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Needless to say, we are heavy users of the various Zoho apps ourselves. Most of our help docs are on Zoho Wiki. We embed Zoho Show slide shows in our blog posts (even this post has one embedded below). Let me give you a latest example. We recently reached the 1 million user mark and wanted to share this glad news to our Newsletter subscribers. Here’s how we did/do it :

1. When a user chooses the ‘Subscribe to Zoho Newsletter’ check box when he/she registers, they are added to our Zoho CRM contacts or leads list.
2. When time comes to send the Newsletter (monthly), we log on to our Zoho CRM account, make an email template and save it
3. Then select all the contacts who are to be emailed
4. Schedule when to send the email
5. A couple of points to be noted : a) A Newsletter is typically HTML formatted and some email clients strip off formatting. So it is safe to have a version of it hosted online and point to it in the newsletter email you send. We have an online version of the Newsletter as a Zoho Writer public document. b) We have an ‘Unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of each mail. Submitting your email address there will directly opt you out of the Newsletter subscriber list that we maintain in Zoho CRM
6. Lastly, we use Zoho Mail internally. And the filters/folders option there allows us to get the Newsletter related replies (genuine replies, bounced/undelivered mails, Out of Office/Vacation replies, auto-responses etc) segregated so that we can attend to each one of them easily.

We will be sharing more such scenarios of how we are using Zoho within our organization.

Open IT Online is a Firefox extension that allows to open and edit documents and images from everywhere. Thanks to this extension, you will be able to open several types of documents directly in Firefox using online services (such as Zoho) without needing any software to be installed. In other words, it adds an option to your Firefox “Open With” dialog to let you open Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more file types in the Zoho suite, Google Docs, ThinkFree Viewer & others. You can configure defaults for every file type - nice and convenient for fans of online editing. Open IT Online is a free download and it works wherever Firefox 2 or 3 does.

Here’s more screenshots & a nice video of how to use Open IT Online to view documents online with Zoho. Install the Open IT Online Firefox add-on to view/edit files directly online without downloading them.

Here’s a question (with variations of it) we get from the first-timers of Zoho.

I have a document/spreadsheet/presentation that is to be emailed every time to a ‘prospect/client’ or to my ‘boss/peers/co-students/teacher for review’. In the former instance, “I don’t want the doc to stay in my prospect/client’s inbox (as documents soon become obsolete)”. And in the latter instance, “I and my boss/peers/co-students/teacher end up having multiple versions of the file, adding to my/their email clutter”. How can Zoho help me here?

Well, this is one of the fundamental problems solved by Zoho. Let’s say you have a .doc or .odt file. You have a few options in Zoho that would make things easier for you.

• Import your document into Zoho Writer
  • Share it by giving the email addresses of your prospect/client, boss,peers, co-students or teacher. They will receive an email with a HTML link (URL) which they can click on to view the document. They can edit the document too, directly inside Zoho Writer if you have given them proper permission
  • Make the document public (if it doesn’t contain anything confidential) and give the URL to anyone who would like to view it.
• Upload your document to Zoho Viewer. You get a URL which you email to everyone concerned & they can view it. Use the Zoho Viewer option judiciously - there’s an option where you can choose the URL to expire after a certain time period

Here’s a short screencast (our first attempt. bear with the video/audio quality please!) explaining the above options. For better clarity, view the video in Full Screen mode.

There are other advantages too.

• No compatibility issues that come with using different types and versions of desktop software
• You can keep updating your document and the latest version’s available for your prospect, client or whoever you want it to be viewed
• Live collaboration is possible - you and your collaborators can work on a document or spreadsheet in real-time
• And, you can chat too (using the embedded Zoho Chat)

Use Zoho. Say NO to email attachments.

As we announced yesterday, Equation Editor (with LaTeX support) is the latest feature in Zoho Writer. This one has deep personal relevance to me. My first “programming language”, in the sense that I wrote a lot of code, was actually LaTeX. It is a programming langauge for accurate typesetting of documents, that in many ways anticipated developments like HTML/CSS.

As a graduate student at Princeton, I spent countless hours writing and rewriting papers for publication using LaTeX, first with inputs from my advisor, and later from anonymous reviewers at publications like The IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Of course, my entire PhD thesis was written in LaTeX as well. The most important aspect of LaTeX I loved was its easy facility with equations. You would type in something like (Ampere’s Law - thank you Wikipedia!)

\Delta  \times  \mathbf {B} =  \mu_0  \mathbf {J} + \mu_0  \epsilon_0  \frac{\partial  \mathbf {E}}{\partial t}

and the LaTeX compiler would generate

Or the integral form of Ampere’s Law:

 \oint_{\partial S}   \mathbf {B} . d \mathbf {l}  =  \mu_0 I_S + \mu_0 \epsilon_0   \frac{d {\Phi}_{E,S}}{dt}

It was pure magic to see the compiler generate such beautiful forms. I spent four years of life with equations like that - pretty much every section, every page in my thesis had them. As a graduate student, I used to wonder if such equations could be generated via a friendly user interface - keep in mind that MS-DOS still ruled the world at that time and graduate students like me had Sun workstations. I myself had little interest in software at that time (I was going to prove theorems, so I looked down on programming as a lowly activity!) so never pursued that thought further. If someone had predicted at that time that I would end up founding a software company one of whose key products is a word processor, and LaTeX would play a role in it, I would have just laughed the idea off as absurd or in technical terms, “of vanishingly small probability”, a phrase that sticks in mind after seeing those epsilons and deltas (or \epsilon’s  \ and  \ \delta’s in LaTeX terminology!). I used to practically dream in epsilons and deltas during that period - so many of the mathematical proofs depended on them being close to but not quite zero. 

I am very happy to see the Equation Editor in Zoho Writer give shape to that user interface idea. There is a lot more potential in typesetting using LaTeX like ideas, and you will see us pursue them in due course.

Thinking back, what is surprising to me now is how little of my PhD I remember. I retrieved my PhD thesis from its long-forgotten closet, dusted it off, and it is all Greek to me. I can scarcely even believe it is my own work I am staring at. I used to be really, really passionate about proving theorems, so it seems even stranger that I would just completely abandon it. The only thing I would have gotten right with all my PhD training was to recognize that vanishingly small probability events can still happen.

Zoho Writer provides you with quite a few page setup options. For accessing them, click on the Page Setup icon (third from left, first row of the Zoho Writer toolbar). The pop-up window has 3 tabs marked General, Header & Footer.

In the General tab, you can set the font face, font size, page bg color, top/bottom & left/right margins, paper size, direction (those in the Middle-East can set right-to-left for Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu etc) & line spacing. All these properties can be set for each document by default. And if you want this to be applied to every new document you create, you can check the ‘Make it default for All New Documents‘ checkbox.

In the Header and Footer tabs you can choose what to display in the Left, Middle, Right areas of the Header/Footer sections of a document.

And the icon adjacent to Page Setup is Page View. Use it to see how your page will look while it’s printed - both width-wise & length-wise (where a page ends & the next one begins). The Page View is in Read Only mode currently & we will be extending this option to Edit mode soon.

Use the above options while drafting your documents in Zoho Writer & let us know in the comments below of how it went.

Huddle combines group collaboration, project management and document sharing using social networking principles. Huddle now integrated Zoho Applications for viewing and editing documents inside their application.

Huddle used our Remote API to integrate Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet. This allows Huddle users to create, view and edit documents, spreadsheets within their familiar interface respecting Huddle’s security, permissions and workflow rules.

We’d like to thank Huddle for integrating Zoho and are looking forward to more such integrations. All our API Partners are listed here.

Rick Castellini has come up with a couple of cool screencasts for Zoho Writer & Zoho Sheet.

Zoho Writer :

Zoho Sheet :

Thanks, Rick! Expecting videos for the other Zoho services that you are using as well And to the readers of our blog, we highly recommend HelpMeRick.com. Rick and his co-blogger Adam, post excellent tips on computers there.

Rick Castellini has come up with a couple of cool screencasts for Zoho Writer & Zoho Sheet.

Zoho Writer :

Zoho Sheet :

Thanks, Rick! Expecting videos for the other Zoho services that you are using as well And to the readers of our blog, we highly recommend HelpMeRick.com. Rick and his co-blogger Adam, post excellent tips on computers there.

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After adding business friendly features like Pagination, Headers & Footers, Headnotes & Footnotes, Offline Support etc in our previous updates, we are further enhancing Zoho Writer functionalities with today’s update. The highlights include…

• DocX Support
• Thesaurus (in 10 languages)
• Sharing with Groups
• Enhanced Endnotes/Footnotes
• Enhanced Headers/Footers
  

DocX Support:

Zoho Writer now supports exporting to DocX, the new Microsoft OOXML file format for Word. Ofcourse, we already support ODF Export/Import in Zoho Writer. Currently you can export any of your documents in Zoho Writer as a DocX file. This is added in addition to the already available export options - DOC, TXT, HTML, PDF, ODF, SXW and RTF. We will soon be supporting DocX import as well.

Thesaurus:

We now added Thesaurus option (in 10 languages). Right-click on a word, choose the ‘Thesaurus’ option from the contextual menu to view the synonyms and related words. The current version of Thesaurus is used more for lookup purposes. We plan to enhance this functionality further to replace the words with selected ones from thesaurus in the next version.

Languages supported in Thesaurus: English, Czech, German, Greek, French, Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian & Slovak. We will keep adding more language options in future updates.

Sharing with Groups:

You can now share documents with groups. This makes it a lot easier to share documents with multiple people avoiding entering of multiple email addresses each time you share a document. To share a document with a group, click on ‘Share’ and select the ‘Share with Groups’ tab. You can create new groups in your ‘My Account‘ section. These groups will be visible across all Zoho Applications.

Enhanced support for Endnotes/Footnotes:

As you may know, we recently added Endnotes & Footnotes capabilities in Zoho Writer. This updates enhances this functionality further. All your Zoho Writer documents when exported to DocX, ODF, SXW & RTF will retain the endnotes/footnotes correctly. We now also import endnotes/footnotes from DOC, ODF, SXW, RTF files.


Enhanced support for Headers/Footers:

Headers/Footers support is further enhanced in this latest update. Full support is available when you export documents to DocX, ODF, SXW & RTF.

Apart from these, there are other enhancements and bug fixes in this update. Manual page breaks are also supported in export/import as well.

Do give the latest features a try and let us know what you think.

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Just a few days after we added features like Pagination, Header/Footer etc in Zoho Writer, the team is ready with another update adding offline editing capabilities.

In August, we made Zoho Writer available offline. When we released it back then, the documents were available in read-only mode when offline. With today’s update, you’ll now be able to view and edit your documents offline. This functionality is based on Google’s open source project Google Gears. We thank them for the project and their support.|

For Zoho Writer to work offline, you’ll need to have Google Gears plug-in installed on your browser (works on Firefox 1.5+, IE 6+). Click on ‘Go Offline’ to access your documents offline. By default, we download 15 documents each from ‘My Docs’ and ‘Shared Docs’ section. You can change the default setting by clicking on the down arrow beside ‘Go Offline’ link. The documents are downloaded based on the ‘Sort Order’ in your ‘My Docs’ section.

When you are not connected to the internet, you can visit http://writer.zoho.com/offline to access and edit your documents offline. When you are back online, clicking on ‘Go Online’ will let you to synchronize the modified documents with the online versions.

The following video should give you a quick overview on how this functionality works.

For better clarity, try this video. You’ll notice that not all functionalities available online are available in offline mode. This is because some of the functionalities are online specific while others will make their way into the offline mode moving forward.

Another new feature to come as part of this update is Right-to-Left language support. We have a lot many users from the Middle-East who had been asking for this. Click on the ‘Page Setup’ icon (), the third from left on the Zoho Writer toolbar and you will see the language ‘Direction’ option in the pop-up window that opens.

Please do give our offline editing capabilities a try and let us know your feedback. If you’d like to be informed in advance of announcements from Zoho, subscribe here.

Related Posts:

• Zoho Writer Offline
• Pagination, Header/Footer Support etc

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Myself and Sridhar sat down with Dion Almaer from Google Gears team to chat regarding our Offline Editing capabilities in Zoho Writer. We talked about how we implemented editing capabilities, what’s next and other related stuff.

Here is the video of our discussions with Dion. He also talked about this in Google Gears blog. You can find our previous discussion here.

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Just a few days after we added features like Pagination, Header/Footer etc in Zoho Writer, the team is ready with another update adding offline editing capabilities.

In August, we made Zoho Writer available offline. When we released it back then, the documents were available in read-only mode when offline. With today’s update, you’ll now be able to view and edit your documents offline. This functionality is based on Google’s open source project Google Gears. We thank them for the project and their support.|

For Zoho Writer to work offline, you’ll need to have Google Gears plug-in installed on your browser (works on Firefox 1.5+, IE 6+). Click on ‘Go Offline’ to access your documents offline. By default, we download 15 documents each from ‘My Docs’ and ‘Shared Docs’ section. You can change the default setting by clicking on the down arrow beside ‘Go Offline’ link. The documents are downloaded based on the ‘Sort Order’ in your ‘My Docs’ section.

When you are not connected to the internet, you can visit http://writer.zoho.com/offline to access and edit your documents offline. When you are back online, clicking on ‘Go Online’ will let you to synchronize the modified documents with the online versions.

The following video should give you a quick overview on how this functionality works.

For better clarity, try this video. You’ll notice that not all functionalities available online are available in offline mode. This is because some of the functionalities are online specific while others will make their way into the offline mode moving forward.

Another new feature to come as part of this update is Right-to-Left language support. We have a lot many users from the Middle-East who had been asking for this. Click on the ‘Page Setup’ icon (), the third from left on the Zoho Writer toolbar and you will see the language ‘Direction’ option in the pop-up window that opens.

Please do give our offline editing capabilities a try and let us know your feedback. If you’d like to be informed in advance of announcements from Zoho, subscribe here.

Related Posts:

• Zoho Writer Offline
• Pagination, Header/Footer Support etc

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We are pleased to announce several new enhancements to our Zoho Plugin for Microsoft Office. Users can download the new version of the plugin here. The salient features of this update are :

Option to keep a local copy

This is a nice little feature wherein users can keep a local copy of the existing document/workbook that is available in Zoho Writer & Sheet. To achieve this, users just need to enable the check box “Keep a local copy” when they are logging in to access their documents from within Microsoft Word/Excel.

There is also an option to create a new Zoho account from the Zoho Plugin credentials page. Click on the “New Zoho User? Sign Up” link to set up an account with us. This is for the users who have downloaded the plugin but are yet to sign up for Zoho Services.

Added a new tab - Local Documents

Now that the users can have a copy of the online document/workbook in their local drive, there is a new tab “Local Documents” added to the “Add-Ins” option in Word/Excel. Users can access the local copy by clicking on this particular tab. Locally downloaded documents/spreadsheets are password protected now. Users are asked to provide Zoho account password when opening a local copy of the document/spreadsheet. The enhanced security is to prevent unauthorised access.

Users also have the option to delete the local copy. Click on local documents tab from Add-Ins, select the document & choose delete button to perform the above operation.

Offline editing of documents/workbooks

User can now edit their documents/workbooks offline using the local copy and can sync up the updated offline version with the online version of the document/workbook in Zoho Writer/Sheet by connecting to the internet, signing in to their Zoho account from the Add-ins tabs in Word/Excel and then choosing the option “Save in Zoho Writer/Sheet”.

Multi-user Support

Our earlier version of Office Plugin did not allow the guest user of Windows to access the documents/workbooks. Now guest users (as opposed to only allowing users with Administrator privileges previously) who have an account with Zoho can access & edit their documents/workbooks in MS Word/Excel.

Do have a go at the enhanced Zoho Office Plugin and let us know your feedback.

It’s that month of the year when you try your hand on writing a novel - the National Novel Writing Month. Why not try it this year with Zoho Writer or Zoho Wiki? A few screenshots with explanation of how you can go about in organizing your novel in Zoho Writer/Wiki.

My sample novel is divided into 3 Books. Book 1 consists of 3 Chapters, Book 2 - 2 chapters and Book 3 - 3 Chapters. Each Chapter is a Zoho Writer page

I tag each Chapter with a common tag, ‘nanowrimo’ and with the Book which it belongs to

Clicking on each tag, I now use the ‘Add tag as folder’ option. The folders get added to the left panel. It now becomes easier for me to navigate to each Book and its Chapters

And all the Chapers / Books of the novel are available under the common nanowrimo tag (folder) too

Try using the newly released Mozilla Prism. You get to use the entire real-estate of your monitor screen area. No distractions offered by a typical browser as well.

Alternatively, you can use Zoho Wiki instead of Zoho Writer for writing and organizing your novel

Once you complete the novel, you can publish it to the world using the easy publish options available in Zoho Writer and Zoho Wiki (making the Wiki as public). Your comments are welcome on other possible ways that Zoho can help authors in writing a novel this November. Enjoy NaNoWriMo with Zoho

DigitalBucket, an online storage vendor recently integrated Zoho Apps into their application. If you have Documents or spreadsheets uploaded to their application, you can view, edit and save them within their application using Zoho. Presentations can also be viewed within their app.

They have a neat application with good functionality. We’d like to thank them for their integration.

Other online storage vendors who integrated Zoho into their application includes, Box.net, OmniDrive, MyDataBus, Steekr, FileDen etc.

If you’d like to integrate Zoho into your App, we’d love to work with you and offer our support. Also, we plan to extend our API for other applications soon.

We got a great response for Zoho Writer offline support announcement from our users, bloggers, media….and also from Google Gears team. Members from Google Gears team congratulated us on the integration. We’d like to thank them for their support and are looking forward to working with them closely on this open source project.

We had a great time with Dion Almaer from Google Gears team who visited our offices yesterday to talk about our integration. Here is the video from Google Developers Channel.

Update: Dion talks about this on Google Gears Blog.

Also check out the posts from Donna Bogatin from Insider Chatter & Zoli Erdos.