Zoho Blogs

Zoho and Network Solutions Partner

Ian Wenig — Thu, 4 Feb 2010 00:10:17 -0800

We are pleased to announce a partnership with Network Solutions - one of the leading hosting and domain registration companies in the world. Network Solutions is now a Zoho reseller and will initially offer Zoho CRM to their customers. Zoho CRM, an ideal sales force automation solution for small and medium sized organizations, is now accessible directly from Network Solutions' website in a new business marketplace linked from their home page.

The goal is to add value to Network Solutions existing portfolio of applications and services while providing Zoho with a large distribution channel.

Customers will see the benefits of Zoho CRM and be able to sign up on the spot.

To read the press release click here.

Zoho Projects: Reports, Forums, Import/Export and more enhancements

Rodrigo Vaca — Wed, 3 Feb 2010 10:46:56 -0800

Zoho Projects, our project management and collaboration service has really taken off since we introduced the redesigned and revamped version about 7 months ago. Our user base (and associated revenue) has been steadily increasing since then and we are of course encouraged by the feedback people constantly provide us about the service.

And of course, we keep improving Zoho Projects on a daily basis. Today we have a few enhancements that we want to share with you. Most of these came as a direct result of customer feedback. Thanks!

More - and enhanced! - project reports

We have to admit that, while useful, the project reports we had were not as good looking as they could be. So that's one area that we have been working at lately. Today we are happy to announce that we have made great progress on this and we are releasing a revamped set of cool reports - not only for your information but also for your enjoyment.

Also, the average number of projects our users work on has been, not surprisingly, increasing as well. And this means that at some point, people want to have a summary view of how things are going across projects. So we also created a couple new useful reports: Milestones and Completion status across projects. Both help you track the different activities across all of your projects. In addition, we also created a new Timesheet report.

'Watch' a Forum Topic

Project forums allow teams to hold important conversations and make decisions in a centralized place everyone can refer to later on. One of the most requested features for the project Forums was the ability to "watch" a particular conversation - that is, be notified whenever someone made a reply to a particular post. So we added this, as well as a count of how many people are following that particular topic so users can judge how popular that topic has been. Of course, all activity that happens here is still reflected on the project stream.

Project Announcements

Since I mentioned the Project Stream part, let me touch on this nice little feature: Project Announcements. Customers have told us that the Project Stream is a nice way to keep up with whatever is going with a project and all the activities happening inside it. However, some important things were getting "lost" in the stream. That's why we have created the 'Announcement' section in the Project Stream, where project administrators can post important announcements for the team:

Nice URLs: I want my "Back" button

This is mostly a technical thing and I won't bore you with the details. But the bottom line is that previously, navigation inside a project had to be done using only the web navigation interface - that means - you couldn't use the "back" button. And you couldn't just copy the link in your browser and send it to a team mate to point her to a specific part of the project. But we've changed that now. Yes - you get your 'Back' button, well... back! :)

Export Project Data / Backup

Although the data that you store in Zoho Projects (and all of our other Zoho services) is safe and backed-up periodically, many people still like to make a back-up copy that they store somewhere else. On the other hand, it is one of our core beliefs that the data that you store on Zoho is yours and you should be able to do with it as you please. We just hadn't gotten around this part, but now we are pleased to offer a full project-export functionality that you can use to download all of your project data in one single file.

Migrate into Zoho Projects and import project data

And just like you can export your project data, you can also import it. But that's not all. Based on some requests we've gotten in the past, we are making it easier for people to come into Zoho Projects from other project management/collaboration places. In fact, we have had this for quite a bit now since we started getting a good number of these migration requests so we thought we'd find a general solution for it. We hadn't announced it because we didn't thought it was fair to allow people to migrate into Z Projects without allowing them to easily migrate out of it should they want to do so. So now that we have the export piece ready we are announcing this as well.

We hope you'll find these updates useful. Sign in (or sign-up!) to check them out.

Rodrigo

Zoho Wins NASSCOM Innovation Award

Arvind — Tue, 2 Feb 2010 08:36:07 -0800

NASSCOM (The National Association of Software and Services Companies, India) today announced the winners of 'Innovation Awards 2009'. We had submitted our unique way of recruitment (recruiting & training bright students who were definitely not going to college for whatever reason, usually economic), in the Process Innovation category. And we have been selected as a Joint Runners up!

We are honored by the recognition given and we hope this award will spur other companies to adopt a similar model of recruitment.

Enhancing Online Support Forums with Zoho Discussions - and new features!

Rodrigo Vaca — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:05:00 -0800

Customer support is one of the most commons scenarios Zoho Discussions is used (and designed!) for. There are many types of customer support - Zoho Discussions is oriented towards the self-service/community-driven one: customers themselves helping each other through customer support forums. This of course makes sense for a number of reasons. Not only it is more economical for companies to provide support this way, but it also provides a better support experience for customers, who get better answers from real customers in similar situations.

We recently introduced a few new features that make Zoho Discussions-powered online customer support forums even better. As with other things Zoho, we've been using them for our own internal forums (which we use quite extensively!) as well as using them silently in our customer-facing forums.zoho.com. We like them! So it's time we share them with you.

Topic Status

A topic status basically indicates what "state" a particular conversation is in. For example, when someone posts a Problem, the possible topic status are: Solved, Not a Problem, Need more Info, Working on It, Work-around Suggested. In contrast, when someone submits a Question, the topic status can be: Working on It, Answered or Need more Info.

Filters

Of course, being able to set the status is only half the story. Topic statuses become more useful when you can search for them. And that's why we have now enabled Filters. Filters allow visitors to the forum to quickly identify those topics that are more relevant for them. For example - see only the announcements that have been posted in the forums or only see those ideas that are in-progress:

Nice URLs

One recent change we also introduce are nice, SEO-friendly URL for topics.

Lots of valuable content can be stored in your discussion forums. And it's important for our customers to make sure that content is easily discoverable by their users through search engines. So to aid in that, conversation now also support user- and seo-friendly URLs. For example,

For example, what used to have the cryptic URL:

https://forums.zoho.com/#Topic/2266000000821113

Now becomes:

https://forums.zoho.com/topic/backup-a-project-to-your-local-hard-drive

A-ha! That sound more like it, and should give you a couple of brownie points with the search engines.

And a bonus: Activity Graphs

And lastly, even though this is not specific only for customer support forums, I thought of mentioning this here, since well, it is new too! We've made a new widget available that you can add to your support forums - an activity graph that shows forum activity, including posts and replies, with daily and weekly view.

We hope you'll find these features useful for running your online support forums. And, as a friendly reminder for our open source friends - we have something good for you too!

Rodrigo

Insert Watermarks in your Zoho Writer Documents

Arvind — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:08:28 -0800

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

Rina — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:53:23 -0800

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 Challenge - new customers and new features

Dhan — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:55:13 -0800

It has been a month since we launched Zoho Challenge 2.0 and so far we are pretty happy with the response we've gotten. Our original target for the service was, as you'd probably imagine, the educational sector. But one of the things we've learned after going live with the service is that Zoho Challenge is well suited not only for schools, but also for the commercial sectors. We are (pleasantly!) surprised by the high uptake from customers other than education, including SMB customers - who are the mainstay of Zoho's customer base are taking to the service pretty well.

So far, we have observed that businesses use Zoho Challenge for

Training and assessment needs for customers - used by training centers
Conduct knowledge assessments for employees
Internal training, validation and continuous improvement
Recruitment self assessment
Recruitment screening

Most of these scenarios are new ones that, quite honestly, we didn't think about before. We are glad to note that Zoho Challenge clearly addresses these requirements as well.

As a 'thank you' note to the business users, we have made iFrame embeddable online tests available right from the free plan. Not only did we make it free, but we also improved the level of customization for the embedded tests. We believe that this feature will help businesses and schools stay closer to their users and improve stickiness of their website. You can now create online tests, do limited customization and embed them in your website - all this in a few clicks and for free. Learn more here.

What better way to illustrate the feature than to put it to use? Find a quick online quiz that also outlines key additional features that have been added to Zoho Challenge in the last month.

In the meantime, we are keeping busy at perfecting and adding more features and are gearing up for another major update. Stay tuned!

Zoho Creator Help 2.0

Aparna — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 02:49:04 -0800

With great power comes great responsibility. And we want to add, with a huge user base comes the need to support them even better. After endless rounds of discussions and cups and cups of tea, we found that making it easier for a user to resolve any query that he/she might have while developing an application would go a long way in making his/her Zoho Creator experience a pleasant one. And thus was born ...

Zoho Creator Help 2.0

Presenting a revamped Help Center with a cool and squeaky clean interface that is easy on the eyes. The various topics that are covered by the Help Center are neatly segregated under different categories. For instance, a new user looking to get started with Zoho Creator can use the Quick Start Guide while a current user can check out the User Guide for his/her needs.

The Knowlege Base section is in the Q&A format. We have handpicked a few queries which we have received from our users and provided solutions for them. Novice Zoho Creator users who'd like to unleash the power of the Deluge Scripting language can use the Developer Guide to pick up a trick or two. And for the API gurus and geeks, API Guide is the place to be.

If you can't find an answer to your query from any of these, you can post your query at the Zoho Creator Forum where our passionate developer community will help you out. The Community Pitstop gives you the latest news from Team Zoho Creator. Be it the issues that we are working on ironing out, be it our limitations, or our newest updates you can find them all here. You can also find our contact details and our Social Networking presence too here.

In addition to all these resources, we are pleased to announce the Zoho Creator Lounge. An interactive portal which will feature Tutorials from the Zoho Creator Team and some of our prolific developers on the nitty grittys of Zoho Creator and tricks to turn that cool app of yours into a stunning one. In addition to this, it will also feature regular updates from the Zoho Creator Team on interesting tit bits and news.

So poke around the new look Help and if you'd like to see something more added to this or if you'd like to tell us your 2 cents of feedback, drop us a line at support@zohocreator.com.

Zoho Discussions is now free for Open Source Projects; jQuery deploys Discussions

Raju Vegesna — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:58:51 -0800

At Zoho, we use many open source components including JavaScript libraries like jQuery. When John Resig from jQuery blogged about his issues with Google Groups, we approached him to offer Zoho Discussions for free as we immensely benefit from jQuery. After evaluating several discussion forums, John finally decided to go with Zoho Discussions.

We ended up analyzing countless solutions but in the end we chose to go with Zoho Discussions. A combination of decisions drove us to this decision:

Zoho Discussions seamlessly integrates both regular, forum-style, discussions and Q&A. Additionally all the moderation and administration tools are designed around building and managing a slick workflow for answering questions and concerns.
The Discussions team at Zoho has been incredibly accommodating. Not only providing all the hosting for free but going out of their way to fix concerns and integrate our full Google Groups back history. We’ve been working very closely with them and they’ve fixed, or are fixing, every issue that we’ve brought forward.

jQuery had significant amount of data in Google Groups as well as mailing lists. To provide a seamless transition, we worked with jQuery team to migrate all their existing data, which includes 51K+ posts and over 116K responses, to Zoho Discussions. The new jQuery discussion forum is now live at http://forum.jquery.com. You'll notice that Zoho Discussions is customized to fit the jQuery website theme. To participate in the discussion, you can login using your Zoho credentials or with Google, Google Apps or Yahoo account.

John provides additional details about this migration in his blog post.

We would like to thank John and the jQuery team for providing us the opportunity to power their discussion forums. We benefit immensely from jQuery and we hope they'll find Zoho Discussions useful.

Zoho Discussions for your Open Source Project

As we benefit from many other open source projects ourselves, we'd like to extend this to all open source projects. This means, if you are running an Open Source Project, we will offer Zoho Discussions for FREE based on your needs. To take advantage of this, go to http://www.zoho.com/discussions/open-source.html and provide us your details.

This free offer for open source projects is different from the free version we currently have. We will tailor Zoho Discussions for your custom needs and can offer the best package for your open source project. To get started, please visit http://www.zoho.com/discussions/open-source.html

We'd like to thank the jQuery team for using Zoho Discussions and we look forward to working with other open source projects.

Using Dashboards in Zoho Reports

Arvind — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:30:04 -0800

An organization's key information (data and reports) should be readily available at any point of time. A BI and reporting solution makes this possible through a dashboard. The below slide deck shows how easy it is to create dashboards in Zoho Reports and use the other features available (like inserting text/images and sharing/publishing of dashboards).

Some dashboard samples created using Zoho Reports

Google Adwords Campaigns Performance Analysis - http://bit.ly/Campaigns-Analysis
Google Adwords Ad Groups Performance Analysis - http://bit.ly/AdGroups-Analysis
Summer Olympics 2008 - http://bit.ly/Olympics-2008
Sachin Tendulkar in Tests - http://bit.ly/Sachin-Tests

Create and Share Dashboards using Zoho Reports and let us know how it went.