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Office productivity suite Zoho removed the need to create an account to use their services today - you can now log in to any of their products using a Google or Yahoo account. Sign in is completed via Yahoo’s and Google’s authentication APIs.

I asked Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna why they don’t just adopt OpenID to handle authentications instead. He says they will, soon, but also want to integrate directly with the most requested third parties to address users immediate needs (and it is still a pain to log in with OpenID). Vegesna also says they may integrate directly with other third parties, such as Microsoft and Facebook, in the future as well based on user requests.

The goal, Vegesnu says, is to get users to try Zoho with as little hassle as possible: “One thing we noticed is, when users try both Zoho and Google, more than 70% of them prefer Zoho. It made sense for us to do this. We want more users to try our apps.”

This certainly accomplishes that. In a matter of a couple of clicks, new users can get in to Zoho and start creating and editing documents. My guess is this works out well for them.

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This is an obvious move for Zoho, which has created a suite of online office applications: Chinese versions of their products. The Office piracy rate in China is 90+% according to Microsoft, and that market will be even more willing to use online versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. than the U.S. and European markets have been.

The applications are being delivered via a partnership with Baihui, which hosts the Zoho sites. For now, they are launching Writer, Sheet, Show and CRM, with more applications coming soon.

Since the software is being run independently by Baihui, users will not be able to share documents with normal Zoho users. However, Zoho itself supports 11 different languages (English, Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, Danish, Russian, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish), so they also compete directly with this new distribution partner.

The only non-free application being launched in China now is CRM. The price is 99 RMB/user/month, which is about $14. That’s actually more expensive than the $12/user/month that Zoho charges in the U.S.

Zoho says that 50% of their usage today is already outside of the U.S., but their site is very slow inside of China due to the firewall. This partnership gets them onto the other side.

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Google’s Web-based word processor, Google Docs, can now be used offline to view and edit documents in your browser. That means you no longer need to be connected to the Internet to write a letter or draft an agreement. When you connect again, all your changes are updated. Google Docs now joins Google Reader as a Web app that can work offline. Spreadsheets and Presentations are coming up next.

This offline capability has been a long time coming. Google Docs is finally taking advantage of Google Gears, a browser plugin for creating all sorts of offline apps which launched nearly a year ago. Using Google Gears, Zoho came out with an offline version of its Web-based word processor last August.

Is it me, or is innovation at Google slowing down?

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If you’ve heard of Zoho, you probably think of Zoho Office, its suite of Web-based productivity software (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation). But Zoho Office is primarily as a marketing exercise. Zoho’s real business is in offering a series of Web-based enterprise apps that it started introducing last September—CRM, Project Management, Web conferencing, an online database. And today it is adding Zoho People in beta.

Zoho People is a Web-based enterprise app for managing human resources—recruiting, org charts, HR forms, an employee self-service portal. Here are some screenshots and an online demo.

Zoho People is targeted at small businesses with 50 or more employees—companies that cannot afford PeopleSoft, but cannot manage their business on Excel spreadsheets anymore. More directly, Zoho is going after WorkDay (started by PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield), Salesforce.com, and smaller online HR apps such as Vemo’s. To get businesses to try it, the software will be free for the beta period. The pricing is yet to be determined, but will probably be in the range of $50/month for HR administrators and $4/month for other employees. It will also be available as part of Zoho’s suite of enterprise apps under blended pricing. Maybe Salesforce should just buy Zoho. Oh yeah, it already tried that.

Zoho People from Raju Vegesna on Vimeo.

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Web-based word processors keep closing the gap with Microsoft Office. Since its launch, Zoho now has 650,000 users, a 30 percent increase from just last November, the company tells us. It is doing 2 million user sessions per month. And its users have created more than one million documents on Zoho Writer (1.6 million, if you include its online presentation and spreadsheet products, Zoho Show and Zoho Sheets).

Today, Zoho released an update to Zoho Writer that includes:

Docx Suppor—the ability to export documents in the new docx Word file format (this is in addition to existing support for doc, txt, html, pdf, odf, sxw, rtf files).

Thesaurus—a thesaurus in ten languages (English, Czech, German, Greek, French, Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Slovak).

Groups—Now you can save emails forgroups instead of re-entering each one every time you want to share a document.

Enhanced support for Endnotes/Footnotes, Headers/Footers—Formatting is now maintained when a document is exported, as are manual page breaks.

Zoho still has along way to go to catch up to Microsoft Word, and it trails Google Docs in usage, but it is making steady progress.

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Every company in Silicon Valley wants to become a platform for other companies to build cool stuff on top of. It is the easiest way to attract customers. Coghead—the DIY, Web-based, business-app builder—is no different. Today it is publicly launching its charter affiliates program, whereby software developers can create their own enterprise apps using Coghead and then resell them to their customers. (The program has been in private beta since Coghead launched in October, 2006). Coghead hosts the apps and gives developers a 15 percent discount on its regular $49/month subscription fee (for five users). They build a custom application for software product managers or flower-shop owners or whomever, charge a markup, and get to keep the difference. Coghead takes care of the back-end management and billing as well.

It is the exact same business model as Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. (Meanwhile, Salesforce is already moving into Coghead’s custom-application territory with Force.com, which it launched in September). Coghead faces other competition from Zoho Creator, Dabble DB, WyaWorks, and LongJump. The online database/app creation market is getting crowded, and there is only room for one or two platforms. Salesforce is already one of them. If Coghead can make it easier to develop Web apps for the enterprise than anyone else and attract a following, it’s got a shot at that coveted platform status. We’ll be keeping an eye on its progress.

Has anyone used Coghead? How does it compare to the competition? Please let us know in comments.

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Google is usually fairly tight lipped about future product releases. But they were surprisingly revealing about upcoming plans for Google Apps at an event in Ann Arbor earlier this week. Blogger Andrew Miller took some great notes from a presentation by Googler Scott Johnston, the VP of Product Development at wiki startup Jotspot prior to their acquisition by Google a little over a year ago.

First, Google Sites, an evolution of Google Page Creator, will launch in 2008. Google Sites will be based on JotSpot collaboration tools and will allow businesses to create intranets, project management tracking, extranets and other custom sites.

We should also expect Google Docs, Gmail and Calendar to soon work offline via Google Gears. This has been widely predicted, but it’s good to see it coming more formally from Google (note that Zoho, a Google Docs competitor, already has offline functionality via Google Gears).

Some of the other stuff is more speculative, but worth the read (pivot tables on Google Spreadsheets? I doubt it).

* Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.

* Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? Scott’s answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar.

* What happens when somebody edits a document offline at the same time another user is editing the online version? The same algorithm that reconciles simultaneous editing will apply here when the offline version is merged back into the online version. Changes will be versioned the same way, so basically in chronological order.

* Will Google docs have OCR capabilities for importing .pdfs or other graphical files? Not yet, but perhaps someday. Scott couldn’t comment on the “roadmap” for future enhancements. However, the collaborative Google Sites (based on JotSpot) will allow for upload and storage of any file type.

* Will GrandCentral be integrated into Google Apps? If so, when? Again, Scott didn’t comment on the timing but said they are working on it and it is a “huge priority” for them.

* Will Google Spreadsheets ever have advanced features like pivot tables, macros or offline database integrations? (This was actually my question) Scott said they are constantly trying to find the balance between speed and utility. It will never be a heavy duty analytics program because that would be too heavy and bulky for the average user.

* Will Google Apps support video conferencing in addition to Google Talk and Chat? Scott’s answer, “Not yet”. I got the impression from his body language that it’ll come someday, but nothing more was said.

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New product press releases unencumbered by the complexities of releasing actual software set off alarm bells. And when those press releases are so boastful as to suggest that the (unlaunched) product can hurt a competitor’s $20 billion revenue stream, the alarm bells get much louder.

So with alarm bells screaming, Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia announces he’s going to war with Microsoft by (someday) launching an online version of Office. The fact that Bhatia got rich when Microsoft bought Hotmail for $400 million in 1997 only adds additional drama to the story.

The as yet unlaunched product, called Live Documents (see our review from a year ago when the product was significantly different), will be a Flash based online suite that competes with Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The company will also release plugins that work with the desktop Office software that lets users store and collaborate on documents online.

If this sounds a bit like Google Docs and Zoho, that’s because it is. The differentiating factors for Live Documents, besides the fact that it’s built on Flash (Google Docs and Zoho are Ajax applications), is that they are promising feature matches with Office 2007 and they have the offline plugin component.

It’s not clear that Flash is a better (or worse) interface than Javascript, but it isn’t much of a competitive advantage either way. And we note that Zoho has their own plugins for the desktop Office. Zoho also has an offline version of their product via Google Gears; its likely that Google is not far behind.

CTO Sumanth Raghavendra says Live Documents “break’s Microsoft’s proprietary format lock-in.” But in reality Live Documents has absolutely nothing new to offer users based on what we’ve been told so far. And as Dan Farber notes, they aren’t yet releasing the product and don’t even have screen shots to share with us.

There are additional red flags as well. As Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu notes, Bhatia is making a big mistake by estimating Live Documents revenue based on taking market share from Microsoft. Bhatia says “If Live Documents makes 1 per cent of Microsoft Office revenues, then we would earn USD 200 million a year. If Live Documents makes 10 per cent of Microsoft Office revenues then our revenues would be USD 2 billion a year in the next three to four years.” Vembu notes Guy Kawasaki and others who’ve warned against this kind of analysis.

So far Live Documents is nothing more than bullshit and smokescreens. That may have been the way to do business when Bhatia co-founded Hotmail in 1996, but his software is going to have to survive on its own in a hyper competitive marketplace when it actually launches. Hubris alone won’t do it. We’ll see if he can pull off a second win, or if Bhatia is, in the end, just another one trick pony. So far, I’m underwhelmed.

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I recently had the opportunity to see a demo of a product coming out in early 2008 called Blist (pronounced like “bliss” with a “t” at the end) that will take on DabbleDB and Trackvia by giving users the tools to easily create and manage databases online.

Blist’s initial target demographic will be Excel users who need more functionality and are trying to make their spreadsheets act like databases, but who don’t have the skills or tolerance to even use Access. Blist will not require users to know any SQL, the language commonly used for interacting with databases (in contrast, recently reviewed Zoho DB does require knowledge of SQL). The company behind Blist seeks to eventually replace traditional databases completely by making its product robust and appealing enough for database application developers as well. The end result: no more databases behind the firewall, since they all end up existing in the cloud.

Blist’s plans are obviously ambitious. They are not only designing a better user interface for manipulating databases, they are also building a sophisticated database architecture that will allow them to replicate data geographically, thereby preventing data loss from natural disasters. Their entirely SaaS-based database solution will also provide an API so you can link your applications up with it. If Blist ever has a chance of replacing traditional database servers, its API will need to be very capable indeed so that applications can run all of the same queries they run now. Blist’s CEO Kevin Merritt says that the API will eventually allow for a large range of operations, but the initial API will be fairly simple and will rely on XML.

Since Blist won’t be ready to convert database administrators right off the bat, the quality of its user interface will determine its initial success. Either Blist will come across as intuitive and succeed, or non-technical users will go right back to using Excel. From the brief demonstration I saw, Blist does look impressively easy to use and very functional, too. As you might be able to tell from the screenshots - which show how Blist could have been used to organize our candidate data for the TechCrunch40 conference - the program looks and feels more like a full-fledged desktop application than DabbleDB. It currently supports fourteen data types, with more coming soon. Data can be viewed in table mode (as in Excel), page view (so you can edit entries using a form), or calendar view (so you can see entries with associated dates in a calendar layout).

What really makes Blist a database application is the ability to apply various “lenses”, or views, to the data. These lenses are like queries since they allow you to view the data by particular criteria. But you won’t need to know any syntax: just change the fields in a form to construct your query. Right now, lenses can only be used to view data in different ways. Blist will become much more useful, in my mind, when users can also implement lenses to manipulate data. Once that is possible, it will closely match the functionality of GUI database tools like MySQL Query Browser.

Since Blist is an online application, the company has taken care to integrate features that distribute and share data. Databases in Blist can be easily shared with other Blist users through the standard interface. They can also be spread over the internet via widgets that pull out samples of data from particular databases. If you are a blogger who wants to publish some of the raw data you have used for analysis, you’ll be able to drop a Blist widget into your post that will highlight some of the main data points and allow users to gain access to the original data set. For example, I wouldn’t have to make unwieldy charts like this one for white label social networking solutions, because I could just drop in a Blist widget with all the data and viewing capabilities instead. These widgets, like most, can also be embedded on other webpages across the net.

While Blist is gunning for the $15 billion relational database market, they have not yet figured out pricing (although they do intend to charge both casual consumers and business users). The company will start by focusing on the North American market and will move to other regions from there. Blist has not accepted any external funding yet but will be looking to raise some soon.

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Zoho is adding another weapon to its arsenal today - Zoho DB - raising its total number of online office applications to 13 (not including four additional “utilities”, or lightweight apps).

Zoho DB is meant to provide developers and database administrators with better ways to manage and digest their data. In a way, it’s like Microsoft Office Access but online and (purportedly) with more powerful features. It also combines aspects of two other Zoho products: Spreadsheets and Creator (although all three will exist as separate, soon interlinked, products intended for different purposes). Whereas Zoho Spreadsheets organizes data in Excel-like spreadsheets and Zoho Creator makes it easy to build database-driven applications, Zoho DB stores data in a database but displays that data as though they were in a spreadsheet. Still with me?

The best way to understand Zoho DB is to actually try it yourself. To start, you can create a new database or simply import an existing spreadsheet (from Zoho Spreadsheets or a desktop application like Excel). Zoho DB will convert that spreadsheet into a database. You can then interact with the data as if it were in a spreadsheet, or you can run queries on it as if it were a database. The application accepts queries in any SQL format (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Sybase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Informix and ANSI SQL dialects).

Once you’re ready to analyze the data, you can take advantage of reporting and charting capabilities that the company claims are comparable to those found in high-end products like Cognos and Crystal Reports. The creation of reports and pivot tables is simplified with a drag-n-drop interface.

There’s a lot of functionality built into Zoho DB, much more than I can explain or even fully understand. Luckily, Zoho has helped us out by providing a nice video tutorial, which we have embedded below. An additional tip: if you are looking for a feature (like running SQL queries) but can’t find it, click on the arrow next to the “New” button in the application and you’ll likely find it there.

Zoho’s parent company is Adventnet, which has been around for 11 years and has never taken any outside funding. Over 150 programmers based in India develop Zoho’s products and were able to take advantage of Adventnet’s SwisSQL product line to gain database expertise (and SwisSQL’s engine to support all SQL formats within Zoho DB). Look for Zoho to add further functionality to Zoho DB, such as the ability to import and export database schemas into and out of Zoho DB.

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