Sales Call History : An app maintained by the Sales team about the status of toll free calls received for taking further action.

Facilities Desk Team : Seeing the first post made last week, got a mail from the builders of integrated facilities management software about how they are using Zoho Creator. A couple of their apps below, for tracking feature requests and demo schedules.

Administration Team : The folks manning the smooth operations within Zoho/AdventNet have many apps built for their specific needs, travel booking being one of them.

Webmaster Team : Here’s a list of Zoho Creator apps that are embedded on our website pages and used for various purposes - schedule a demo, file a feature request or feedback, get a quote, submit a testimonial etc.

Personal Apps : A birthday app is being maintained by Chandra of Zoho People. Being a guy involved in development of a HR solution, Chandra knows the value of remembering birthdays of team mates, close friends & family members!

Sripathy Ramesh of Zoho Sheet plays the keyboard in our music group (called ‘Sangeetha Megam’) and he has an app made for collecting info on those interested in corporate music jamming.

Hope the above list (and the former one) shows how easy, useful, diverse the apps created using Zoho Creator are and how these apps are put to good use by a company of around 1000 employees. Tell us how you are using Zoho Creator.

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.

Sports Teams : AdventNet has a good number of sports enthusiasts & we win quite a few tourneys! Calls for sporting teams to participate in internal tournaments are typically made using Zoho Creator.

Cab Booking : AdventNet employees avail the cab facilities provided by the company for going home after 9:30 pm. And this is managed using a Zoho Creator app.

Children’s Day : Zoho Creator plays an important role in all events organized here. In India, we celebrate Children’s Day every year on Nov 14. The below screenshot shows the app built for collecting the details of children attending the event.

Tour Organizing : It is a yearly ritual in AdventNet for each team to go on a 3 to 5 day trip. This acts as a good refresher and helps improve team bonding. The below forms show the details that are typically asked for as part of tours being planned.

The above apps should give you some ideas of how to use Zoho Creator, the friendly tool that lets you create apps within minutes, within your organization. We will see more example apps in another post.

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One such thing happened to one of the Zoho Creator user - Alan Bradford, last week. His wife was hit by a driver when she was traveling back home from the gym. The driver was DRUNK!. Luckily she was not hurt. But the car has got hit very badly and Alan says that the repair works would cost $13,000 dollars.

You might think what this has to do with Zoho.

Since there were no broken bones, and everybody (surprisingly) had insurance, we decided to try to get through this on our own. While I was on hold with the insurance company the next morning, I logged into my Zoho Creator account and built an application for us to manage all the details related to the accident. It took me about an hour to build it. You can demo and download my Accident Tracker application in the Creator Marketplace

However, this action of Alan perfectly mirrors the aspect of his strong personality. Alan, our best wishes are with you and your wife. Hope she recovers out of this emotional trauma soon.

Alan Bradford has blogged about this incident in detail here.

1. Say you are conducting an online survey in your blog or website and you want to collect some feedback data from your visitors. But you don’t want to show all the data that is being collected when the survey is on (as that may affect your survey outcome).
2. Your survey ends and you want to display the data collected but not the form you used to get the data (so that your visitors don’t add any more data once the survey has ended).

For the first scenario, the collection form is to be made Public so that anyone can access the form.

• Let’s say you have created the application in Zoho Creator. By default, it is Private (that is, it is accessible only to you upon logging in)
• Go to the Edit mode of your application and click on the Share tab.
• From the left panel, click on the Form that is to be embedded. In the center of the page, click on the Change link.
• The form is now Public and you should see the Anyone can enter data into this form message now.
• Click on Access this application -> More Actions -> Embed in your website. Copy-paste the iframe code given there to your blog/website page
• Log out from Zoho Creator and see if your blog/website page displays the embedded Zoho Creator form properly
• Test your application by submitting some data
• You should be able to see the data submitted only after logging to your Zoho Creator account

For the second scenario, you will just have to reverse which of the application part - here, it is the ‘view’ part - that is to be made Public (and marking the ‘form’ part as Private).

Hope that helps when building your next Zoho Creator application.

Here is the stats of Zoho Marketplace (as on 22nd Oct):

• No. of Application Installs : 4125
• No. of Apps Published : 69
• Most Installed App : Project Management Plus by Aparna S, (no. of Installs - 855)
• No. Projects Posted by the Users : 55

But wait! That’s not all we have to share with you.

Have an interesting success story to share. Poul Tang, a consultant posted his requirement at the Marketplace and recieved solution from Pascal in few days. Well, Pascal Veilleux is the featured Zoho Creator Partner. Check out his developer profile.

What makes this story interesting is that Poul got three proposals from the developers and he finalized on one to get his things done. He used PayPal service for the payment. Entire process was completed in couple of days. Read the full story here »

In Zoho DB & Reports we have introduced the feature of scheduled periodic import of CSV files from any accessible Web URL. With this feature you could setup Zoho DB & Reports to periodically fetch data in CSV format from any accessible Web URL. This would be really useful in scenarios where you have new data being published or updated periodically and you would like get those updates inside Zoho DB & Reports for reporting and analysis. Till now you had to re-import this data manually into Zoho DB & Reports, every time an update is available. Now you just have to setup up the periodic import feature and Zoho DB & Reports would do the rest for you.

With this feature you could also (enable Zoho DB & Reports to) periodically fetch data from your Zoho Creator Application into Zoho DB & Reports as changes happen to the same. As the latest data is made available inside Zoho DB & Reports, you could create any type of powerful reports with it. The reports created using Zoho DB & Reports could also be embedded back inside your Zoho Creator application using the new HTML Page view feature introduced in Zoho Creator 3.0

The following presentation demonstrates how you could periodically import data from Zoho Creator into Zoho DB & Reports:

Do give the above feature a try and let us know your feedbacks. This is just the first step in making available the powerful reporting functionality of Zoho DB & Reports to Zoho Creator users. We are continuing our work on this problem to further simplify the process. A much closer GUI level integration of making report creation features of Zoho DB & Reports available within Zoho Creator is in development. We will keep you posted once we are ready with it…

Happy Reporting and Keep tab on further development…

Clarence
Zoho DB & Reports - Online Reporting & BI Service

Recently, a user asked us the browsers supported by Zoho. The simple answer is Firefox (2.0 onwards) and Internet Explorer (6.0 onwards). But to know what browsers each Zoho service supported, we made a simple form application in Zoho Creator like below and sent it to all the teams, asking them to fill the required info.

And we heard back from all the teams within an hour! The page below lists the browsers supported by each of the Zoho services.

Another of our users asked about the languages Zoho’s UI is available in. For this, we created a Zoho Sheet and shared it with the teams. And the info got filled up as in the below Zoho Sheet.

A special mention is to be made of how Zoho Sheet handles UI translations. They have opened it up for the community to help them customize the UI for different languages. No wonder then that Zoho Sheet supports the most number of languages! (Think other Zoho teams will follow suit in adopting the same strategy)

Previous posts on the ‘How we use Zoho apps in Zoho’ topic :

• Using Zoho CRM to send our Newsletter
• Using Zoho Wiki for our Help Documentation
• Using Zoho Wiki for our Business Portals

We have used Zoho Creator extensively for solving many of our internal needs. We will profile such apps in the coming days. And to the readers of this blog, do let us know in the comments (or write to us) how you are using Zoho Creator, Zoho Sheet and other Zoho services for your personal / business needs.

Zoho Marketplace is a service that brings users and business application developers together. It provides a growing catalog of business applications that users can try and purchase. If you like an application you can buy it from the developer (some applications are even free) and ‘Install’ it in your Zoho account. Contrary to what happens with installing old business software, the installation is really pain- and worry- free for use. Because everything is set-up, hosted and arranged by Zoho, it only takes a few minutes to start using the application.

But what if the user can’t find the *exact* application he is looking for? No worries. Customers can also post their exact requirements to the Zoho Marketplace, and get help from third-party developers in creating the application they need.

For developers, it provides a place where they can post and market the applications they have developed in Zoho Creator – free of charge. Yeah, you read that right. There is no fee a developer has to pay Zoho to list his application.

In short, just like you can buy “stuff” in Amazon or eBay, you can also get your business applications in Zoho Marketplace.

But wait! That’s not all we have in store for you.

Today we also released a major update for Zoho Creator. Zoho Creator allows regular folks like me to create power data-driven business applications that can be kept private, shared with a group or published to the world. We call those ‘Situated Software‘. But it can of course also be used by more advanced developers to add complex logic, interaction with other sites and more.

This release focuses more on the latter. We have added many new features and capabilities which make developing rich business applications even easier. These include:

• Custom HTML pages. Allows developers to create dynamic, fully customized HTML pages that are part of an application and embed forms, views, widgets, videos and more.

• Layout Customization. Makes it easy to create great-looking applications in seconds. Choose from a variety of layouts and themes. And of course, you can also create your own.

• Stateless Forms. Stateless forms allow developers to take advantage of all the Creator tools and environment, but gives them full control over where their data is stored.

And there’s of course many others – like full support for CRUD operations, the ability to share/un-share an application (or just components of it separately), easier to create mashups by fetching and processing data from other websites, creating maps on the fly and some others.

To celebrate these two releases and to give you an overview of Zoho Marketplace and Zoho Creator 3, we’ve prepared a ‘different’ kind of video for you. If there were and Oscar category for “Best Video Demo Award”, I’m sure this would get one!

In addition, there are two other videos you can check out:

• Zoho Marketplace & Zoho Creator video and demo for customers looking to buy/build business applications.
• Zoho Marketplace & Zoho Creator video and demo for software developers or people who would like to publish applications using Zoho Creator and Zoho Marketplace.

Rodrigo Vaca

This is what some people refer to as the ‘democratization of the tools of production’. It was a concept popularized by the ‘Long Tail’, a best-seller book by Chris Anderson. Regardless of your own views of that book (there is some controversy about it), the concept of the democratization of the tools of production is evident in YouTube, blogs, music and some other cases.

Where am I going with this? Bear with me for a second.

Not long ago, ‘geeks’ were the only people who could create data-driven applications on the web. And there was a reason for that - doing so required quite a bit of training, and even years to master just one of the many components involved in creating applications - the operating system, database, application server, web server, security…

But that’s not the case anymore. Zoho Creator is another example of the democratization of the tools of production. In this case, it is about the tools for creating web, business and data-driven applications. With Zoho Creator, everyone can create applications for their own particular need.

But the question is – what kind of applications? There are many kinds of applications out there, and while Zoho Creator can certainly be used by professional developers looking to commercialize their applications, but right now I want to focus on the kind of applications that everyone can create on their own, for themselves and their own consumption.

Let me explain with a simple 2-by-2 matrix.

On the horizontal axis we have the ‘Complexity of the Application’ - how advanced they are in terms of their logic, the formulas and algorithms they use. On the other vertical axis we have ‘Uniqueness of the Requirements’. Lower in the scale means more people share those same requirements. And these two axes are a continuum, but for the sake of this discussion, we’ll imagine just two scenarios for each axis.

So in the high-complexity/common-requirements quadrant we have those applications like ERP and CRM. They are complex applications which required a lot of logic, but millions and millions of people share the same basic requirements. Sure, people spend a lot of time (and money) customizing their ERP system, but most of that has to do with the underlying business process than with the software itself.

In the high-complexity/unique-requirements quadrant we have those applications that land rockets on the moon. Don’t expect to just ‘buy and install’ those applications.

Then there are those applications which are low-complexity and share common requirements - that everybody needs. Say, a calendar or calculator application. Pick one, they all yield pretty much the same result and are used pretty much the same way.

But then there are those applications that are not quite as complex as a rocket-launching system, but they are so unique to a particular situation that you can’t readily get them off the shelf either. What should we call these? Luckily, Clay Shirky already came up with a name for them - “Situated Software“.

Situated Software is the kind of applications people need to collect, share, keep track and report on a variety of data. But they are not long projects that warrant the formal involvement of your IT department, formal methodology and end-less meetings. They might be short-lived projects, almost bordering on disposable software, or they may be applications created to be used for a long while.

In a business environment it might mean keeping track of their IT assets, people registering for an event, managing contacts in a simplified way, tracking bugs, issues or customer requests/comments, etc. For a school, situated software might be about keeping track of student information and their parents, or a simple library records app. There are as many examples as unique ‘situations’ for people – that is, too many to list.

How many? Well, there are already more than 100,000 applications created with Zoho Creator. Zoho Creator makes ‘Situated Software’ possible for everyone. No, we’re not all turning into Star-Wars-and-Star-Trek-loving software developers. We can continue to be regular folks, but we can write our own (situated) software every once in a while.