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

We just rolled out a new design for Zoho on iPhone. You can play with it @ mobile.zoho.com (or iZoho.com). The new design introduces a tabbed interface for navigation between Zoho Apps. Currently, Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show & Creator are supported in this new interface. We plan to add more apps and more functionality to this new version.

Once you login, the Zoho tab shows the recent 5 documents from each Zoho app. You’ll be able to view your personal and shared documents under the respective application tabs.

We are looking forward to your feedback on this new redesign.

Popularity: 37% [?]

Posted to:  Announcements, Zoho Creator, Zoho Mobile, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Writer  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

After the recent Zoho Sheet Pivot Table support which is based on Zoho DB & Reports, we have rolled in good set of useful features into Zoho DB & Reports. I have summarized the important ones here below. 

Copy Database:

With the new Copy Database feature, you easily create a copy of an existing Zoho DB & Reports database. This feature provides an option to make a copy of the database with or without existing data. If you copy without data, then only the tables and report definitions are copied. If you copy with data, then all tables, reports along with existing data in the database would be copied.

You can make a copy of a database following the steps given below:

• Go to “Existing Databases” section in the home page
• Under each database that is listed you will find a “Copy” link
• Click on the “Copy” link for the database that you wish to copy
• It will popup a dialog where you could provide the name and description for the new database that is to be created
• Check/Uncheck the “Copy with Data” option depending on whether you would like to make a copy of the database with tables, reports and existing data OR just the tables and reports definition alone

With this option you could also copy any of the demonstrative Sample Databases that is provided by Zoho DB & Reports.

HTML Import:

Zoho DB & Reports now supports importing HTML table contents into Zoho DB & Reports. This enables importing data in any HTML table into Zoho DB & Reports as you import CSV data. The HTML file should contain at least one Table inside it for importing.

You can import data from a HTML file through any of the following means:

• Copy/Paste the HTML code into the “Import Wizard”
• Load a HTML file from a local folder
• Load a HTML from any publicly accessible Web URL

More intelligence & convenience for designing Chart/Pivot/Summary views:

So far, while designing chart or pivot or summary view, you had to drag and drop fields listed on the left to the right-side design area and construct the view. Now we have provided checkboxes to just select the fields that are to be used to design the chart. This is apart from the existing drag and drop support.

Zoho DB & Reports intelligently identifies the appropriate position to place the selected field in the design area. Also as another step of intelligence, Zoho DB & Reports even selects the right function to apply on the field which is added to the design area.

Filters & Search across all tabular views:

Filters and Search (Quick Filter) was introduced into Zoho DB & Reports in one of our previous update. It was initially supported only in Tables. Now you could do Quick filtering across all table based views in Zoho DB & Reports. This includes Tabular Views, SQL Query table and tables shown for displaying View Underlying Data in Charts, Pivots and Summary Views.

Color your Zoho DB & Reports interface with Themes:

Zoho DB & Reports now supports themes. You could apply the theme you like by choosing the “Themes” menu at the right top corner of the screen. Currently we have only two packaged themes available (more to come very soon….). The theme you choose will be set to your preference and applied across logins. I guess you would have already noticed that the snapshots embedded above in this blog post were all taken with our New Blue Theme.

Keep track of the  Zoho DB & Reports Feature Trail to know about all the features that are rolled-out into our service regularly. Try out the new features and let us know what you think….

Popularity: 16% [?]

Posted to:  Announcements, General, Zoho DB  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

Today’s Zoho Writer update introduces three key functionalities

1. Import Documents from Google Docs to Zoho Writer
2. Equation Editor
3. LaTeX Export

1. Import Documents from Google Docs to Zoho Writer

After we accepted Google and Yahoo! sign-in to Zoho (and Google Apps accounts sign-in), we were asked to implement import capability to Zoho. We have added this feature in this update. And now you can import your Google Docs into Zoho Writer. Here are the steps :

• Login to your Google Docs account & choose the documents that you need to export to Zoho
• Click on More actions -> Save as HTML (zipped) to your desktop
• In Zoho Writer, click on Import -> Import Google Docs, select the zipped file path and click Import
• All the Google Docs documents in the zip file will be imported into your Zoho Writer account & will be displayed in the left panel

We certainly don’t want to trap your information in Zoho. We will soon provide a mass Export option to take your documents to other services.

2. Equation Editor
As you may know, a significant % of our users are students. We got a lot of requests from this user segment to build an Equation Editor into Zoho Writer. And Zoho Writer has it now.

You’ll see a new Equation Editor icon (last one in the second row of the toolbar) which brings up a simple UI to create your equations. If you are a LaTeX guru, type your equation away and we automatically generate an image of the equation on the right. If you are not a LaTeX expert (like me), you can simply select the equation symbols with your mouse and we automatically build the equation for you. Once done, the equation image is inserted into your document.

After you insert your equation, if you want to make any changes to it, right click on the image and select Edit Equation.

3. LaTeX Export
As you see in the above slide show, we support LaTeX, the document markup language widely used by mathematicians, scientists, engineers and scholars in academia. We have a new option in Zoho Writer under Export, to save such files involving equations in LaTeX format as well.

Try the new features in Zoho Writer now & we will be glad knowing your comments.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Posted to:  Announcements, General, Zoho Writer  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article:  

We are delighted to announce that Zoho is part of PC World’s “The 100 Best Products of 2008“. Thanks to PCWorld’s editors & readers! We stand 49th on the list.

We were also included in similar list last year. Zoho was also included as one of The 25 Most Innovative Products of the Year from PC World late last year.
Past awards won by Zoho.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Posted to:  Announcements, General, In the News  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
Help others find this article: