Zoho Blogs

Offline?

Raju Vegesna — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:09:48 -0800

As I write this blog post @ 30,000ft above the ground on a Virgin America flight, flying back from Boston to San Francisco, I started to wonder whatever happened to the 'Airplane problem' (or the Offline problem of online apps) we all used to talk about couple of years back.

At Zoho, we have had offline support for over 2 years now. Zoho Writer and Zoho Mail supported offline access and I kind of used them initially, but I have to admit, I quickly gave up using the offline versions as I never needed them. Sure, there were times I was offline, but during those times, well, I went offline too, grabbing a coffee or something.

My behavior is not just with Zoho Apps. Many other apps I use do support offline access and I never bothered to use them in offline mode. This makes me wonder if this is just me or do you also fall under the same category? I created a quick poll (using Zoho Polls, ofcourse) to get your feedback on this.

Share your opinion in comments section.

Zoho Projects : Communicating with your Projects via Email

Celina — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:58:19 -0800

We've been working hard to find new ways to improve the user experience which in turn helps you to improve your productivity. Even in these days of collaboration, we find that many people tend to fall back on email rather than shared online work spaces. And this being the most popular demand from most of our users we've included this feature as part of our recent update.

Let's see what's in store for you :

Post Comments in Forums with Attachments

There may be an interesting topic going around in the project forums and you may wish to quickly post a comment. Previously, you had to login to Zoho Projects and then post a comment. But now you can simply do so through an email.

Add Task Notes with Attachments

We've provided a unique email id for each and every task. Go to task details page. Now copy the email address and compose a mail along with your notes and send it. You can find your notes automatically added for this task via email.

Add Notes for Meetings with Attachments

Similarly you can add notes and attach files for a scheduled meeting through email. Also you can add notes for an existing meeting through a reply mail.

It's simple, isn't it ? Learn more about the new feature addition at Communicate with Projects via Email

We feel that communicating via email in Zoho Projects will be extremely useful for virtual teams as this encourages informal communication and team building. It's not just about a new feature addition - it's how you thoughtfully apply it. So find ways for your team to play with it and you'll be amazed at how quickly they find new ways to apply them to their work process.

We hope you'd start using these features in Zoho Projects and share your experience with us at support@zohoprojects.com

OOdesk and Zoho

Arvind — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:38:19 -0800

OOdesk (pronounced as voo-desk) is a virtual desktop application offering free email, storage space, file sharing etc. OOdesk users can view and save documents, spreadsheets, presentations directly online without downloading. And this is done using Zoho's Remote API.

Once you are logged to your OOdesk account, you will be presented with a virtual desktop environment (a desktop-like feel within your browser window). Double click on My Documents and click on the Upload option. You can upload any file from your desktop into OOdesk. Shown below is a Microsot Excel file opened within OOdesk using Zoho Sheet's remote editor. You can view Microsoft Office or OpenOffice files, make changes and save them back to your OOdesk account.

[Click to enlarge image]

If you are an ISV requiring such a functionality, do have a look at our APIs. We have a good many vendors who have successfully implemented our APIs (recently Central Desktop integrated Zoho Sheet). And it's not just for ISVs, any enterprise can make use of our APIs too.

Label Enhancements & Contextual Options in Zoho Mail

Raju Vegesna — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:22:35 -0800

Our Zoho Mail team recently added a couple of new features to the Mail app. Improvements to labels and contextual options for your folders. Let's take a look.

Labels Specific to Email Accounts

You may know that Zoho Mail supports multiple email accounts. This means, apart from your zoho.com email account, you can use Zoho Mail to fetch your emails from external POP accounts. By default, Zoho Mail lets you maintain a different folder structure for each of your mail accounts providing you a better way to manage your mail accounts.

Along with Folders, Zoho Mail also supports Labels, for those who prefer organizing their mail boxes using labels. But previously, Labels were common across all mail accounts. This is no longer the case. With the recent update, you can create Labels specific to your mail account.

To create/modify/delete labels for a specific mail account, select the mail account, go to Settings > Personalize > Labels.

Contextual Right Click Options

Do you know that you can right click on mail folders in Zoho Mail? We have a contextual menu offering folder-specific actions. If you right-click on a folder, you'll typically see options to create sub-folders, Mark Folder as Read, Rename, Delete, Archive etc. Apart from these standard options, you'll also notice an additional contextual option.

When you right click on 'Outbox' for example, you'll see the 'Send Immediately' option to send mails immediately without holding them in the Outbox temporarily. Similarly, right-clicking on Draft, Spam or Trash folders offers an 'Empty Folder' option.

Apart from the features mentioned here, we did add a few other features. We will let you discover these new goodies. If you do, drop us a comment.

Central Desktop Integrates Zoho Sheet

Raju Vegesna — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:08:06 -0800

Online Project Collaboration application vendor Central Desktop integrated Zoho Sheet into their application using our Remote APIs. Zoho Sheet is integrated contextually within their application letting users view/edit spreadsheets and save them back to Central Desktop's storage.

This integration brings in all the goodies from Zoho Sheet into Central Desktop's application. This integration went live this weekend replacing EditGrid's spreadsheet application. Additional details about this integration are available here.

Zoho's unique APIs makes it easy for applications to integrate our office apps contextually to enhance their functionality and provide seamless experience. Central Desktop's integration is another such example. We'd like to thank our friends at Central Desktop for integrating our app. We are looking forward to a productive partnership.

Related Link

Zoho API Partners

Join the Data Visualization Contest and Win an iPod

Arvind — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 04:55:56 -0800

Chandoo writes a very interesting blog offering tips about how to make the best use of Microsoft Excel and to chart data in general. And he announced a data visualization contest yesterday. Contestants have to map the sales data of a fictional company using any software. The charts or dashboards created should help a senior manager understand how the sales people have done in the past 24 months. The winner gets an iPod Touch 8 GB. Cool, right?

Since Chandoo announced the contest is open for sponsors, we asked him if Zoho can be the sponsor. He immediately accepted. So, Zoho Reports is sponsoring this contest and we encourage all Zoho users and readers of this blog to participate in it.

Here's the details about the contest. If you are comfortable using spreadsheets, this should be easy for you. Try using Zoho Reports for the task and see how different/easy the charting experience is when compared to using Microsoft Excel. You can also try using our online spreadsheet tool, Zoho Sheet.

Your comments welcome on how you charted the data, the approaches you followed, the software you used etc.

Zoho Projects : Task Details and Overdue Milestones View

Celina — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:56:22 -0800

We wanted to let you know about two feature enhancements done during the recent update of Zoho Projects.

1. Task Details View

Until recently, in Tasks & Milestones, you needed to dig deep to add notes, log hours or associate documents to a task. If you have a task for which you may need to frequently do these operations, then it makes sense to have all these options accessible easily. Hence we've introduced the Task Details page where you can add notes, associate docs, log time for a task - all from a single place.

To view the task details page :

1. Go to Tasks and Milestones tab
2. Click on the particular task to display the task details page

Here's a sample screenshot:

Apart from this, you can also set status, priority, percentage completed for a task. You can also take a print out of the entire task details page.

2. Overdue Milestones View

Now, you can see overdue milestones of your project from two different places

a. In My Home

b. From Project Dashboard

Check out these new feature enhancements in Zoho Projects and let us know your feedback at support@zohoprojects.com

Watch out for the much awaited feature coming up next week. Stay Tuned !

Zoho API integration in FilesAnywhere

Arvind — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:46:45 -0800

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.

Related Link

Sample list of Zoho API Integration Partners

Colorful Forms in Zoho Creator

Aparna — Mon, 9 Nov 2009 05:30:00 -0800

How would you like it if the plain looking form that you created in Zoho Creator which looked like this,

could be transformed to look like this,

this,

or this?

Great, right? Yes, it is possible to revamp your forms into stunning works of art. The actual forms displayed above can be accessed from

Zoho Creator offers a plethora of customizing options for your forms. You can find these options in the embed dialog. Click on the "Customize Form Properties and Look and Feel" to reveal the options. The customization options are divided into 4 sections, each section offering customization parameters for various parts of the form.

The first section offers modifications for some basic configurations for your form like the page/iframe to which the user should be re-directed to, on submitting data into the form, the success message to be displayed when data is submitted in the form, the background and border color to be applied to the form etc. For specifying any attribute involving color, you'd have to specify the rgb or hex code. You can use guides like this or this to give you the exact color codes. For example, you can specify the background color for the form in the box provided as #FF9999 or rgb(255,153,153). For standard colors like teal, cyan etc you can use the color names as well. Once you key in the color code and click outside the textbox, you can notice that the text box where you entered the code displays the color specified by you. This way you can make sure you are setting the desired color.The height, width attributes can be specified in pixels or % e.g., 50px or 50 %. And did I mention, you can also hide the form header as well? Yes you can do that too!

Now that we've applied some background coloring to the form, lets tweak the header and footer of the form a bit. The second section will help you with that. The header is the top strip in the form which contains the form name. The footer is the bottom strip containing the "Submit" and "Reset" buttons in the form.You can specify a color for the header so that it matches your form's background color, the height, if the form name is being displayed, the font in which the form name is it to be displayed, the font size and the font color as well. As for the footer, in addition altering the color and height, you can specify a number of attributes for the buttons being displayed. How about setting background color, font family, text color to be applied to the button when the form is loaded and when there is a mouse over the button etc for the buttons in your form? Terrific? You can do that too.

Coming to the most important part of your form. The fields. The third section deals with giving the field labels and the fields themselves the right look. You can set a background color for the field labels so that they are highlighted and stand out from the background, the font family, font size and font color and also the width of the label. Supposing you have a loong label and if you'd like to wrap it to your convenience, you can give a small value for the width. Or if you would not like the field label to wrap then you can give the value accordingly. For the fields, you can specify the background color, width, the font color,family and the size as well.

Now that you've splashed enough color in your form, you can set right some heights and widths. In the final section, for each field type supported in Zoho Creator, you can specify the width and height attributes. e.g., if the form contains 5 Single Line fields, the specifications mentioned here will be applied to all five fields.

Once you have picked and chosen the attributes from the various sections, you'd notice that some parameters have been appended to the code snippet. Copy the code snippet as is and paste it in your blog/website and boom! Your colorful form, looking just the way you want it to is ready to go!

Fake Office: The Tweets, The Website... The Movie?

Rodrigo Vaca — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 05:04:49 -0800

Wow - Thanks! We are overwhelmed by the support everyone showed us on Twitter and elsewhere after Microsoft called us "fake".

For example, Vinnie Mirchandani at Deal Architect said:

If this is fake, give us plenty more

Tim O'Reilly also tweeted about it:

The question is, what do you do when the 800-lbs gorilla in the industry calls you a fake? Well, we've come up with a checklist

Blog about it - Check
Tweet about it - Check
Make a website about it - Check (We just uploaded the Fake Office 2.0 version)
Make a movie about it - ?

Yeah, we realized this morning that we were missing that movie part. So we made Fake Office - The Movie. It's a musical documentary about life in the 21st century with the "non-fake" Office and the "Fake" Office. Pay attention! There's even a cameo apperance by your favorite "non-fake" Office feature, Clippy. Here you go:

Now, seriously... want to see how real the fake office is? Sign up now. Takes less than 20 seconds.