Today at the Office 2.0 conference, we are launching a new addition to Zoho Suite - Zoho Docs
Zoho Docs is a central place to manage all your personal documents. Your Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations that you created in Writer, Sheet and Show will now be available at this central location.

This video provides a quick overview of Zoho Docs.

Zoho Docs supports folders. You can drag-n-drop files to these folders. The folder structure you create in Zoho Docs will be the common folder structure inside Zoho. Eventually this folder structure will appear in all other Zoho Applications.

Apart from aggregating you documents, the application also lets you view your documents, spreadsheets and presentations as a tab within the application. If you choose to edit any of these files, the file is opened in Edit mode in the appropriate Zoho Application. All documents inside Zoho Docs can be tagged, Downloaded, Shared etc. They can also be sorted by name, creation date and modified date.

Zoho Docs accepts all file types. To keep the upload process simple, you can upload ZIP files and Unzip them after the upload. Your My Documents folder can be uploaded to Zoho Docs in a single shot for example. When unzipped, your existing folder structure will be retained. When the files are uploaded, we automatically scan for viruses.

Zoho Docs also supports Group Sharing. If you have any groups created, you can share the documents to your existing groups. All documents shared to groups can also be viewed in Zoho Docs under the ‘My Groups’ section.

The Views section groups the documents by type across all folders. Here you can view ‘All files’ from all folders, Recent Documents, Documents from Zoho Writer, Spreadsheets from Zoho Sheet, Presentations from Zoho Show, Pictures and other file types.

Zoho Chat is integrated right into Zoho Docs. You can now chat with all your Zoho Contacts without leaving the application Zoho Docs.

As you notice, you’ll see multiple Zoho Services integrated well to form the Zoho Docs application. We have documents from Zoho Writer, Spreadsheets from Zoho Sheet, Presentations from Zoho Show, Groups information from Zoho Accounts, Chat from Zoho Chat - all integrated into Zoho Docs. The plan is to provide you the information where you need it rather than having to hunt for information inside applications.

Zoho Docs is also integrated into Zoho Business as the ‘Documents’ application.

This application has been created entirely by user feedback. We hope you’ll find this application useful. Please do give this a try and let us know what you think.

PS: We are hosting a Zoho Party at the Office 2.0 Conference today to celebrate our Million User milestone. This event is open to all Zoho Users. We hope you can join us to celebrate the occassion. Looking forward to seeing you.

We work closely with Google Gears and other open source teams in Google. On multiple occasions, I have joked with them “Web apps like us need a really good Javascript engine, I hope you guys are working on it”. Well, now I know they had been working on it :) 

Being heavily invested in web standards and Javascript, we love the recent announcement of a new JIT based Javascript VM in Firefox 3.1, and today’s news of Google Chrome. These developments are a huge win for the entire ecosystem of web application developers. But the impact of this goes beyond the browser, as important as the browser itself has become.

The biggest losers in Google’s announcement are not really competing browsers, but competing rich client engines like Flash and Silverlight. As Javascript advances rapidly, it inevitably encroaches on the territory currently held by Flash. Native browser video is likely the last nail in the coffin - and Google needs native browser based video for its own YouTube, so we can be confident Google Chrome and Firefox will both have native video support, with Javascript-accessible VOM (video object model) APIs for web applications to manipuate video. As for Silverlight, let me just say that if Silverlight is the future of web computing, companies like us might as well find another line of work - and I suspect Google and Yahoo probably see it the same way too.

More speculatively, I believe we will witness the emergence of Javascript as the dominant language of computing, as it sweeps the client side and starts encroaching on the server. The server landscape today is split between “enterprise” platforms like Java and .NET on the one side (we ourselves are in the Java camp on the server side),  and “scripting” languages like PHP, Python, Ruby on the other, with Javascript firmly entrenched on the client.  Languages like Ruby promise tremendous dynamism and flexibility to the developer, but their relatively weak execution environments have held them back. It is telling that both Java and .NET come with state of the art just-in-time compilers, while none of the major scripting languages do.

With Firefox & Google Chrome announcments, and the recent developments on WebKit (which power Safari), now there are 3 compelling VMs for Javascript. These VMs promise a 10-fold speed up in Javascript execution. Combined with the rapid evolution of Javascript libraries, I believe the time has come for Javascript to start encroaching on the server landscape.

Of Zoho Writer’s HTML options, one is to see the HTML code version of a document by clicking on the ‘Toggle HTML source’ icon at the far-right of the Zoho Writer toolbar’s second row. Previously, the HTML code was pretty much unreadable. But now it is indented & if you are a power HTML user, can easily modify it. Also, the HTML code is classified as Head, Body & Styles sections for ease of use. (you can apply your own style by specifying your own style sheet and that gets reflected in the ‘Styles’ section)

The ‘Insert HTML’ icon that can be of much use too. You can insert a sheet or chart from Zoho Sheet, a slideshow from Zoho Show or a video from YouTube. The advantage of inserting from Zoho Sheet and Show is that whenever the data in the original sheet or show changes, it gets automatically reflected in the Zoho Writer document.

Try playing with the HTML options available in Zoho Writer.

Anoop @ Daily Gyan has a nice post with a video tutorial explaining how you can add a contact form to your blogspot blog using Zoho Creator.

If you want to be a better blogger, you need to listen to your readers. You need to give them an opportunity to get in touch with you.

That’s why it is important to have a ‘Contact Me’ page in your blog. A ‘Contact Me’ or ‘Send Your Feedback’ page not only makes your blog look professional, but will also make you understand your readers better, help you in getting a lot of tips from them and ultimately will make you a better blogger in the long run.

But, have you seen our Send Tips page? It has been done using Zoho Creator. In today’s post we teach you how to create a similar form for your blog.

Read more @ the Daily Gyan blog. Thanks, Anoop!

You can try the above for your blog / website as well. And we have other examples of Zoho Creator in action. Ming Jack Po says in a blog post about using Zoho Creator for registration at New York City Interscholastics Mathematics League.

if you need to construct a nice looking form to accept information, Google Spreadsheet really sucks. I’ve found Zoho Creator to be absolutely amazing in that respect though. They even allow for scripted actions like automatically sending an email using data you just co llected as acknowledgment. For example, at the New York Interscholastic Mathematics League, we use it to collect registration information.

If you are managing your projects using Zoho Projects & are interested in giving us a case study, you can do so by filling up this Zoho Creator form and you will be featured in our website.

Email campaigns. Check. Every CRM has this as a checkbox on their feature list. Whether it is integrated as part of the system, as is the case with NetSuite & Oasis, or acheived through a partner integration, ala Salesforce and Campaigner, no CRM system is complete without it. Doing it well and making it easy, however is another story. Having been a marketer for longer than I care to admit, suffice it to say I have had plenty of experience with email campaigns…(not to date myself, but can you say mailmerge & Eudora?)

Ah but I digress. After struggling in this area with our previous CRM system, I was psyched to be able to quickly and easily generate targeted, personalized email campaigns. (and better yet, teach my team to do this as well!)

Zoho works like other CRM systems in terms of splitting up leads, accounts, and contacts. It is very easy to create email templates in either plain text or HTML, and use these templates for emailing out to leads or contacts. The text editor is simple and straightforward, and to add your own HTML creative you simply cut and paste. Adding wild cards for personalization is suprisingly easy, and acheived by simply choosing fields (in plain english!) from a drop down list and copying and pasting into your template.

By making the templates available to everyone who uses the system my team can personalize their messages and add wild cards for their signatures - leveraging content that is available for everyone to use yet giving the messages their own personal flair. Again, not a new concept but deceptively simple in Zoho.

Once the template is created you then go to either the Leads or Contacts database (depending on your desired targets) and select the Mass Email feature (this is easily located at the bottom of the main page of the Leads and Contacts databases.

This takes you to the Mass Email page, and is the area where you will select your email template and records to send it to. To select your template just choose one from the drop down menu. Then click on the “Select Records” tab to choose your recipients.

This is the area where Zoho really shines. While this is undoubtably the most important aspect of any direct response effort (selecting the actual targets for communication) - many systems fall short when it comes to being able to quickly get to the right target list. In fact, this basic ability was completely lacking in our last system without having to directly create a SQL database query. Not impossible, but for a marketing team not the most practical approach.

In Zoho there are a few basic ways to search for and select your email recipients. The first way is to use the “Custom Views Criteria.” This will use any of Zoho’s standard or user-created Custom Views to select the recipients. You can create custom views into your data based upon certain criteria (such as geography, timeframe, etc.) or you can choose your recipients based on Zoho’s out-of-the-box views such as “My Leads” or “Today’s Leads.”

From this view you can choose to send to all or manually select which contacts you want to receive the email. This feature alone is extremely valuable, especially in the case of not having a complete up-to-date, clean list, which can often happen right after a trade show, webinar, or some other event. This basically gives you a quick and easy way to opt out people that you do not want to receive the email, or weed out duplicates without having to clean the entire database. This is a great feature that has alowed us to continue to communicate effectively without having to go through an arduous database cleanup exercise.

The other method to select your recipients is to utilize the “Manual Criteria” feature. This allows you to select criteria from a number of fields to get to the right list. Say uou wanted to send a thank you note to all prospective customers who visited you at a recent regional trade show. You could search for all records with the lead source “trade show” and narrow it down to the specific show, account owner, territory, etc.

Again, not rocket science, it just works. And not only does it work, it’s simple enough that my entire team is now empowered to be more effective in their outbound communications. Once the target list is specified they can quickly choose from that list who should receive the email and who should not.

Overall for us it has never been easier to generate targeted, personalized, and effective email communications. While we will always continue to send out general HTML-based messages that highlight news and offers for a mass audience, we are now able to more effectively communicate with our customers, partners, and prospects. There are many more features in Zoho that my team is utilizing and in future posts will discuss more about how our entire process is improving the more that we continue to use the system.

This post was originally written by D-Tools VP marketing, Tim Bigones

Today’s Zoho Projects update brings in a few more goodies.

Project Templates : Zoho Projects has had Tasklist Templates for quite some time now. This has now been enhanced to include defining whole projects as templates. In addtion to defining tasklists, you can now have Milestones (consisting of various tasklists), documents, forum posts & users added to a template. And whenever a new project is created, you needn’t start from scratch but make a copy of a suitable project template (whereever applicable).

Bulk Upload Documents : Typically, when a new project gets started, you upload various documents like requirement docs, drawings, design plans, test procedures etc related to that project. What better way than to choose once and upload all of them in one go? Zoho Projects now offers multiple file uploads.

Log time : Logging time has now been made easier. A clock icon comes on moving your mouse over the days in the calendar view. You can click on it and log the time for your tasks in that project.

You can also log time, edit the logged time in the List View under the Timesheet tab now.

Do try the latest features in Zoho Projects.

Some users like managing their portfolio using a simple spreadsheet like this one (it uses our recently launched VB Macros, BTW).

While a spreadsheet is good one for such use, research is a different story. Apps like Zoho Notebook comes in handy in such cases. Good news about Zoho Notebook is, you can even include such spreadsheets inside your notebook.

Mike Hogan from Barron’s talks about using Zoho Notebook (and Google Notebook) for your Stock Research.

BOTH NOTEBOOK SYSTEMS make it easy to sort out the HTML-bound text, pictures and videos you want to keep from those you want to lose. Yes, popular desktop applications accept hyperlinks, graphics and other HTML gingerbread, but not with anything approaching predictability. Web elements can change a receiving file’s formatting; and, if your mouse stumbles over an embedded link, you can find yourself transported to an image or video application or some other Web page.

Google Notebook is better at selectively stripping out Web links and other formatting, or turning a big note into plain text with the click of an icon. Zoho Notebook is more oriented toward page-building than text conversion. It has standing menu options that let you create multimedia notebooks by mixing images, RSS feeds, spreadsheets, presentations and other non-text elements, or even record audio and video directly to a notebook. In addition to text- editing tools, it has a drawing toolbar for page layout and object manipulation — and a truly impressive ability to deal with disparate Web-page elements.

Google Notebook’s strength is in on-the-fly research, where the fewer mouse clicks, the better. But Zoho’s multimedia elements make for greater comprehension, and facilitate sharing. In this age of social media, being able to bounce your research and ideas off other market speculators is an important part of investing.

Both services let you create public folders online — including password-protected ones accessible only to approved collaborators. But Zoho Notebook has more version-control and collaborative features for group projects, as well as chat access via Skype’s (www.skype.com) instant-messaging and phone service. Both can be included as toolbars in Mozilla’s Firefox browser (http://en-us.www.mozilla.com). With a right mouse click, you have the option to capture a Web page’s URL to Google Notebook or the entire Web page to Zoho Notebook.

Full article here.

Research is obviously the core usage of Zoho Notebook. We have been making some good progress towards it for the next version to further simplify the research process with a better plug-in etc. More on that later.

At AdventNet, our parent company, we offer a host of tools for the enterprise ranging from network management to help desk to log analyzers. We also offer frameworks for OEMs to build their own customized solutions. All these products have quite a lot of technical documentation associated with them.

I joined AdventNet in March 2001 and remember the days when our tech writers used RoboHelp for building the documentation package for our various products. RoboHelp’s a nice tool as it allowed easy arrangement of pages based on the Table of Contents, there was an automatic tree view generated in the left hand side panel, there were the Next, Previous arrows in each page for easier navigation, it had a spellchecker and it offered index, content searches. Once the documentation package for a product was done, it was made as a zip file and uploaded to our site. The zip file was then downloaded by our users and extracted to a local directory for consumption.

But the above method of doing help documentation had a good many disadvantages. We will see below how we have overcome these disadvantages by adopting Zoho Wiki and the top reasons for why you should choose Zoho Wiki as your help authoring tool-cum-hosting solution.

1. Accessible from anywhere
A help authoring tool is pricey and needs to be installed in each of the user machines. And you are tied to your PC or laptop for accessing your work. Since Zoho Wiki is available on the web, you can access your help contents for editing from anywhere. When you sign-up for Zoho, you have for free, two wikis with unlimited number of pages.

2. Collaboration
With the conventional help authoring tool, our team of tech documentation writers always found it difficult to collaborate. Each member had to work on a different page, topic or section and finally it was all brought together. Not so with Zoho Wiki. The wiki administrator can set page-level permissions allowing for fine-grained access control to who sees what. For example, when a product’s help pages are being created, the Read/Write Access is set to Group, meaning no one from the outside world can view it. Once the documentation gets done, the Wiki permission is set to Public and everyone is able to access those pages. The same’s true for new documentation pages getting added all the time to a Wiki.

3. WYSIWYG Editor
Most wikis need the wiki syntax to be followed. For example you have to write **Zoho** in order to make Zoho appear as bold. This is one reason why wikis haven’t proliferated as much. But we want Zoho Wiki to be a wiki for all. It has a powerful WYSIWYG editor which allows you to format text as you like, insert URLs & tables, play with pictures / images etc.

4. Page Organization
The sitemap provided by Zoho Wiki allows creation of sub-pages and lists them as a hierarchical index (folder view) of the wiki pages. Pages could be created and re-arranged easily by drag-and-drop.

5. Version Control
Zoho Wiki saves all versions of a web page. And the evolution of the documentation can be tracked as any two versions of a page can be compared. A page can be reverted back to an older version, if need be.

6. Search Engine Optimization
The zip file we had for our help documentation didn’t help when it came to search engine optimization. There were lots of valuable info in those pages which the search engines didn’t have access to. But all wikis made public in Zoho Wiki are crawlable by search engines. And the tags you add for wiki pages automatically make up the keywords meta tag. The name of the page is taken as the title tag. Also, Zoho Wiki has a good PR in Google. Since all the wikis you create are sub-domains of the Zoho Wiki URL, you have a nice chance of getting a good page rank, resulting in your pages turning up tops for related search queries.

Searches for Olympics 2008 stats, entrepreneurial marketing, CRM online help in Google all have Zoho wikis within the first 3 places.

7. No Expertise needed
There is typically a learning curve involved with any help authoring tool. It takes some time to know all the functions and master them. But with Zoho Wiki, you can hit the road running. Sign up for free with a username / password, get invited to the appropriate wiki and start working on the content right-away.

8. Searchable
The pages of a Zoho Wiki are regularly indexed and hence are easily searchable. There is a search box available in evey page where you can type page names, tags, words or text phrases within a page and search for them within a wiki.

9. Customization Options
With help authoring tools, you should have a thorough knowledge of HTML in order to make your web pages appear the way you want. With Zoho Wiki, there are a lot many customization options available. Like having the side panel to the right or left, including your organization logo, customizing the header/footer panes, choosing a skin color etc. There is CSS support too. If you know how to work with style sheets, you can easily make your wiki look unique (like this one, for example).

10. Easy maintenance
Before, we had to upload zip files to our site and it required webmaster’s help. Whenever there was a small change/addition to any of the documents, a whole set of steps had to be followed. The tech writer updates the specific page, a new build (a zip file) is made to reflect the changes, the zipped file is mailed to the webmaster team, the webmaster team uploads the build to a test site and mails back to the product team asking for approval, the product team downloads the zip from the test site and sees whether everything’s OK, gives approval to the webmaster for uploading to the site and finally the webmaster uploaded it onto the site. Now with Zoho Wiki, it is an one-click process. Make the necessary changes in the appropriate wiki page, save it and you are done. The latest changes get reflected on the site.

Some of the tech documentation that we have on Zoho Wiki : Zoho Invoice, Zoho CRM, Zoho Wiki’s itself, Zoho Show, ToonDoo and more. Going forward, we plan to host almost, if not all, of AdventNet’s / Zoho’s web pages on Zoho Wiki in a phased manner.

Switch to Zoho Wiki now for all your help documentation needs.

How do you plan to compete with Google or why do you compete with Google? That is a question we get asked very often. It is better to ask why Google is interested in the business software market. Let me explain with a spreadsheet.

Focus on the revenue per employee and profit per employee metrics. I have grouped together the business software industry and the consumer internet industry separately. Notice how very successful companies with mature business models like Oracle or Intuit don’t even pull down half the revenue per employee of Google, and perhaps surprisingly, they pale in comparison with the supposedly struggling Yahoo. Ebay also towers over every software company except Microsoft. Finally, even Microsoft falls short of Google’s revenue/profit per employee metrics - and Google isn’t even milking a mature monopoly.

Salesforce.com is very instructive. Though it likes to pass itself off as an internet giant, its revenue per employee is only in the range of its business software peers, and is a fraction of the real internet giants - I know an internet giant when I see one, and you ain’t no internet giant, Salesforce ! This, I must add, despite their out-of-this-world pricing for their CRM subscriptions. They pull in almost $1 billion in revenue on the backs of - those are some really overloaded backs - a little over 1 million users, leading to almost $1000/user/year.

Now it is clear why we compete with Google. Google is perhaps the most stunning technology success story ever, but we simply don’t believe Google has the rational business incentive to get too deep into the business/IT software category. The lower revenue and profit per employee figures would be tolerable if there were huge growth opportunities there, but when very successful companies like Adobe and Intuit pull in revenues well shy of a Yahoo, when even the enterprise software leader SAP is smaller, and slower growing than Google (Google makes nearly as much in profit per employee as SAP or Oracle Salesforce make in revenue per employee), it is fairly clear this market is not going to make a material contribution to Google’s growth and profitability objectives. So what is Google’s plan here? It is fairly obvious they are in it to put Microsoft on the defensive on its home turf, so that Microsoft’s offensive capability in the internet is diminished. It is also perfectly clear why Microsoft wants to be an internet player - as Google has shown, it is a higher margin business even than its monopoly-profit core business.

So why is business software so much less profitable than the internet? I can think of two reasons: a) purchasing departments that know a thing or two about supplier margins and specialize in putting the squeeze b) sales and support costs, particularly support costs. When you sell software to businesses, they have all kinds of support expectations, which adds to headcount. A search engine or a news portal isn’t expected provide any customer support.

Another conclusion that leaps out is that within business software, companies that sell to small and mid-sized businesses, such as Adobe & Intuit (Microsoft is also very strong in SMBs), have higher revenue per employee than companies that focus on large enterprises, such as Oracle or SAP. This is likely due to SMB-focused channel strategies leading to “outsourced” selling.

When push comes to shove - and there is a lot of very messy push and shove in the business software market -  Google’s resources are going to flow into figuring out how to monetize the humongous traffic of YouTube or compete in online auctions, rather than figure out a way to squeeze a bit more margin compared to Oracle or Adobe or Salesforce. That may explain why Google has been silent on CRM, Project Management, Invoicing or HR type of tools, because those markets don’t offer the profit potential they already enjoy.

(Update: Dan Farber’s take here)

Managing duplicate records is one of the hardest things to accomplish when using CRM software. Just trying to determine what is a duplicate is hard enough and when you find a duplicate somehow you have to decide which fields need to be merged from the duplicate records.

In ZOHO the process is almost automatic. I have spent so much time on this issue with other CRM systems in the past that when I saw how ZOHO handled it I shed a little tear of joy.

Check it out. Go to any kind of record, Lead, Account, Contact, Vendor, whatever that you think is a dupe and click the Find and Merge Duplicate button.

You will go to a UI that allows you to narrow your dupe search. In this case I am using the email address and last name. I came up with 6 matches and four of them have the same email address.

I can merge three at a time so I check them and press the View Duplicates button. This is where the magic happens. I can choose which record is the master record and if the fields within each record are different I can choose which field will get merged. It works perfect. This is a huge feature that solves a huge problem and is so easy to use any temp admin staff person can do with minimal training. Not the case with any other CRM system I have used.

From a software development standpoint this is a deep and complex problem to solve.  The fact that Zoho CRM does it so well is a solid indication of the thought and planning that has gone into the product.

More information on the ZOHO Find and Merge process can be found here.

Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.