Mark Gibbs on Zoho Writer

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Mark Gibbs at Network World, in his widely read Web Applications newsletter wrote about Zoho recently. He reviewed Zoho Writer in particular. Some excerpts:

This service provides a familiar screen layout with a document management bar to the left with buttons for creating a new document, importing documents from your local machine’s storage, and deleting documents with a larger editing panel on the right. The document panel is divided into four sections: My Docs, for your current private documents; My Templates, you can save any document as a template; Shared Documents, for documents that others have shared with you; and Trash.

The editing panel is tabbed so you can have multiple documents open simultaneously. The WYSIWYG editor, which provides automatic backup, has all of the usual text editing features such as styles, fonts, font attributes, tables, links, and anchors.


When does Zoho Writer get Wonky?

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Many people put Zoho Writer to several uses. I use it, among other things, to share movie scripts with my equally film-obsessed friends.  Unlike your normal documents, film scripts are unusally long. With a minimum of 10000 words, they may go upto 30000 words. Using Zoho Writer to edit and share them is a hard test for Zoho Writer’s performance, especially when testing with a turtle speed of 256 kbps, albeit DSL internet. (Yeah well, if it works with the barest minimum requirements, it will work in better environments, right? :) ). Performance is gauged by the response time. (or atleast that’s what users look for)

So while doing the above mentioned test, the following observations were made: Editing, including any copy-paste function took less than five seconds. Saving the entire document (of around 10000 words) took around twelve seconds.


ZohoCreator: Data Search in ‘View’

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Use ‘Search’ in the View to get to the data you need straightaway, without spending any time.

Data Search

Click on search_button.gif, type search criteria in the corresponding textfield and click ‘Go’

Eg: Type ‘Closed Won’ below the ‘Lead Status’ texfield and ‘Kevinson’ below ‘Lead Owner’ textfield to see all the closed won leads by Kevinson.

Now isn’t this simple?

~Roughic


Making 2.0 tick

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What makes Web 2.0 tick? Sample this:

As I’ve said in previous posts, it’s their direct contact with the users that makes 2.0′s so much greater than the “old school” way of taking care of users. I know that as their user base increases that won’t be so easy for them, but their blogs and forums are another way for users to interact with them and with each other, and help each other along.

Another user wrote:

This kind of touch is exactly what more tech companies should have, regardless of specialty. I understand, yes, busy people can’t respond to all their email, but even getting back to some—especially if it’s on an external blog and wasn’t sent in directly—is really warm and sends more good vibrations than 100 clones of Brian Wilson in a marching band on a midspring’s dusk.


Zoho Writer login issue

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You would not have been able to login to Zoho Writer for the past few hours. The issue was due to the loss of connectivity between the Zoho Writer application and the database backend. This has been sorted out & you should be able to logon now. Our sincere apologies to all Zoho Writer users who weren’t able to login.

We are in the process of upgrading our current infrastructure to a new grid based technology which we believe will prevent such happenings in future.


Embed Forms and Views in your Website/Blog

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One of very useful features of ZohoCreator is to embed Form/View on any website and blog, just by pasting few lines of code. Know How

Embed Form/View in your Website and Blog

Here’s an example of embedded View:
http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/pivot/pivot/entry.php?id=658


Conversations or not

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The Economist carried a story on Blogging. And the bottomline was:

Blogging is just another word for having conversations

Tom Raftery wrote a few days back that in his blog that Blogging was starting to become monologous as some of the most popular bloggers closed down/moderate comments.

And this is what Guy Kawasaki had to say regarding comments:

7. Acknowledge and respond to commenters. Only good things can happen when you read all the comments in your blog and respond to them. It makes commenters return to your blog. This, in turn, makes commenters feel like they are part of your blog’s community which makes them tell more people to read your blog.

It is rather ironical that comments are not “wanted” anymore, because in the early days of blogging, comments were an indication of how popular a blog was! With the advent of feed readers and trackbacks, popular bloggers have decided to shut down a window; one crucial channel of communication, blaming it on the trolls.