There is a NYTimes story today on the rise of “cloud computers” and net-tops like the Asus EEE. I have called them Fireboxes in the past myself, but cloud computer would work! Here are some reasons I think why this trend is inevitable.

1. Convenience: On any kind of decent broadband connection, launching a cloud application is faster than launching the desktop equivalent.The fact that you could do that from just about any machine is icing on the cake. On a regular basis, I now work from 4 different machines: 2 desktops and 2 laptops (see reason 3 why).

2. Lazy Computing: flossing teeth, backing up files - I don’t want to diss those oh-so-disciplined folks who do these regularly, but alas, I am not one of them. My single biggest reason for switching to cloud applications is that I never have to do a backup ever again - that’s what data center administrators are for. I was reminded of it twice recently, because two laptops decided to crash on me suddenly. That brings up the third point.

3. Resurrection of old computers: I actually like to use old computers. Partly it is to force myself to experience our own software in fairly challenging circumstances. The reason reason is that there are plenty of unwanted old computers around, so using old machines you are always in a state of super-abundance. In fact, one of my laptops is a “loaner” from a friend who was going to send it for recycling - Firefox works great on that one!

One consequence of using older computers is I encounter frequent crashes. But it is not just old computers that crash. Last week, a brand new loaner given to me by our sysadmins in our Chennai office had a disk crash too. Since I don’t store anything on the local machine, it was a 2 minute operation to swap it with another laptop and I was on the cloud again.

Try moving yourself to the cloud entirely. I bet you won’t ever go back!

(Update: Just after I posted this, I find that Mike Arrington wants a dead simple web tablet. I would love to buy one too!)

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Yes, three easy steps are all it takes to export your data from Zoho Invoice to Zoho Sheet. You can export and view all of your invoices, quotes, contacts, customers and items in Zoho Sheet. I am sure most of you would be using this feature already, exploring it for the benefit of others-

Let’s say you want to export and view all your invoices in Zoho Sheet, all you have to do is-

1. Select the “Invoices” tab.
2. Click on the “Export Invoices” link at the top.
3. Click on the “View” link in the Spreadsheet/CSV/TSV format.

That’s it! All your invoices will be exported and will be shown in a new window in Zoho Sheet. Now you can play with it as any other sheet document.

Hope you find this feature useful. We will be happy to hear your comments.

Just like Zoho Sheet, we will also be supporting Google Sheet shortly.

Happy invoicing.
Regards
Siva

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InfoWorld did a good analysis of MS Office alternatives (Slideshow here). They picked couple of vendors from the cloud (Zoho and Google) and couple from the Open Source world (IBM and OpenOffice) and did some analysis to see if they stand any chance against MS Office. Full article is available here. Here is the summary.

Glad to see Zoho lead the pack (along with IBM) with our current apps.

Bottom Line:
If you’re ready to embrace the SaaS future, then Zoho could be the productivity suite you’ve been waiting for. Zoho can provide both personal productivity and business back-end applications, and with Google Gears, you can keep working on documents even if you can’t find the Internet. Zoho is the only suite here that you could easily use to run a complete business. It’s also the only one that can run virtually all the Excel macros you might have developed

The good news is, the applications are improving at a very rapid pace. If you have noticed, its been a while that we rolled out a new app. The focus lately has been more on integration between apps and enhancements to the existing ones. In the longer term, we think cloud based productivity suites can go far beyond desktop software. We’ll see this happen over the next year or two.

While InfoWorld looked at Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Presentation apps, the productivity suite goes beyond these three (Wiki, Email etc are others). Also, you’ll need more apps to run your business than a productivity suite. In the bigger picture, we are trying to build a suite of apps to run your business. As we often say, we want to be your IT Department.

Thanks Curtis for the analysis.

Update: ComputerWorld did similar analysis here.

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Here’s a little noticed feature in Zoho Show. You make a presentation public and embed it in a blog. Once the presentation is embedded, what if you made (want to make) changes to the original presentation? By default, it will reflect in the embedded presentation too. But this is not desirable in two cases

• When you are adding or editing slides, the visitors to your blog/website will be seeing live the unfinished changes that you are making
• When you want to have the original version linked to on the site while wanting to have the revised version private or shared only to a group

There is the Automatically re-publish when document is modified checkbox which does the trick. Leave it checked and you will always see the latest version in your blog/website. Uncheck it and you can do your edits safely without the external world knowing it.

Having the Automatically re-publish when document is modified option ticked makes the latest version available to the public always

Leaving the option unchecked, you can see that the last published version is 1.4 while the latest version is 1.6

The above is not just limited to embedding your presentation as it applies in general to making a presentation public! Hope you found the tip useful. Try this out in Zoho Show and do leave your comments on how you are using Zoho (Show).

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We get asked frequently about integration of some Zoho service or another with a third party service, often with that of a competitor. As one recent example, see this thread on Zoho CRM integration with GMail/GTalk. The question often is “Is Zoho all or nothing? If we like and use one Zoho service, would we be forced to use all of them as a bundle?”

The categorical answer is “No, Zoho is not an all or nothing proposition. We fully respect user choice and will fully support mixing and matching Zoho services with competing services.” We have intentionally architected the Zoho suite so that each service stands on its own, and can be mixed and matched with third party services. This “depth-first” architectural strategy, whereby each service is useful by itself (independent of integration with other Zoho services), enables a style of loose-coupled - RESTful, in the technical lingo - integration that makes it just as easy to integrate a Zoho service with a third party as it is with another Zoho service. We believe in customer choice, interoperability and data portability, and we do not want to lock-in any user. And we fully recognize the reality, particularly as a smaller vendor, but even true for very large vendors, that customers do not want to put all their eggs in one basket.

Specifically, to answer the specific question asked in our forums, Zoho CRM will interwork with the Google suite - including the all-important GMail, but with other Googe Apps components as well. But this extends beyond Zoho CRM - all of Zoho services will interwork with third party vendors wherever it makes sense, regardless of whether Zoho competes with that vendor in one aspect or another. As an example, if 37Signals would let us, we would be happy to integrate our Zoho Invoice or Zoho Wiki with their Basecamp project management offering, in spite of the fact that Basecamp competes directly with Zoho Projects.

It is that philosophy that guided us in our integration of the Zoho productivity applications with Salesforce AppExchange - an integration we nearly completed when they decided it wasn’t in their interest, something I actually disagree with; I believe it would actually make the Salesforce ecosystem stronger to let Zoho services in, but then again, perhaps it is in our best interest that they won’t let in Zoho! It is a different matter, of course, that it is their customers who lose.

Zoho a la carte is a fundamental guiding philosophy for us, not just a tactical competitive move. It brings numerous architectural benefits to us, enabling us to move faster in our own development.

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That was the first thought that crossed my mind as I looked at Google AppEngine. Yeah, there are differences - Ning 1.0 was PHP, AppEngine is Python. You hosted your apps in myapp.ning.com vs myapp.appspot.com. But here is the most important difference of all: Ning was too early, and it was, well, Ning, as opposed to Google. Ning smartly realized that early too, so Ning 2.0 moved to a new sexy model of “Build Your Own Social Network”, but I believe the heart of their Ning 1.0 system is still in there, carefully tucked away so as not to scare the average social networker with query languages and such.

Here is my reaction to AppEngine: I asked our engineers to brush up on their Python. Fortunately, we have experience in it - a lot of our test automation scripts are Python based. I think AppEngine is going to be monstrously successful. And we at Zoho are going to embrace it whereever we can, just as we are already playing with Amazon AWS.

Fundamentally, we are a software company. We don’t compete against Google because of our infrastructure advantage over them, that’s for sure. Initiatives like Amazon AWS and Google AppEngine let us be a software company again - and that is a good thing! So here we come, Python … and to Ning, here is someone who remembered your original innovation. Thank you!

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This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

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Can’t believe this. Do we need to support this kind of language in Zoho Writer :~) ??

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht

I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan

mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy caimls taht,

it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are,

the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer wlil be

in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you

can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm.

Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey

lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Amzanig huh? yaeh, and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was

ipmorantt!

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