The Next Phase in the Evolution of Office Suites

May 11, 2010 | By Raju Vegesna

This week, Microsoft is launching the latest version of its Office suite. These 3 year release cycles seem alien to us given that our apps are typically updated at least once a month. In case you are considering upgrading to Office 2010, you might want to give online alternatives a try. Our friends at Google listed several reasons not to upgrade to Office 2010 .

As Microsoft evolves its Office suite and moves online (finally), we see a new phase in the evolution of Office suites – Componentization. For the past five years, we have seen Office suites evolve from desktop application suites to online application suites, and Zoho has been at the forefront of this transformation. Now, we are leading the way again in taking the office suites to the next phase of its evolution.

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Zoho, Google Gears, HTML5

February 20, 2010 | By Raju Vegesna

Today, Google announced that they will no longer support Google Gears . You may be aware that we have been using Google Gears to offer offline support in Zoho Applications .

Google team is gracious to inform us about this decision in advance and the intentions behind this move, which we very much respect. At Zoho, we see HTML5 as the future of the web, and we plan to move our apps in this direction.

As far as Offline support for existing Zoho Apps (Zoho Writer & Zoho Mail, primarily) are concerned, they will continue to work for now as we migrate towards HTML5. We internally are experimenting with HTML5 and we are excited to see the possibilities.

It was a great experience working with the Google Gears team and we now look forward to working closely with HTML5 team.

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New: Page View Option in Zoho Writer Editor

February 10, 2010 | By Arvind

Zoho Writer now has a new Page View option. Previously, Zoho Writer’s editor displayed your document as a single HTML page – the Normal View option as shown below.

You can now make the Zoho Writer editor display your document page-wise. By choosing the new Page View (under the Views
menu-tab), you get to see how the text appears in the actual page
layout. Dotted lines show the page boundaries. What’s
best about the new option is that you can continue to write (edit) in
the Page View mode.

You can make the Page View as the default View option by clicking on the Settings link at the top and choosing the appropriate Choose View option.

In our next update, we will be making this Page View more like the Print Preview option available now.

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Insert Watermarks in your Zoho Writer Documents

January 28, 2010 | By Arvind

The importance and usefulness of embedded watermarks in business documents can’t be stressed enough. From drafts to confidential documents to having organization logos, watermarks perform an important role in document management. Now, you can insert watermarks in your Zoho Writer documents. The Watermark option is present under Zoho Writer’s Insert menu-tab.

You can include both text and picture watermarks.

Screenshot of a document with watermarked text in the background.

Other than when being shared online, the document’s pages will contain the watermark when printed. Try the new watermark feature in Zoho Writer.…

Zoho Recruit Integrates With Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show and Viewer

January 27, 2010 | By Rina

No more file downloads to view and edit the documents in Zoho Recruit. Viewing and editing the documents has now been made easy in Zoho Recruit. Its integration with Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show and Zoho Viewer gives you an option to View and Edit the attachments and save them directly to Zoho Recruit. Thus it helps you save time in viewing and editing the documents.

Zoho Recruit identifies the file format and opens in appropriate Zoho Application. You still have the option to download the file if you need a copy of it.

Stay tuned for more features from Zoho Recruit!…

Zoho API integration in FilesAnywhere

November 11, 2009 | By Arvind

FilesAnywhere is a secure online file storage service. For documents, spreadsheets and presentation files, FilesAnywhere makes it easy for its users to edit and save files, directly online. Right clicking on a file brings the below menu.

Choosing Service Plugins -> ZOHO Editor opens the file (document, spreadsheet or presentation) in a new tab.

You can edit the file and save it back to your FilesAnywhere account. Give FilesAnywhere a try.

Glasscubes integrates Zoho

November 3, 2009 | By Raju Vegesna

Online applications are ideal for collaboration, especially for
collaborating with users from multiple locations. These browser based
applications offer convenience, mobility among many other advantages.
But when you have to depend on a locally installed application, to open
a document for example, breaks the flow. Integrating document editing capability
within in the browser can offer seamless experience and can make users
productive as well as remove the hurdle to have an installed
application.

We have seen collaboration vendors like Box.net, Huddle, Knowledge Tree etc offer
seamless online document editing experience using Zoho editors. Today,
another online collaboration & project management vendor,
Glasscubes integrated Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet into their application.…

Zoho Writer