A small but very important and useful function got added in today’s Zoho Writer update. You will now notice a ‘Switch To’ link at the top of your Zoho Writer page. Click on that and in the drop-down menu that appears, you will find links to other Zoho apps. Allows you to open your other Zoho app accounts in new browser tabs easily from within Zoho Writer.

All the other Zoho applications will follow suit in having this option soon.

Zoho Applications (Writer, Sheet and Show) are now available on Facebook and we are excited about this. We got several requests from many users and well wishers like Krish asking us to do this integration. Considering the fact that 30% of our users are students, we couldn’t resist.

So, what can you do with this application?

You can now create documents, spreadsheets and presentations from Facebook. You can also view and edit all your existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations (both personal and shared) from Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show. Here is a quick screenshot.

This makes Zoho the first office app on Facebook. Do give it a try and add it to your profile. This application provides a good view of all your documents in a single page.

Talking about providing all documents in a single page, let me pre-announce something else here. We are working on way to better organize your documents in a single place (compared to our application specific organization). We will reveal more details on this soon.

Meanwhile, do give our new Facebook app a try and let us know what you think.

…or should I say ‘Office for your iPhone‘. This is fun project going live in record time (thanks to our APIs and of course our team).
iZoho (no, its not an online desktop ) is an easier way to access your Zoho Apps on your Mobile…atleast, iPhone for now. Sure, you can use Zoho Apps in their current form on your iPhone, but there is lot of stuff you don’t need on your mobile phone. So we simplified the interface and just provided simple features you’d normally use on a mobile phone.

We have three applications available currently in iZoho - Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show which lets you view your documents, spreadsheets and presentations in Zoho. Currently you can view and edit your documents, but you cannot edit your spreadsheets and presentations (you can only view them). You can also create new documents and view your presentations in landscape mode. There will be more features coming as we move along.
Frankly, we don’t know how this will work on iPhone as we haven’t tested it. It certainly works well on Safari so we hope it’ll be a non-issue. In any case, we will be fine tuning this over the next few days.

As I mentioned earlier, a device with a big screen, built in Wi-Fi, good usability and a full fledged browser will only improve the chances of practically using web apps on a mobile device.
Do give it a try and let us know what you think (support at zoho.com). Below are some screenshots.

SteekR, an online storage vendor integrated Zoho Writer into their application in their recent update. With this integration SteekR users can edit documents using Zoho Writer and save them back into their SteekR Drive.

SteekR offers a free account with 1GB storage space. I like their upload feature where you can just drag and drop your files into the browser and they are uploaded directly without having to install anything. Also, if you have any photos or audio files uploaded, you can play them directly in your browser. They have a great application and we are glad to see Zoho integrated into it.

Other online storage vendors who integrated Zoho APIs include Box.net, FileDen, MyDataBus & OmniDrive. We’d like to thank you all once again for integrating Zoho Apps and we look forward for more such integrations.

Japanese users of Zoho Writer are in for a treat. Thanks to our Japanese colleagues who are putting in a lot of effort in translating the Zoho services’ UI screens, Zoho Writer now joins Zoho Sheet in providing a Japanese UI. In your Zoho Writer account, click on ‘Options’ -> ‘Settings’ and you will find the language option there.

Soon we will be adding other language UIs to Zoho Writer (and other Zoho services) as well.

The long title of this post says it all. Donation Coder did a very extensive review of Word Processors available in today’s market. This is arguably the most comprehensive coverage of all the word processors. In the review all the available options were categorized into three parts - Major Word Processors, Second-Tier Word Processors and Online Word Processors. I am not going to talk about the first two categories here, but in the Online Word Processor category, Zoho Writer is selected as a Winner and Google Docs is the runner-up.

Here is what Donation Coder has to say about Zoho Writer.

Zoho Writer combines the best of both word processing and HTML worlds in one online package. You can even use a CSS file as a template for your documents (more support for this on the way, too), making Zoho Writer a natural frontend for blogging. Faster than any other online app reviewed here with regard to upload speed, UI responsiveness, and navigation — you really get to see what AJAX can do here. Zoho Writer doesn’t waste space, either. By combining text, icons, toolbars, tabs, buttons, a sliding sidebar file explorer, along with a tight workspace, it clearly is built for productivity. Good design is when you take the best of others and bend them to your needs. With Zoho Writer you can get right to work with no learning curve at all. Even better, you can create (or learn!) a lot of cool HTML, and to a lesser extent CSS code with the documents you create using it. After using it for a short while, I’m willing to bet you’ll like it better than your desktop word processor — it’s that good.

We are honored to be selected as a winner in this category. Zoho Writer is a work in progress. We can do magic with these online apps. Stay tuned for some good enhancements coming your way.

Zoho Writer’s latest update enhanced the setting up of margins. Clicking the ‘Document Properties’ button, one can set the top/bottom & left/right margins.

For user convenience, the left/right margins have now been made draggable. Please note that the margins are calculated as percentage of screen area. Try the new feature out.

ps: From the feedback we have received so far, setting the margin properties globally is one that’s been most requested. We will try having this soon

Richard Brandt at MIT Technology Review has an article on Zoho titled “Can Zoho beat Google?“. From the article :

Zoho has become a prolific designer of online software tools, releasing at least one new product every month for more than a year. It boasts 15 product offerings so far, including a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation tool, a Wiki, a project manager, a customer-relationship management (CRM) tool, a database, and a project-planning tool. Bloggers who have tried the software say it’s more robust than online applications offered by Google, and it offers better collaboration capabilities (for example, it lets multiple people work on a document simultaneously or sync spreadsheets with remote data from websites) than products from Microsoft. Zoho’s fans see it as the model for a new generation of Web-based applications that could displace expensive software sold by Microsoft.

Zoho is the suite to beat. A Gartner report released on March 12 placed Zoho at the top of its list of “Cool Vendors in Web 2.0,” five companies that offer “a glimpse into the future of enterprise innovations.” Says Gartner analyst Nick Gall, “Zoho is ahead in the user community and in the technology.”

Thanks to Richard Brandt & MIT! In other news, The Social Computing Magazine has a write-up on Zoho Notebook titled “Zoho Notebook: One-Stop Business Collaboration Tool“. And in a blog post on Zoho Notebook at weblogg-ed, Melinda Miller has this to say about Zoho Polls in the comments :

I really like zoho polls. One of my 4th grade teachers used it in class one time so now I use it all the time with my staff. We voted on our theme for next year, planning for next year’s holiday party, and staff shirt preferences. Here is a link to my school blog with the zoho poll embeded.

In a post titled “CRM on the Cheap“, Davey Moyers writes,

Looking for an inexpensive, robust CRM program? Why not check out Zoho CRM. The price is right, free for three users. I have been giving this system a test drive, and there’s power under the hood. Full CRM functionality. It lacks mobile capability or offline use, but otherwise this is a solid player for the individual sales rep or small team. It also boast Outlook synchronization that is as good as the competitors in this space. The features I especially find appealing are lead management, opportunity management, and sales quotes…. I spent four years using salesforce.com on a daily basis, and I would pit this program against salesforce.com in all categories save one. Offline and mobile are not yet offered. However, the print templates on Zoho are much better than salesforce.com. So you plan it, print it, execute it. Whatever “it” is.

Amit Agarwal has a nice post explaining how to embed Zoho Sheet’s charts in one’s blog. Zoho Chat’s shoutbox feature (embedding a chat window in your website) has been put to good use by a community named Cerebrals Hens Network. Cool background options, guys! And our recent REST API release got noted by Thomas Willingham & Go To India Web 2.0.

Thanks, one & all

The Zoho API for Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show have been made more developer friendly. In addition to the existing XML-RPC format, we have added the REST APIs as well. This makes it a lot easier for the developers to read data by just making HTTP GET requests to Zoho. The new storage REST APIs for :

Zoho Writer
Zoho Sheet
Zoho Show

One more change is the way time/date is handled in our API response messages. It wasn’t flexible enough since it returned the date in a particular format & the time was in our server’s timezone. We have changed this to the standard long milliseconds format which is just the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970, 00:00 GMT.

Omnidrive, Box.net, myDataBus, Kearen are some of the web services which have implemented the Zoho API and there’s a lot more to come. Try the new APIs out and we will be glad hearing your feedback.

Ryan McIntyre has a neatly done brief history of Excite presentation as an embedded Zoho Show slide show. ‘Connected Internet‘ recommends Zoho as one of the top 5 web apps that an enterprise can use. Here’s what the blog says about Zoho :

After trying them all, i am pretty much convinced that Zoho is currently the most advanced Office 2.0 suite in the market. What i like the most about Zoho, is that although it runs on the web, its set of features is rich, and would satisfy even the most enthusiastic MS Office user. In my opinion, Zoho Writer (the word processor) and Zoho sheets (the Excel like spreadsheet) are excellent choices for organizations that would like to cut their MS Office expenses (they are 100% free). I also like Zoho Creator, a nifty application that allows you to create database applications in minutes. If you don’t like to work on your office productivity suite on the web, you’ll enjoy Zoho Desktopize, a widget that allows you to work in selected Zoho applications in a desktop environment.

bemaNetwork, a group of experts for fighting SPAM write this about Zoho in their blog:

I have used several of the app’s myself and they are great, AJAX is being used here in force and it works marvelously. I am very impressed with the UI, the performance and what it delivers for the cost. Zoho.com we really appreciate these tools that you have made available, and want to share that with our members and friends. We hope that everyone that finds zoho will love these programs and use them everyday to replace your office or other productivity software, and maybe win a piece back for the developers!Great Job guys, we all love it!

We earlier wrote about Rick Roche and the surveys he does for his library. He is out with the results for his core biography survey. Wanna do such a survey? Try it with Zoho Creator. It is simple and easy.

Thanks, all