The chat bar you see at the bottom of applications like Zoho Mail, Zoho Business, Zoho Docs does a lot of useful things. Most of them has got to do with your presence status and the bar helps you in chatting live with your contacts who are online. But there's one other important feature - notifications. The little bell icon adds a number to itself whenever there is a new notification.
You get notified for a good many work instances.
1. When you are offline and someone sends you a chat message
2. When someone shares a Zoho document, spreadsheet or presentation.
3. When you upload a file to Zoho Docs
4. When you make a post in a Zoho Discussions forum and someone responds to it. You get notified when you watch someone or a forum too.
5. Users can send a direct notification message (instead of a chat message) to their Contacts / Groups from Zoho Chat
You can see the past notifications history by clicking on the Feeds link. 
So, watch the little Notification icon at the bottom-left when you login to Zoho the next time. It might have some important notifications for you :) The chat/presence bar itself will continue to evolve as we have planned for more useful features to be delivered through it.
As you may know, we have been focusing a lot on integration between Zoho applications. For a end user, it is important that Zoho
applications fit well into his workflow and integrate well with third party applications/services as well. Apart from integrating Zoho
applications, we have also integrated Zoho with many third-party
applications. Infact, we have too many such integrations. So I'll split
this into multiple posts and expand on some of our integrations with non-zoho applications
Integration with Google/Yahoo
Let
us start with login. We don't mandate you create an account with Zoho
to try our apps. If you are reading this, you probably have a Yahoo
or a Google account, right? So we figured, we'll just let you login to Zoho with you existing accounts. This way, you don't have an
additional username/password pair to remember.
EchoSign Integration in Zoho Writer
If you are working on an agreement or any other document and you need to get it signed/approved, EchoSign is a great service to use for electronic signatures/approvals. To
make the process seamless, we integrated EchoSign into Zoho Writer. So you work on a document and with a click or two, you can send
the document for approval. You'll find EchoSign integrated as 'DigiSign' option under the 'Share' MenuTab in Zoho Writer.
Flickr & Picasa Integration in Zoho Show
When you try to insert an image in Zoho Show, apart from uploading the
photos, you'll notice two options - Flickr & Picasa. If you already
have your images uploaded in other sites, why re-upload them to Zoho.
So we integrated Flickr & Picasa into Zoho Show to let your embed
those images into your presentations.
Paypal, Google Checkout & Authorize.net integration with Zoho Invoice
Sending out invoices is just one part of the story. If you want to
receive payments, your invoicing system needs to have multiple options
for your customer to choose. Zoho Invoice integrated multiple payment
gateways to receive payments - Paypal, Google Checkout and
Authorize.Net.
Integration with multiple IM Networks in Zoho Chat
With Zoho Chat 2.0, we added multi-protocol chat support. This lets you
chat with users from other IM Networks including Yahoo!, Google, MSN,
AIM, ICQ or any network that supports the Jabber protocol. As Zoho Chat is integrated across mutliple Zoho Apps, you'll be able to chat with members from other IM Networks no matter which Zoho App you are in.
There are just a few examples of external services integrated into Zoho
Apps. I'll talk about other integrations in follow-up posts. Meanwhile,
if are there any third-party integrations you wish to see in Zoho,
please let us know.
In
one of my previous posts, I talked about integration between different Zoho Apps expanding on the following integrations.
Collaboration and Web Apps: The Big Picture
Previously, I talked about Collaboration being one of the key features of web applications. In this post, I want expand more on that point.
I am sure all of us agree that the key advantage of web based applications is Collaboration. There are other advantages like mobility etc. But thats for another post. Lets look at how collaboration is evolving in online applications. Before that let us look at communication applications first and later we shall talk about their role in collaboration.
Communication Apps:
Today we use different types of communication tools on a daily basis. These tools include Discussion Forums, Email, IM, Audio Conferencing, Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing etc. Some of these tools are used along with others for better/effective communication. Each of these communication tools are intrusive than the other. Forums are less intrusive than Email which is less intrusive than IM which is less intrusive than Audio Conf etc.
Collaboration Tools:
With the advent of web applications we have seen a different type of collaboration with 'Collaborative Editing' on content where multiple users can work on the same application/content at the same time seeing each other's changes immediately. In this case, all users are (literally) on the same page working on the content making collaboration effective with out the hassle of emailing attachments and managing versions.
These 'Collaborative Editing' and 'Virtual Whiteboard' type of functionalities in web applications is just the stepping stone for more broader and deeper integration. These features mark a significant change in the way we work. Instead of emailing attachments, we email a link (Remember, Document is a URL). The communication tools like Email, IM etc are used for the right purpose - to communicate the changes and not for pushing the content.
Collaboration + Communication Tools
What we will see next is a combination of collaboration and communication tools. Each of the communication tools I mentioned will be integrated into web applications that focus on collaboration. A user might prefer one type of communication than the other. So it is important for web apps to provide different types of communication tools for effective collaboration.
In fact we already see this happening in our own applications. Email is integrated into Zoho Writer where you can email a document (selecting a format) directly from the application.
Similarly, Zoho Chat is integrated into Writer/Sheet/Show/Notebook etc enabling instant communication.
With the recent addition of Comments feature in Zoho Writer, a mini discussion forum is integrated to discuss the comments...and then in Zoho Notebook, we have integrated Skype for audio and video communication. You'll see other communication tools eventually integrate into such web applications.
We certainly see this as the direction web applications will evolve integrating different types of communications in multiple ways. Instead of content revolving around communication tools, the communication tools will now revolve the content.
Sound Notification
Due to overwhelming requests from our users, we have composed a new tone for sound notification (to indicate message/online/offline status). Hear it and let us know your feedback. Thanks to our own music director, Ramesh of Zoho Sheet, who made the composition :-)
Message Notification & Smileys
We have tuned the message notification a bit by scrolling the message on the title bar.
Zoho Chat now provides ways to express your emotions through glossy smileys. Don't get surprised if you feel like it has got the ToonDoo flavor since we brought it out of their favor!
Internationalization
Zoho Chat is now available in two more languages other than English. Japanese gets the credit of the first non-English version of Zoho Chat followed by Tamil (I tried my hands on it, don't know whether my Tamil teacher will be happy or worried on hearing this news ;-)). You will find more languages supported in our upcoming updates.
Note: As of now, you need to configure your browser's default language for the corresponding translation. We are in the process of configuring it right inside Zoho Chat. Till then, please stay tuned.
Based on our users' feedback, Zoho Chat's update today introduces a new theme. In addition to the existing tab-based theme, you can now have floating (drag-and-drop) chat windows on a desktop theme. These chat windows are now within the Zoho Chat browser tab but soon we will be giving the pop-out option as well. The new theme's available in two gradient color styles, blue & black, with more colored skins to come.
Now that it's been a week since we launched Zoho Creator 2.0, it's time for another announcement. Today we are opening Zoho Meeting to public.
We announced Zoho Meeting in March and it was in Private Beta till now. Today it steps out as a Public Beta where anyone with a Zoho Account can use Meeting. The application is free while it is in Beta.
For those of you who are not very familiar with Zoho Meeting, it is a web conferencing application where you can schedule meetings with others and share your desktop. Apart from sharing your desktop, sharing a presentation is an important part. For this reason, we integrated Zoho Meeting with Zoho Show (our presentation application) where a desktop sharing session can be embedded inside a slide. Zoho Meeting is also integrated with Zoho Chat.
One of the advantages of Zoho Meeting is that the attendees can be on any operating system to attend a meeting. Here are some quick highlights of Zoho Meeting.
Here is a quick video of the application.
Try Zoho Meeting out and we would love to hear your valuable feedback comments.
Richard Brandt at MIT Technology Review has an article on Zoho titled "Can Zoho beat Google?". From the article :
Zoho has become a prolific designer of online software tools, releasing at least one new product every month for more than a year. It boasts 15 product offerings so far, including a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation tool, a Wiki, a project manager, a customer-relationship management (CRM) tool, a database, and a project-planning tool. Bloggers who have tried the software say it's more robust than online applications offered by Google, and it offers better collaboration capabilities (for example, it lets multiple people work on a document simultaneously or sync spreadsheets with remote data from websites) than products from Microsoft. Zoho's fans see it as the model for a new generation of Web-based applications that could displace expensive software sold by Microsoft.
Zoho is the suite to beat. A Gartner report released on March 12 placed Zoho at the top of its list of "Cool Vendors in Web 2.0," five companies that offer "a glimpse into the future of enterprise innovations." Says Gartner analyst Nick Gall, "Zoho is ahead in the user community and in the technology."
Thanks to Richard Brandt & MIT! In other news, The Social Computing Magazine has a write-up on Zoho Notebook titled "Zoho Notebook: One-Stop Business Collaboration Tool". And in a blog post on Zoho Notebook at weblogg-ed, Melinda Miller has this to say about Zoho Polls in the comments :
I really like zoho polls. One of my 4th grade teachers used it in class one time so now I use it all the time with my staff. We voted on our theme for next year, planning for next year’s holiday party, and staff shirt preferences. Here is a link to my school blog with the zoho poll embeded.
In a post titled "CRM on the Cheap", Davey Moyers writes,
Looking for an inexpensive, robust CRM program? Why not check out Zoho CRM. The price is right, free for three users. I have been giving this system a test drive, and there's power under the hood. Full CRM functionality. It lacks mobile capability or offline use, but otherwise this is a solid player for the individual sales rep or small team. It also boast Outlook synchronization that is as good as the competitors in this space. The features I especially find appealing are lead management, opportunity management, and sales quotes.... I spent four years using salesforce.com on a daily basis, and I would pit this program against salesforce.com in all categories save one. Offline and mobile are not yet offered. However, the print templates on Zoho are much better than salesforce.com. So you plan it, print it, execute it. Whatever "it" is.
Amit Agarwal has a nice post explaining how to embed Zoho Sheet's charts in one's blog. Zoho Chat's shoutbox feature (embedding a chat window in your website) has been put to good use by a community named Cerebrals Hens Network. Cool background options, guys! And our recent REST API release got noted by Thomas Willingham & Go To India Web 2.0.
Thanks, one & all :-)
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