The first Interop show at Mumbai happened from Oct 7 to 9. We had a booth there representing Zoho and ManageEngine. For a show's first edition, all the arrangements were real good. The show had a good number of exhibitors and there were a lot of sessions going on simultaneously. We were a little apprehensive of the traffic that the show might attract but we were happy when we started having a lot of visitors to our booth from day one. The traffic continued on days two and three as well.

It was my first tradeshow/conference representing Zoho and my business card had my designation as Market Analyst / Blogger. The blogger tag was a bit intriguing to many and it acted as a good conversation starter :)

Cloud computing and SAAS were a big draw. Infrastructure Management Services (IMS) aka RIM also invoked good interest. A lot of our visitors knew Zoho, ManageEngine or our former name AdventNet. We got good feedback from our Indian users on many of our products/services. Other than the photos above, I posted a few photos of the other exhibitors' stalls in my twitpic account. Overall, it was a good show to remember and makes me look forward to the next edition.

Zoho Sheet underwent an update last week with some cool functionality. Here are the new features in this update:

1. Insert Button:
   
   Buttons which trigger VBA macros can now be inserted into your spreadsheets in Zoho. This opens up a lot of possibilities to create spreadsheet based applications. We would love to see what kind of spreadsheets you create using this. Here is a simple BMI (Body Mass Index) calculator with buttons embedded below. Just fill in your details and hit the calculate button.
   
   
   
   To insert a button, look for "Insert Button" under the Insert icon (plus icon) on the toolbar. You can then assign an existing macro to it or assign a new one by writing a VBA macro or by just recording a macro.
   
   
   
   
2. Full XLSX Support:
   
   Earlier we supported import of xlsx files (Microsoft Excel's file format since 2007). Now we support export to xlsx as well. Our APIs too support this new format.
   
   
3. Time Zone Preference:
   
   We now respect your time zone preference and display the date and time accordingly. TODAY() and NOW() functions will give out the date/time based on your time zone setting. You can set your timezone preference by clicking on "Account Settings > My Account" link available on the top bar. You can also visit http://accounts.zoho.com and set your preferences which will be used across the various Zoho services.
   

Apart from the above, there are some enhancements and bug fixes as well. Refer our What's New page for more information.

PS: Zoho Sheet is now on Twitter. Follow us @zohosheet.

Douglas MacMillan @ BusinessWeek features Zoho's role prominently in a story about the online business productivity software market in the Asian countries, India & China in particular. Excerpts:

Prithwis Mukerjee, a professor of management at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in eastern India, needed a convenient and low-cost way for his students to create spreadsheets. But rather than turn to Microsoft, the granddaddy of spreadsheet software, he opted for a lesser-known maker of free, Web-based software that gives his students more flexibility than Microsoft's Excel. "Many people don't have Excel, and that becomes a big challenge," Mukerjee says.

Aiming to meet that challenge are two California-based upstarts. One is Google, owner of the most popular Web search engine, and the other is Zoho, the maker of online business productivity tools that won over Mukerjee as a customer.

Because many new computer users in India lack familiarity with Microsoft's Office and other desktop software, they're generally more open to the idea of cloud computing, says Zoho Chief Executive Sridhar Vembu. "There's a whole set of new companies that have no apprehensions" about Web-based software, Vembu says. "We are now starting to see this as a major market opportunity."

Since opening an office in Vembu's former hometown of Chennai, in 1996, Zoho has attracted about 400,000 users, or 20% of its base, in India and China. It now employs more than 300 workers in the office. In China, Zoho distributes its wares in partnership with local company Baihu. With demand for PCs, mobile phones, and broadband Internet growing more quickly in these markets than in the West, Vembu predicts that a decade from now the majority of Zoho's revenues will come from customers in China and India.

Businesses use the software to equip salespeople in the field. In 2008, Mumbai-based data hosting company NetMagic Solutions signed up to use Zoho's customer relationship management (CRM) software to help sales teams in different offices share information about customer leads. At first, a lack of connectivity in many parts of India was a problem. "There were complaints from the salespeople saying that they were unable to connect to Zoho" while traveling, says Jayabalan Subramanian, the company's chief technology officer. Now that AT&T is rolling out more of its 3G wireless broadband network throughout India, NetMagic says that has become less of a concern.

If you happen to run a business in India or China, we believe you are giving online services like Zoho some serious thought, for the economic and productivity benefits they provide.

Thanks to Doug & BusinessWeek!

In the last post, we saw how Zoho Reports helps in providing a more comprehensive analysis of your Google Adwords campaigns than what's provided by Google Adwords in the form of reports. In this post, we'll see how to use Zoho Reports to analyze the performance of your various Ad Groups within a campaign. Our featured example is for a Mountain Bikes campaign which is having 4 Ad Groups - Adult Bikes, Kids Bikes, Athletic Bikes and a Common Keywords Ad Group.

The below report shows how the CTR has varied for the different Ad Groups over the months.

To get a more recent analysis, the time period can be changed to see how the CTR has varied over the last month alone.

Pivot tables can be made too. The below pivot lists the monthly conversions for all Ad Groups since Jan 2007.

You can also analyze how the various parameters within an Ad Group has performed. For example, you can compare the number of conversions vs the number of clicks.

A scatter plot can be plotted to see which Ad Group is more effective, say in terms of conversions for the ad impressions got.

The above are just a few report samples. The whole set of data and reports are available at http://reports.zoho.com/ZDBPublicDBView.cc?DBID=4000000176044. And this set of Ad Groups-level reports are readily available for your Google Adwords analysis too. All you have to do is to follow the easy steps as mentioned in this page and you can have the same reports as above for your Google Adwords account as well.

It is easy and powerful to analyze your Google Adwords Campaigns and Ad Groups (you can analyze for ads etc too) by importing the csv data files provided by Google Adwords into Zoho Reports. As said in our earlier post, we are working on a Google Adwords connector which will let you do this more readily. Stay tuned.

This post is a combination of one feature which many of you seem tough to find/do in Zoho Projects and two new features. First the tough-to-find/do feature.

Add/View Task Notes
Often we get this support question of how one can add notes to a task. Here's how to do it. In the Task & Milestones tab, go to the task where you want to add your notes & click on the gray Notes icon.

This will pop up a notes dialog box where you can type in your notes related to the task and save the changes.

You can in fact add multiple notes to a task. To view the task notes added, click on the yellow colored icon which indicates that one or more notes have already been added to a task.

Log Time from My Timesheet
One popular demand from most of our users is there should be an option to log time directly from My Timesheet itself instead of going to each Timesheet tab across various projects to log their billable / non-billable hours. So we've made this available in the My Timesheet itself.

View Unread Chat Topics
Few customers felt while they are offline or away, they missed important chat transcripts and there should be an option to see missed conversations with their project members and clients. Now you can check such missed chat transcripts and you can do this from 3 different places in Zoho Projects.

a) from the Home tab

b) From the Dashboard View

c) Of course from the Chat tab

Hope you find these features helpful. We'd like to hear from you about these features in Zoho Projects and how it is helping you and your team

Last year, we enabled users to sign-in to Zoho using Google or Yahoo accounts. This was very well received and a good percentage of our users use this option to login to Zoho. We are now extending this option to Google Apps. Thanks to recent enhancements to Google Apps sign-in, users can now login to Zoho using Google Apps credentials.

When you try to login to Zoho, you'll notice a new 'Google Apps' option in the sign-in box. This option is now available in all Zoho Apps. If you are a Google Apps user, you can choose this option to sign-in to Zoho.

Once you provide your Google Apps domain name, you'll be redirected to Google to sign-in using your Google Apps credentials. Once you authorize accounts.zoho.com, you'll be logged in to Zoho directly.

If you are logging in to Zoho for the first time using your Google Apps account, you'll be asked to choose a Zoho username. This option appears only for the first time you login.

We believe this sign-in level integration will allow businesses use Google Apps and Zoho Business Apps seamlessly.

While we compete with Google on some applications like productivity suite & email, we offer a broad range of business applications which complement Google Apps. Our business applications include Zoho CRM, Invoice, Meeting, Projects, Creator & more. With over 1 Million Businesses using Google Apps, the ability for these business' users to sign-in to Zoho using their existing Google Apps credentials gives seamless single sign-on access to all Zoho Applications which complement Google Apps.

All Zoho Business Apps have good free versions (not trial versions, but actual free versions). Please do give our business apps a try and see how they compliment Google Apps. If you already use Zoho Business Apps alongside Google Apps, please share your story with other Zoho users.

[Note : The Google Federated Login Service is disabled by default for Google Apps Premier and Education Editions. The domain admin can enable it as mentioned at OpenID-based Federated Login for Google Apps. ]

Google Adwords has become a very important advertising medium for all advertisers & marketing professionals. As one using Google Adwords, you should be analyzing your various campaigns, adgroups, ads etc constantly. But the readymade reports provided by Google Adwords are pretty rudimentary and have the below disadvantages.

• There aren't actually many report options. The report consists of rows of data which you can see as HTML or export as a csv/xls files.
• The only chart option given plots only one metric (CPM, Clicks, CTR etc) at a time.
• The chart and the data are separate and this means you can't drill down a chart to see the underlying data.
• The reports don't allow you to compare how two different campaigns are performing. Or how a campaign in July 2009 (current month) performed as against June 2009 (previous month) or July 2008 (same month, previous year).
• The charts cannot be saved for referencing anytime later.
• The charts cannot be shared or collaborated upon online.

With Zoho Reports, you can do a lot of analysis with the data provided by Google Adwords. Multiple metrics can be plotted and studied. Comparisons between campaigns can be done and a campaign can be compared to how it had performed across different time lines (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or even yearly). Based on such analysis, you can take actions to reduce costs and get higher returns for the money you spend on Google Adwords.

Let's see in this post how Zoho Reports can help you analyze various campaigns & allow you to get the maximum bang for your buck (lower costs, more conversions etc). Embedded below are charts with real data from a Google Adwords account that we have set up. The campaigns have been renamed generically as for mountain bikes. There are 3 campaigns being run, one in the US, one in Europe and one comprising of other countries in Australasia and Africa since Jan 2007.

The above chart shows the avg cost / conversion trends across the various campaigns.

This chart shows how the CTR has varied over the months for the three campaigns. The above two examples compare how various campaigns are performing with respect to each other. We can also compare how a campaign's various metrics have performed over time.

The above chart plots the impressions vs clicks for the Europe campaign over the past year. If pretty charts aren't your cup of tea, you can make pivot tables. Like this one for example, which plots the quarterly conversions for the campaigns.

The embedded reports above are just a few samples. The original database with a slew of reports for the three example campaigns are available here - http://reports.zoho.com/ZDBDataSheetView.cc?DBID=4000000163350. You can play around the data, create as many reports as you want and see for yourselves how flexible and powerful your Adwords Campaign data becomes, when using the right business intelligence tool.

Most importantly, all these set of campaign-level reports are readily available for your Google Adword analysis. All you have to do is to follow the easy steps as mentioned in this page and you can have the same reports as above for your Google Adwords campaigns as well. We are planning to make this easier further by providing a direct Zoho Reports connector to your Google Adwords account soon.

Next, we'll see with examples how to analyze your Google Adwords campaigns at the Adgroups level.

We are delighted to announce a couple of new additions to Zoho Gadgets - Notes and Links. The Links gadget makes it easy for you to bookmark your favorite and oft visited URLs. And the Notes gadget allows you to jot down quick notes. These gadgets are in sync with the Links and Notes modules in Zoho Business/Personal.

The gadgets can be added in iGoogle, Facebook, Orkut or any web page that either supports OpenSocial XML or lets you embed an iframe.

The aggregated page of Zoho Business/Personal's 'Desktop' tab now makes use of Zoho Gadgets too. This allows you to arrange the different Zoho gadgets through easy drag and drop. And makes it easy for the power Zoho user in you to use the various Zoho apps all at a single page.

Try the new Zoho Gadgets and let us know your comments. Coming up next are the business-centric gadgets like Zoho CRM, Projects and Invoice. Stay tuned.

One of the most requested feature in Zoho Notebook is search. In our recent update, we included the search option. You'll now be able to search for notebooks, pages and also the content within your notebooks.

Search results are displayed as a tab on the right. When a search keyword is present in a notebook, the results display the notebook name followed by the page name which contains the keyword. Search results also display the author of the book along with the last modified information.

When you click on a search result, the notebook is opened in a new tab with the focus on the page containing the search keyword. Apart from searching across all your notebooks, we also provided an option to search within the current notebook. This is particularly useful for notebooks with multiple pages.

We hope you find this useful.

How much time do you spend centering images in your presentation or making sure the text objects are aligned well to the top? If you are conscious about these subtle alignments, you'll probably like our new features in Zoho Show.

A new 'Grids & Guides' button is added in Zoho Show () which brings up the dialog to enable these options. You will also notice this option on right click.

Enabling Grids displays a layer of grids on your slides to help you align your objects precisely. You can also enable 'Snap To' options to snap objects to the closest grids/guides.

The guides can be moved around by simply dragging them to the desired position. Changes to the guides are remembered for the user no matter which presentation is open.

If you still don't like the alignment precision, we also added the Zoom options. Right click on any slide, you'll notice Zoom In, Zoom Out and Fit to Width options. These zoom options can be used in combination with Grids and Guides options for precise adjustments.

Additional formatting options were also added to provide better control. You can now go to the properties of any object (on right click) and choose to precisely position objects horizontally or vertically. You can select an image for example and use the keyboard shortcut 'CTRL+M' to align the image to the center of the slide.

We hope you'll like these enhanced formatting options. There are additional goodies coming in Zoho Show. Meanwhile, please provide your feedback on these new features.