We are delighted that Swisscom (incumbent telco in Switzerland) has chosen Zoho for a six month pilot for its Zoho Business Suite which is now available on their Software-as-a-Service portal Teamnet.

Zoho and Swisscom have teamed up to create a custom version of Zoho Business, with Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook and Meeting now available to its 300,000 business customers. Even though Swisscom is the incumbent telco operator in Switzerland, it is taking a bold approach by extending its offerings to the SaaS space.

Increasingly, Service Providers are looking to add value on their existing networks and have started to include online applications like Zoho to their portfolio of services. In the past, one would not turn to the telephone company for productivity applications, but this is changing with the wider adoption of SaaS in the marketplace. We are glad that Swisscom is taking a lead in this regard and will keep you posted on other developments and partnerships as this trend picks up momentum in coming months.

“The goal of the pilot is to provide our business customers with a value added web offering they can evaluate as part of a turnkey solution from their service provider. Zoho is an ideal partner that combines a wide and very innovative range of applications as well as a very solid engineering team to deliver the capability we wanted.” said Michael Gmuer, Head Business Process Optimization of Swisscom.“.

Zoho and its Alliance Partner Program offer service providers multiple paths to increase ARPU (average revenue per user), the holy grail that telcos seek to maximize by adding additional services to their existing infrastructure. The program offers partners a flexible means to bundle various Zoho services for both consumers and business users.

While we are starting small with the Swisscom project, it is a significant step towards a broader Zoho distribution channel in Europe. This follows our recent partnership with Baihui in China.

Thank you Swisscom for choosing Zoho and for your investment in the project. We look forward to feedback from your users and to a successful venture together.

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In a recent Gartner Article ‘Cool Vendors in Web 2.0, 2007‘, Zoho was mentioned as a “Cool Vendor”.

The article ID is G00146431 and it requires a (paid) login. We’ll try to license this article and publish it later. Meanwhile, if you have a Gartner account, you can read Gartner’s opinion on Zoho and other Web 2.0 vendors.

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I have a good news and a bad news today. The good news is, we are announcing Zoho Notebook, our latest addition to Zoho Suite. The bad news is, you’ll not be able to play with it right away :(.

Zoho Notebook is an interesting application that is similar to your spiral bound notebook where you can write, draw or doodle, but this being a web application, you can add different types of pages to it. One page can be a photo page, another a word processor page, another a Spreadsheet page, another page can be an application…and the list goes on. To each page you can add different types of content such as text, images, audio or video (thanks to our partnership with Flixn) or even your business content. Notebook also comes with some drawing tools that can be used along with your content.
Zoho Notebook does three things well….

1. It helps you create different types of content.
2. It helps you aggregate content from multiple sources or applications.
3. Fine grained collaboration

Please check out this demo video on YouTube which illustrates each of these functionalities better (You should excuse me for this amateur video. This is the first one I ever created.)

Here are couple of screenshots.

Please let us know your comments/suggestions.

Update:  Our launch video @ DEMO 07 is available here showcasing couple of additional features.

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Posted to:  Announcements, General, Product Blogs, Web 2.0, Zoho Notebook  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
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A few weeks back we had announced a template library feature where not only users could pickup the readymade templates for drafting their documents but can also upload and share their own templates in their areas of expertise so that others can benefit from them. Well we have had many requests from users who had come up with their own templates to add to the template library and it is quite an assortment of categories ranging from resumes, proposals & multiple-choice test to musical concert tickets. Here are few of the users who have their templates featured in the Zoho Writer template library:

1. Ritesh Kashyap and Kalleanderson with their respective resumes.

2. Pat Hypia with a sample speech outline.

3. Andy Wallace with his fundraising proposal.

4. Ross Normy with his innovative multiple-choice test on quantitative & logical ability.

 

5. And last but not the least Chuan Pai with his concert ticket template.

Ritesh, Kalleanderson, Pat, Andy, Ross and Chuan thanks a ton for contributing to the zoho writer template library. We would love to have more users contributing to the template library here.

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I just noticed that we never mentioned about our Site24×7 service in our blogs . So let me shamelessly promote this service. This is a great service and I can say this because we eat our own dog food. This service is comparitively under-noticed mainly because Zoho is primarily known for online office and this great app is slightly off the track (atleast for now).

If you have your website or an application you want to monitor, this is the right one for you. Once you set it up, you need not even visit the service to check out how your websites/apps are performing as the app sends these details to your inbox every day/week.

It is not just a simple website monitoring service. It also does monitor transactions as well. What does this mean? Well, if you want to monitor the whole experience of your customer visiting your site, you can do that using ‘Monitor a Web Transaction’ feature in Site24×7. As part of this feature, we give you a small executable which can be downloaded and used to define your transaction. In this mini application, start recording your transaction by visiting the application/website you want to monitor and do whatever you want it to do to at regular intervals. If you define your transaction as logging into your application, clicking some links and logging out, Site24×7 can do that automatically next time for you continuously and will report you whenever there is a failure or performance below a threshold.

Let me not bug you further getting into the details….I can keep talking about it. I’ll let you play with it. This is a serious (free) app bundling a whole lot of expertise from our friends at ManageEngine that went into this service.

Update : Ashley at CyberNet News has this to say about Site24×7.

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Thanks to Craig Cmehil’s invite for the SDN day, Hyther & me are here at the SAP campus in Whitefield, Bangalore.

It was a revelation of sorts of how big a community SDN is! Thanks to Bangalore’s traffic woes, we started a bit late and Craig had a micro intro. Mark Yolton, VP of SDN/BPX, gave the initial presentation titled “What have we been up to (together) this year”.

The SDN team is 35 strong and some of them were present - Mark, Craig, Marilyn, Marco (the only Dutchman was the joke), Uri, Anil, Anand and others. The invitees included SAP employees, partners (all the developers whose life revolve around SAP) and a couple of customers. Craig & team had done a pretty good job and the mix was perfect.

The numbers quoted be Mark were staggering. 600K SDN members, 80K from India alone (only US & Germany have more). And SDN had to split to make room for the Business Analysts & Consultatnts to form a new community, BPX - Business Process Experts. They too have grown to 60K with 12K members being added every month. (Mark is targeting 75K users by this year end and 1 million by 2010)

SDN has this system where members can earn points. The system works this way - you have a question and post it to SDN, someone comes up with an answer and you (or anyone) can award him/her some points. Naturally, Craig had made sure that he’d invited some pretty big earners of good karma to the SDN day. Among today’s participants, Kartik Iyengar of Wipro headed the list.

SDN encourages its community by providing freebies, when you cross a certain level you get a T-shirt, the next level, a jacket etc. Most of all, it is the recognition that a SAP developer gets that keeps this community so alive. The SDN community is so vibrant and active that the average time that you have to wait for an answer is just 16 minutes!

Other stats include 61 of the Top 100 Indian companies run SAP, SDN has a unique monthly visitors count of around 400K and weekly views of 1.6M. There is small growing community of bloggers too (600 to 800, Mark was not sure of the number) who write at SDN Blogs.

Those are some points I’m left pondering about, dreaming about a similar Zoho community to form when more Zoho apps go out of Beta, open up our APIs, get a more viral traction. SDN is social networking at its best. They proved it once again through the “Speed Networking” session where we got to interact with the other participants. Even we guys from Zoho who were literally the only ‘outsiders’ felt at home meeting all these cool people. Kudoes to the SDN team and all its members for making this happen!

Hyther being the tech guy, naturally, is more interested in how Zoho and Web 2.0 can bring in value to a giant ERP soultion provider like SAP and enterprise apps in general. And he had a session titled “Enterprise meets Web 2.0″ which was very well received. He will also be part of a panel (think the title is ‘Technology & Innovation’) at the end of the day. Prashanth Rai who will also be part of this panel is blogging too.

May be I will later try updating this post with some photos. Tomorrow, we are again special guests of Craig at the SAP TechEd. Hope to have a great day tomorrow too. And forgot to mention, the arrangements were excellent - a very good internet connection, well organised sessions and nice & spicy Indian food.

Update : As promised, some photos from today’s event (Thanks to Uri, who lent his photos!)

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Raju Vegesna, Evangelist, Zoho will be speaking at this year’s Web 2.0 Conference in the session titled ‘SMBx: The Revolution of the SMB Application Marketplace“. Moderated by Tony Perkins, Creator & Editor in chief, AlwaysOn, other speakers of the session include Michael Arrington, Editor, TechCrunch, Dave Ferguson, Engineering Director, Google and Richard McAniff, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Office.

Thanks to Danny Kolke of Etelos which provides hosting of custom web applications, for the invite.

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A few days earlier, Kiruba Shankar interviewed our CEO, Sridhar Vembu. The podcast is up now, click here for accessing it. Lots of insight into services vs products companies in India, venture funding in India now as compared to way back in 1996, how Zoho’s gonna take on Google/Microsoft, desktop vs online security, how blogs have helped spread the word on Zoho etc.

In another interview, Allen Stern at CenterNetworks met up with Raju Vegesna, Zoho Evangelist. The interview concentrates on Zoho’s background & technology behind it, comparison with Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Microsoft Office, the future of office products, Zoho’s clients etc. The podcast can be downloaded from here.

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Recently we have been getting more request from users for “Single Sign On” (SSO) for Zoho services. Single Sign On allows users to register just once to use all Zoho Services.

Recently Priya Ganapathy from RED HERRING finds this annoying to sign up separately for each program ( http://www.redherring.com/article.aspx?a=18050 ). I, being one of the frequent user of Zoho services ( Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Planner & Zoho Creator ), I can understand the pain.

We have been working hard to get this out soon. The delay is due to the data migration. We have come close thrice but since we are not fully satisfied with the way we handled existing users, we just decided to change the design.

Having our own Identity Access Manger software ( http://www.securecentral.com/products/iam/index.html ) made it simple for us to support Single Sign On. But handling existing user base with no ( or minimal ) impact is the real challenge we are figuring out to solve. We are happy that most of the features we required were already supported in IAM & this saved lot of time for us.

We apologize for paining you without Single Sign On. We will do our best to get this out real soon.

Stay Tuned !!!!

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Posted to:  General, Web 2.0, Zoho Planner, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Writer  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
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This is how it looks…. any guess??

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