Many of you would have wanted to remotely assist your friends or parents over installing a software or setting right a configuration in their computer. And support personnel have the requirement of troubleshooting a problem in their customer’s premises. While this was possible by tweaking Zoho Meeting’s options (specifically, by setting the Presenter as the Customer/friend while creating a meeting), this wasn’t very intuitive, and rightly so Hence, we came up with a ‘Remote Assistance’ feature in Zoho Meeting specifically for this purpose - providing remote support to your friends and customers.

To use this, go to http://meeting.zoho.com and click on the Remote Assistance tab. You will see 2 options - Start and Join. Enter the email address of the person whose desktop you want to see (person whom you want to provide Remote support/assistance to), and click Start. You should see a screen like this :

And you should see a viewer opening in your PC, which will wait for the Presenter (person on the other side) to join the session. An email will be sent to the person to join the session. Otherwise, you can ask them to go to http://zohom.com (short form for Zoho Meeting ) over phone or IM and enter the 9 digit Session Id (that you’ll see on the web page) to join your session.

Once the person joins the session, you should be able to see his/her desktop. Now, if you want to ‘take control’ of the PC and debug/trouble shoot issues, you can press the Request Control button in your toolbar, and you will gain control of the PC automatically! This should hopefully help you provide Remote Assistance in  a few clicks!

Do give Remote Assistance a spin and let us know your thoughts and comments. In case of issues/queries our id is support (at) zohomeeting (dot) com or srk (at) zoho (dot) com.

Popularity: 20% [?]

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Michael Hayslip has a great post explaining online meetings & how desktops can be shared easily. From his post,

An online meeting can be defined as a session where you and at least one other person are collaborating on a project in real time via your computers. … An online meeting has the benefits of a face-to-face meeting without having to be in the same place.

And Michael explains how Zoho Meeting helps you do the above for free.

With Zoho Meeting, only the meeting host needs to sign up for an account. Others do not need an account in order to join an existing meeting. Once you sign up for a free account, you can begin hosting meetings. It is a very simple process and only takes a minute or two to get started.

For now, the free version of Zoho Meeting is able to handle my meeting needs pretty well. Currently, there is no limit to the number of meetings you can hold or participate in, or the number of participants that can be in a single meeting. … Zoho Meeting works well behind a firewall and uses SSL encryption for security.

Mike Muise has this to say to his readers about free CRM,

Zoho CRM is a free customer relationship management suite (up to 3 users). If you require more users, there are paid options. I have been trying it for my day-to-day tracking of prospects and sales opportunities for 2008. The interface is clean, simple, but best of all it is fast. Something that not all CRM solutions can boast. It also runs cleanly in my browser, Firefox (take note other CRM providers!). As far as what I have used it for so far, I give it a big thumbs up.

Thanks to both the Mikes for the their nice blog posts!

Popularity: 34% [?]

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A lot many new features have gone in to Zoho Meeting since its Beta launch. A few of them below.

Skype Integration
We have added the ability to do Skype conferencing in Zoho Meeting. This allows you to converse with your participants.

When you click on Create Meeting, there is a ‘Skype’ checkbox (beside the Presenter’s section). Enabling it will get you a new column. Just enter the Skype ids of people whom you want to include in the conference.

You can also decide when you want to start the Skype conferencing. After you create a Meeting, you will get a button, Skype Conference.

On clicking that, users will be automatically dialed on Skype and included in the conferencing system!

Buddy List Auto Fill
Zoho Meeting also remembers the names/email addresses of the participants you have recently invited. When you type in the first few letters, there is an auto-fill/suggest box which helps fill the names easily.

Inviting Users to your Meeting Session
One feedback we receive quite often is, ‘How do I invite users to a meeting?’. There are multiple ways you can invite people to a Zoho Meeting session, at various stages of the meeting session.
1) When creating a meeting, you can specify their email addresses in ‘Participants’ section
2) After creating a Meeting, there is an link to ‘Invite‘ people. Clicking on that will give you multiple ways to invite people - standard Zoho Meeting invitation through email, sending a link using your Mail Client or IM, or using the Meeting Key to join

3) After installing the Agent/Presenter, there is an invite icon in the toolbar. Clicking on it will enable you invite people, giving their mail id.

For comments or suggestions, my id is srk(at)zoho(dot)com

Do give Zoho Meeting a shot and let us know what you think!

Popularity: 19% [?]

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While Zoho Creator was the first Zoho app to have an exclusive blog dedicated to it, Zoho Sheet became the first to have a complete help book made for it. Check out the book at devGuide.net. Many thanks to Jacek Artymiak!

Lynn Aleshire of Anchorage, Alaska has been using Zoho Projects to help her daughter with her school work. And this got referenced in an article titled “Checking the Kids’ Homework Over the Internet” by Christopher Lawton at the Wall Street Journal as well.

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb is having a series of posts on Web Office this week and this post has a poll on word processors. Vote for Zoho Writer if it is your favorite.

At Bootstrappr, Jessica Hupp in a post titled “The Green Entrepreneur’s Toolbox: 100 Networking Resources, Guides, and Links“, lists Zoho as one of the green tools that entrepreneurs can use for a paperless office.

Zoho Office Suite: The Zoho Office Suite has lots of great tools, but the greenest one is Zoho Meeting. You can use this tool to share desktops, hold online meetings and more, reducing the need to travel for collaboration.

We got a tremendous response for Zoho Writer moving offline using Google Gears. Blog search results in Ask (our favorite as it gets the most comprehensive results!), Technorati and Google. Thanks to all bloggers and analysts who wrote about this interesting development!

Popularity: 36% [?]

Posted to:  In the News, Zoho Creator, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Projects, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Writer  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
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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.

• Create Meetings, share desktop with multiple attendees
• Attendees can attend the meeting from any operating system
• Comes with three viewers - Active-X, Java and Flash
• Participants can choose to control presenter’s desktop
• Meeting Viewer can be embedded into web pages and applications
• Zoho Show and Zoho Chat is integrated into Zoho Meeting
• Zoho Meeting is currently free while in Beta

Here is a quick video of the application.

Try Zoho Meeting out and we would love to hear your valuable feedback comments.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Posted to:  Announcements, General, Zoho Chat, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Show  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
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Gili at ‘Blogging for business’ has a nice post titled “A realistic valuation model for blogging ventures” which is about calculating the net worth of a blog. The blog evaluation calculator there is on Zoho Sheet. If you have a regular blog, do give the blog evaluation calculator a try.

John Wilson confesses to being a big Zoho fan (thanks, John!) and has a nice post of his first experience with Zoho Meeting. From his blog post,

Today, whilst chatting to someone on Skype, I decided it would be helpful to walk them through a website application. I was able to quickly launch Zoho Meeting, ping them an email invite containing a link and within 2 minutes from initiating the entire process, my counterpart was able to view my onscreen activities without having to worry about installs on their machine.

Another long-time Zoho fan, Craig Cmehil has a full review on Zoho Meeting as well.
Talking of Zoho fans, here’s a Chinese blogger named Wangtam who has got lots of posts involving Zoho! Benoit Descary (being French) took note of Zoho Sheet going multilingual.

And this is from a Tumbler blog, “can’t believe I missed these brilliant applications” [referring to Zoho Projects and Zoho Creator]. The same blog makes a reference to one Mr James Clay who had referred to a list of Top 25 Web 2.0 tools for schools. Probably it is this article from March 2007 in OEDb (Online Education Database) which recommends many of the Zoho apps. Elmer Thomas Jr. writing about Office 2.0 tools recommends Zoho Projects & Zoho CRM as well.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Posted to:  General, Zoho Creator, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Projects, Zoho Sheet  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
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We are glad to announce the latest addition to the Zoho Suite, Zoho Meeting - a web conferencing application.

As this is a different kind of application (more of a real-time streaming) from the existing zoho applications we decided to take it slow by offering the app to selected users first. We hope to open up the application to public in April.

As with other web conferencing applications, Zoho Meeting lets you schedule meetings, share desktop, chat etc. However it offers few unique functionalities. For the current release, the host has to be on windows and the attendees can be on Windows, Mac, Linux or any OS with Java or Flash available. The attendees need not install anything to attend a meeting.

Meeting also is integrated into Zoho Show. This means you can now embed your desktop sharing session inside a slide. The complete desktop sharing session can also be recorded and shared with the attendees right away. The follwing video should give you a brief intro to the app. By the time it steps out of private beta, you’ll see more exciting features.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Posted to:  Announcements, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Show  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
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