Zoho Blogs

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 twitted 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.

Microsoft calls Zoho the "Fake Office", so does that mean Bing is ...

Sridhar — Wed, 4 Nov 2009 00:12:40 -0800

At Zoho, we have been banging the drum on the coming new era of competition, thanks to the cloud, in software and how that is going to pose a serious threat to the stratospheric 90% operating profits that Microsoft enjoys on its Office suite. And sure enough, the news that Microsoft Drops Prices of Cloud Apps caught our attention. Some excerpts (emphasis mine):

Microsoft has lowered the subscription prices for its cloud computing applications, and has announced new customer wins and broader geographic availability for the apps.

The software giant has lowered the price of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which includes online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications and Office Live Meeting, from $15 a month per seat to $10 a month.

For Exchange Online alone, its email software-as-a-service, the price drops from $10 to $5. Microsoft also has increased its standard e-mail storage per user from 5 Gbytes to 25 Gbytes ...

...

Still, are Microsoft's cost cuts enough? Google Apps, by comparison, which includes apps for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, in addition to email, costs only $50 per user per year. Markezich's response is that Microsoft offers a scaled-down version of Exchange Online, designed for employees who aren't frequent PC users, for $24 a year, and a scaled-down version of BPOS for $36 a year. What's more, "we're not seeing any inclination that Zoho or Google or Zimbra or any other of those offering fake Office capabilities can replace [Microsoft Office]," he [Ron Markezich, corporate VP of Microsoft Online] said.

Wow, wow, wow - Fake Office! That is indeed a badge of honor for us. We just have a polite suggestion to Microsoft: to be perfectly consistent, Microsoft should also label their Bing "Fake Search" - fair is fair, right? For the record, we actually think Bing brings a welcome dose of competition and we certainly don't think Bing is by any means fake, but with Microsoft marketing terming the entire competitive landscape to their number 1 cash cow "fake", we have to wonder if that would apply to their own effort at competing with the other dominant vendor.

While Zoho and Google are happily doing update after competitive update to our respective Office suites, Microsoft, with their "real" web office, is not actually making their web offering generally available.

Seriously, the whole "fake office" designation illustrates the main problem Microsoft faces. In their world view, with their quaint "Release to Manufacturing" rituals, the fact that a Zoho user has no CD or DVD to buy, no bloatware to download, nothing to install, simply just visit a web site, log-in (using Google or Yahoo accounts, if they must), and they are on their way to Work.Online, must all feel a bit, well, fake. But take it from us Microsoft: there is nothing fake about browser-based applications, no matter how you wish to keep the world on your "manufacturing" world-view of software, with your proprietary lock-ins and your 90% operating margins.

It is a new world now - I have called it the Google Era of Computing a while ago. At Zoho, we fully grasp this fundamental reality. That is why we are excited about today's other announcement, this one by Google: Single Sign-on to Zoho, Tripit, SocialWok and more from Google Apps.

As the Google announcement illustrates, cloud vendors are moving aggressively forward to establish a new competitive landscape. While Google is an existential force and a major competitor for Zoho, this new "Google era" also means tremendous opportunity for us.

Thank you Microsoft, for the "Fake Office" moniker. Please await our real launch of FakeOffice.org soon.

Glasscubes integrates Zoho

Raju Vegesna — Tue, 3 Nov 2009 14:53:37 -0800

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.

If you upload documents or spreadsheets into GlassCubes documents section, you'll notice an additional option to edit the document.

Choosing the 'Edit Document' option opens the document (including 2007 formats) in the appropriate Zoho Editors. You can make changes to the document and save it back to the Glasscubes application. Thanks to our Remote APIs, Glasscubes users need not have a Zoho account to use this functionality.

Rob Hallums explains this integration on their blog. We'd like to thank GlassCubes for integrating Zoho.

Remote Support diaries: Solving the "round and round" problem

Hari — Mon, 2 Nov 2009 02:39:28 -0800

I thought I'll share with you a recent amusing and interesting remote support experience. It involved helping Juan, a friend of mine in UK and his mother in Mexico, both of us ultimately having to control her PC, miles and oceans away. It is interesting how now-a-days members of a family live and work apart in different ends of the world and have to depend on the internet to be a family. You never know when you might get into a situation to remotely assist one of your closest ones with PC software hiccups.

Anyways, I was text chatting to Juan, currently working in UK and was wondering why he was not getting back with his usually witty rapid responses. On my demand for attention, he then told me that his mother in Mexico was driving him nuts complaining...

My friend put the talking thing and left. Now, the talking thing is going round and round.

He asked me if I could make anything out of it and I said all I can think of and see is a huge question mark in a cloud on top of my head.

After further discussions about what is "talking thing going round and round" going nowhere, I suggested him to make a remote connection to his mother's PC in Mexico using Zoho Assist and SEE what she was seeing. He said his mother's computer ideology is such that the monitor is the internet-email and the other box (CPU) is unnecessary. I assured him that if she knows to check her email that will do to gain remote control of her PC. Skeptical but hopeful, he went and started a remote session from the Zoho web page; typed his mother's email-id and clicked "Start session".

Glad to receive any email from her son, his mom opened the email, "clicked on one of those blue things with the hand" (email link) and later on Juan's request clicked on "Join session" from the web page that opened. In minutes Juan was not only viewing but controlling the mouse and working on his mother's PC located far away in Mexico. Then he typed "Hahaha....I see now what the talking thing round and round is!" I demanded immediate explanation and he insisted it be a suspense.

After a while though, he said he was not able stop the "talking thing" from going "round and round" and some extra help would be good. Ultimately he invited me to also view his mother's PC by using the "invite" option in Zoho remote support interface. So, three people in different corners of the world were sharing the desktop of a PC in minutes. No internet settings, firewall tweaking, IP address or such. All from our web browsers.

And so, I too figured out what was going "round and round" repeatedly, while it should be going in. It is absolutely amazing how something simple can seem complicated. In collaboration, we browsed through some message boards online on his mother's computer and after following instructions on one related forum, we got the talking thing to go in. Juan also explained his mother how to talk through it. If you are intrigued to know what was going "round and round".....click here to see.

Remote support is simple and effective with Zoho Assist. You can connect to anyone, anywhere even through firewalls/proxies, NAT. You can have an IT technician remotely control your PC right from his office. If you are in IT support, you even have features like Remote PC Diagnostics and built-in file transfer to exchange and install updates and patches. You can collaborate with your colleagues, share your desktops and work as a team. Try Zoho Assist next time you are in need to remotely control a PC.

Zoho Wiki: Introducing Trial Version, Export/Import and Newer Themes

Arvind — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:26:40 -0700

New Trial Version
If you are a Zoho Wiki user subscribed to the free plan, you can now test drive the more feature-rich Basic plan for free. All you have to do is log on to your Zoho Wiki account and click on Help -> Pricing at the top-right.

You'll be taken to the pricing page with the prominent 'Let me try the 1 month trial version of Basic plan' at the top.

We are offering this one month free trial of the $12 Basic plan without you furnishing details of your credit card. And taking this trial plan will allow you to test the Custom Domain feature. That is, allow you map your domain to your Zoho wiki. And of course you have other options like creating 5 wikis and having 250 MB of attachment space.

Export/Import Wiki
Click on Wiki -> Settings and you will see the Export/Import option.

The export option allows you to take all your wiki contents (including embedded images, file attachments and comments) as a zip file whenever you need. And you can import the contents back (say copying it all to another Zoho Wiki) if need be. Going forward, we would be giving import function from other Wikis.

Newer Themes
In the menu Wiki -> Settings -> Wiki Themes, you have a variety of readymade themes to choose from. Recently added to the mix are two new themes in the Nature category - Green Valley and Penguins. The specialty of these two themes is that they are of fixed width (960px).

Give Zoho Wiki a try.

Integration between Zoho & External Apps - Part II

Raju Vegesna — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:55:31 -0700

When we have a broad set of apps like Zoho, the real value kicks in when these apps are integrated. So we started integrating our apps with each other (and more to come) as well as integrating them with External apps. In one of my previous posts, I talked about how we integrate our apps with external apps. Some of our previous integrations include...

Integration with Google/Yahoo Signin
EchoSign Integration with Zoho Writer
Flickr & Picasa Integration into Zoho Show
Paypal, Google Checkout & Authorize.net integration into Zoho Invoice
Integration with multiple IM Networs in Zoho Chat

Today, I want to talk about few other integrations between Zoho and external apps.

Integration with Google Apps Sign-on

With an aim to make it easy for users to try Zoho, we let users signin to Zoho using their Google & Yahoo accounts. We recently extended this support to Google Apps users. This means, businesses using Google Apps can now try our complementary business apps with their Google Apps account.

Google Docs integration into Zoho Projects

'Documents' is an important module in Project management app. We previously had two ways of adding documents to your project 1) Upload from your local system and 2) Upload from Zoho Docs. We recently added a third option. Uploading your documents from Google Docs. If you are a Google Docs user and like to add those documents into Zoho Projects, we now have the option under the documents module in Zoho Projects.

Zoho on Facebook

Zoho Apps are also available on Facebook. We created a Facebook application couple of years back that lists your documents, spreadsheet, presentations & Zoho Creator applications. The good news is, it is tightly integrated into Facebook. This means, you can share your documents etc with members from your friends list on Facebook.

Importing Contacts from Google, Yahoo & Hotmail

In Zoho Contacts, we have an option to import your contacts from Google, Yahoo or Hotmail. You can also import contacts into Zoho Contacts from external email apps like Outlook Express or Thunderbird. You can import contacts from CSV, LDIF & VCF formats.

Zoho OpenSocial Gadgets

Zoho Gadgets let you integrate our apps with external applications. We have over 10 different gadgets (and growing), which are OpenSocial compatible, which can be embedded in other apps like Gmail, iGoogle, Orkut, Ning and many other apps that support OpenSocial. This is yet another way to access your Zoho content within external apps.

These are few other integrations between Zoho and external apps. There are many even more, but I'll talk about others in a subsequent post.

Announcing the Zoho Projects API

Celina — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 06:01:29 -0700

As you may know, we have APIs for many of Zoho's services. And we have a good many services implementing our APIs. This allows both Zoho's and our API partner's customers to be mutually benefited. A sample list of API Partners here.

Today, we're excited to announce the API for Zoho Projects. Developers can extend the project management and collaboration capabilities through our APIs and can build their own customized applications for their business needs. We've tried to make the API follow the REST (Representational State Transfer) principles and generate a XML/ JSON object which allows you to access / read / write Zoho Projects data from third-party systems like Google/Yahoo gadgets, web sites, billing & invoicing systems, other web-based products and do much more.

How can you access and use this API ?

It's simple. To get started with Zoho Projects API,

   1. You need to first get the API Key and Ticket ID
   2. Fill in the required details mentioned to access your API
       http://projects.zoho.com/portal/[portalname]/api/private/[format]/methodname?parameters

    where,
      portalname your project portal name
      methodname is one of the API methods.
      parameters are query parameters passed as POST input.
      format is one of the required output formats (XML/JSON)

For more information about this API, please visit our Zoho Projects API Documentation.

Here goes a sample implementation of Zoho Projects gadget built using Zoho Projects API. The below gadget can be embedded in Facebook, Orkut, iGoogle and Gmail.

Stream of latest activities - for all users in a project

This opens up a new chapter for Zoho Projects, and it’s just a start. With the Zoho Projects API, you will be able to build a customized CRM system with Projects, billing systems, document management, time tracking tools and other web-based products. In the coming weeks, we’ll continue to post example uses and implementations for everyone to check out. We hope you will join us to share your ideas, tips and tricks with other developers in the community, through our API forums at Tips and Ideas for API.

As always, we'd love to hear your queries regarding Zoho Projects API at support@zohoprojects.com.

Import Google Docs to Zoho Docs

Arvind — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:42:17 -0700

Amit Agarwal has a nice blog post explaining how to download all your documents from Google Docs as a zip. If you want to have a back up of your Google Docs online, you can do so using Zoho Docs. Zoho Docs allows uploading of zip files and you can upload the zip file downloaded from Google to Zoho Docs. The slide show below shows the steps involved in backing up your Google Docs in Zoho Docs.

Recently we announced the integration between Google Apps and Zoho Projects. That integration allows you to attach a Google Docs file to the Documents module of Zoho Projects. We are coming up with more such exciting integrations soon. Stay tuned.

Foundation Zoho: Another Book on Zoho

Raju Vegesna — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:04:16 -0700

Ali Shabdar, one of Zoho users came up with a great new book on Zoho titled Foundation Zoho: Work and Create Online. It is currently available on Amazon for $19.79.

According to Ali, this is what the book is about...

How to use Zoho.com as an at home and work office and productivity tool. Work but have fun as well.
What Cloud Computing is and how it is important and is used in practice.
Adopt Zoho.com as your daily business and at home
Do it yourself (DIY) solutions, that requires little or no technical knowledge nor is support required.
See how Zoho can play a key role in the future of business applications, to increase productivity and collaboration, while at the same time minimizing and all but eliminating costs and overhead.
How to use all of the major Zoho applications; and how to incorporate them into daily activities.
How to increase productivity and collaboration in business using these applications.
How to be more productive in using Zoho itself, by learning shortcuts, tips, and miscellaneous tools and plugins.
Extending Zoho.com to your iPhone or Microsoft Office and much more…

We are very happy to see more books on Zoho. Previous books on Zoho include Zoho 4 Everyone and Zoho For Dummies. We'd like thank Ali for his contribution.

Box.net integrates with Salesforce

Raju Vegesna — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:43:46 -0700

Our friends at Box.net have been busy lately with some exciting integrations. Today they announced the integration between Box and Salesforce.

As you may know, Zoho is integrated into Box.net. Box is one of our first partners to integrate our APIs into their storage system. You can edit your documents, spreadsheets and presentations within Box using Zoho editors. We are glad to see this functionality available in Salesforce as well.

We have had many users asking for Zoho editors within Salesforce. Given our history, it didn't happen. If you like Zoho apps for editing docs, check out the new Box.net's integration with Salesforce.