One of the important things we have been focusing out this year has been integration between the various Zoho apps. An example of such an integration - Zoho Show has long allowed embedding of Zoho Sheet's spreadsheets and charts. The same is now possible with Zoho Reports too. You can embed your cool reports that you created in Zoho Reports into a Zoho Show presentation and impress your audience with live interactive reports.

Let's say as your company's Sales Manager, you are to present the month's sales figures. Use Zoho Reports to crunch all your sales data, make reports out of it and Zoho Show to make your presentation. Embedding the reports from Zoho Reports, you make the presentation much more interactive and powerful. You can mouseover the embedded charts and get relevant values displayed. You can click on the data points in the chart and drill down to the actual values too. See such a slide show in action below (embedding the presentation in a web page / another application is another plus when using Zoho Show)

How to embed reports in Zoho Show presentations

In Zoho Reports, click on Publish -> Embed in Website/Blog. Copy the html code snippet given. In Zoho Show, click on Insert -> HTML code. Paste the code from Zoho Reports and click on the Insert button. The chart/table will get embedded.

Go on. Create Zoho Show presentations with embedded cool & live reports from Zoho Reports. I'm sure your audience will love it :)

Elementool Integrates Zoho

Oct 13 2009 09:50:51 AM Posted By : Arvind
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At Zoho, we provide APIs for a good many of our products and they have all been well received. A sample list of our API partners here. The latest one to join the list is Elementool.

Elementool provides web based project management tools for help desk, bug and defect tracking and time tracking tools. Elementool has implemented Zoho's API in their Docs module. All uploaded documents, spreadsheets and presentations to the Elementool's Docs module can now be viewed using Zoho. Not just viewing, you can edit the file too and when you save the file again, all changes get reflected in your uploaded file in the Elementool account.



Such a functionality is useful if you are uploading a lot of your project/work-related documents, spreadsheets & presentations online and want them viewed or edited then and there in the browser itself (instead of downloading each of them and editing them using a desktop application). Try Elementool out and see if it fits your needs.

We have a couple of other API collaborations happening too which we will blog about in the days to come. Stay tuned.

Remote Presentations in Zoho Show is one of those features we use extensively here at Zoho. In fact, some times when we sit in the same meeting room with no projecter, we end up doing a remote presentation and every member in the room joins the presentation from their laptops. Ofcourse, this feature was designed for presenting over the internet keeping all the members on the same slide.

In a recent update, our Zoho Show team improved this feature further with a couple of new features.

Multiple Presenters

The remote presentation feature in Zoho Show allowed a single presenter. This means, if you wanted your colleague to present a certain section of your presentation, you didn't have much luck with it. Not anymore.

Our recent update added a feature to make other participants as presenters. As a host, you can choose a participant and make him the presenter. Alternatively, a participant can request control from the host to become the presenter. When the host grants access, the slides can then be controlled by the new presenter.




At any point, the host can take the control back.


Cursor on Slides

It is easier to follow a presenter when all participants are in the same room and the presenter uses his cursor to pin point a location on the slides. Viewing a cursor on a slide is useful especially when you want to point to a section of an image in a slide, for example. But how does this work over the internet where we are just viewing the slides and not the presenter's cursor? To overcome this, some people use web conferencing apps to share the desktop so that the cursor is visible.

With this new update, all participants will now be able to view the presenter's cursor on their slides. Presenters can now point to any specific location on the slide and all participants will view the cursor at their end with the presenter's name on it. 



Ofcourse, if the presenter chooses not to broadcast his cursor location, he can disable that in remote presentation.

We hope you'll find these new enhancements useful. We are curious on know how you use the remote presentation feature in Zoho Show.

Zoho's Notification Feeds

Aug 06 2009 05:58:20 AM Posted By : Arvind
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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.

How much time do you spend centering images in your presentation or making sure the text objects are aligned well to the top? If you are conscious about these subtle alignments, you'll probably like our new features in Zoho Show.

A new 'Grids & Guides' button is added in Zoho Show () which brings up the dialog to enable these options. You will also notice this option on right click.


Enabling Grids displays a layer of grids on your slides to help you align your objects precisely. You can also enable 'Snap To' options to snap objects to the closest grids/guides.

The guides can be moved around by simply dragging them to the desired position. Changes to the guides are remembered for the user no matter which presentation is open.

If you still don't like the alignment precision, we also added the Zoom options. Right click on any slide, you'll notice Zoom In, Zoom Out and Fit to Width options. These zoom options can be used in combination with Grids and Guides options for precise adjustments.

Additional formatting options were also added to provide better control. You can now go to the properties of any object (on right click) and choose to precisely position objects horizontally or vertically. You can select an image for example and use the keyboard shortcut 'CTRL+M' to align the image to the center of the slide.

We hope you'll like these enhanced formatting options. There are additional goodies coming in Zoho Show. Meanwhile, please provide your feedback on these new features.


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.

New Zoho API Partner : Rabbit

Jun 26 2009 05:11:00 AM Posted By : Arvind
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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.

Rabbit and 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.

Rabbit has a 14-day trial. Try them out.


Zoho is primarily about working online. We have a great set of online productivity apps which businesses find extremely useful for collaboration. Microsoft SharePoint is ubiquitous in enterprises for content management, but it lacks several advantages that cloud applications like Zoho enjoy.

Today we are pleased to announce Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint that brings the advantages of Zoho online productivity applications to ubiquitous Microsoft SharePoint.

Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint extends the value of Microsoft SharePoint by allowing users to create new documents using Zoho's office suite and then save them directly to SharePoint in Microsoft Office supported formats. Users can view or edit existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations using Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show and save them back to SharePoint.


This video gives a good overview of this add-on.



Installation video is available here. As Zoho applications are served from the cloud, you don't need any installations on desktops to create/view/edit documents. Once you install the add-on for SharePoint server, you can be more productive with just your browser.


Zoho Collaboration on Microsoft SharePoint

Apart from providing editing capability for existing documents, the add-on also provides collaborative editing functionality. Based on sharing permissions already defined in SharePoint, multiple users can collaboratively work on documents/spreadsheets/presentations in real-time. This feature basically brings one of the key advantages of an online office suite to SharePoint.


While collaboratively editing documents, you can also chat with other members using our integrated Zoho Chat.

Data Behind your Firewall

Along with small and medium businesses, we see a good percentage of departments in larger organizations using our productivity apps for collaboration. There are  businesses which prefer keeping their data behind the enterprise firewall. For such organizations, this new add-on brings in the best of both worlds - Collaboration capabilities of an online application while keeping the data behind your firewall.

If you have SharePoint installed in your intranet behind your corporate firewall, you still will be able to view/edit documents using our online applications. After changes, your documents are saved back to your SharePoint server behind your corporate firewall leaving no data on Zoho Servers.

When you open the document, a copy is transferred temporarily to Zoho servers securely. When the document is closed, it is permanently deleted from our servers immediately leaving no data on our side.

Pricing & Availability

Starting today, this add-on is available for Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and 2003 versions. You can try the 30 day evaluation version for unlimited users. After the trial period, it costs $2/user/month on an yearly subscription or $3/user/month for monthly subscription.

If you have already invested in Microsoft SharePoint, this add-on is a great compliment that brings in the advantages of online productivity applications to SharePoint. If you are able to access SharePoint, you'll be able to view/edit documents without having to invest on productivity suites for every desktop in your business.

Additional information is available @ http://www.zoho.com/sharepoint

Please do give it a try and let us know what you think. 

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Microsoft, SharePoint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. ZOHO Corp is not affiliated or endorsed by Microsoft Corporation.

Japan's NTT Communications (NTT Com) unveiled their first foray into Cloud through a concept called "Setten" in Japan starting with a suite of applications for businesses. We are very excited to announce that some of Zoho's Applications are included as part of NTT Com's offerings.

NTT Communications is one of the largest telecommunications company in Japan and they are unveiling their cloud concept 'Setten' offering virtual office environment with a suite of online applications. To start with, the offering will include
  • Email Application (Based on Zoho Mail)
  • Office Suite (Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show)
  • Virtual Desktop for PC/Mobile
  • Business Goo (a Groupware from NTT Resonant)
  • Online Storage
This online offering will also provide the capability to integrate with customer's internal/in-house web applications including Mail & File servers. The offering also supports multiple authentications (ID/PW, IC Card, one time password). NTT Com also plans to open up the APIs for the suite.

Initially, this offering will be available to 15 selected companies in Japan. The applications offered through this suite will expand as the suite matures over time. This offering will enter the commercial phase this fiscal year in 2009.

While Zoho Applications are offered as individual applications, they are also integrated with NTT Com's File Explorer. The mail applications is also integrated with their Address Book application providing seamless user experience through out the suite.

Zoho: The Deployment Model
Interesting part to notice in this case is that the Zoho Applications are not served from Zoho's data centers in US. Instead, Zoho applications are deployed in NTT Com's data centers. Zoho provides frequent updates to these applications. For larger companies as well as service providers, we do offer an on-site deployment option of Zoho Apps within their data centers. This gives them better control over the infrastructure and data.

This custom deployment model is not new as we have done this earlier with Baihui in China offering Zoho Apps in Chinese market. For Baihui, the Zoho Apps are deployed in Baihui's data centers within China to serve the local market. With NTT Com offering Zoho Apps as part of their integrated online suite for businesses, Zoho applications will be served from NTT Com's data centers.

At Zoho, we have seen some good interest from carriers across the world. We think Cloud Apps can complement very well with the offerings from carriers. Cloud Applications combined with the local deployment model is a great win-win situation for both cloud vendors as well as carriers.

NTT Communication's Press Release

Here is the press release.

Integration between Zoho Apps : Part II

May 15 2009 10:04:00 AM Posted By : Raju Vegesna
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In one of my previous posts, I talked about integration between different Zoho Apps expanding on the following integrations.

  • Sheet integration with CRM
  • Writer & Sheet integration in Zoho Projects
  • Meeting & Chat integration in Zoho Show
  • Creator Integration in People
  • Projects integration in Invoice
  • Writer, Sheet & Show integration in Notebook
  • Writer, Sheet & Show integration into Wiki
  • Chat integration in Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook, Meeting etc
Here in this post, let us look at some of the integrations we have added since then. Here we go...

Writer, Sheet & Show integration in Zoho Docs

When we introduced Zoho Docs, we not only aggregated all your documents from Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show, we also added the ability to open these documents right within Zoho Docs. With Writer, Sheet & Show integration in Zoho Docs, we let you open documents as a tab in view-only mode within the Zoho Docs application. You always have an option to 'Edit' these files which launches the appropriate Zoho application in a new window.



Zoho Mail Integration in Docs and Vice Versa

In Zoho Mail, we added an option to attach documents directly from Zoho Docs. This is a simpler way to send documents created in Zoho. Similarly, if you are in Zoho Docs, we integrated Zoho Mail to email your documents. Additional information about this integration is available here.




Zoho Chat Integration with Mail, Docs, People & Business

When I previously talked about Zoho Chat integration, we had Zoho Chat integrated with Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook & Meeting. We now extended this integration to Mail, Docs, People & Business. This means you'll see the consistent chat bar at the bottom across all Zoho Apps allowing you to chat with members in your buddy list. With Zoho Chat supporting multiple IM Networks, you can now seamless chat with your buddies from other IM Networks no matter which Zoho Application you are in.



Zoho Meeting Integration in Zoho Chat

I previously talked about Zoho Chat integration with Zoho Meeting. This time, the integration is the other way around. We integrated Zoho Meeting in Chat. This means, while chatting with other users in Zoho Chat, if you have a need to share your desktop with other users, you can do so with a single click. As Zoho Chat is integrated with multiple IM Networks (Yahoo, Google, MSN, AIM, ICQ & Jabber), you can share your desktop with users from any  IM networks.




Zoho Meeting Integration in Zoho CRM

Zoho Meeting is contextually integrated into Zoho CRM. When you search for a contact in Zoho CRM, you'll see an option on the right to start a quick one-on-one meeting with that user with just a click. As Zoho Meeting is free for one-on-one meetings, you need not be a paid Zoho Meeting user to try this functionality.



These are some of the new integrations between Zoho Apps. We have few others which I'll expand in a future post. We also have some interesting integrations coming. Stay tuned.