Zoho on SWiK

Why We Compete with Google

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:05:06 -0700

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)

Popular Public Zoho Sheets Causing Slowdown: Update

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:04:42 -0700

Zoho Sheet was painfully slow for around 6 hours from Sunday 8:30 pm PST to Monday 2:30 am PST. We apologize for the slow response time. This happened basically due to a huge number of requests (hundreds of thousands) to couple of public spreadsheets which were linked to from a popular website. We restored the site to normalcy by redirecting public spreadsheet views to a different part of the infrastructure there by reducing load on our servers serving regular users.

We hadn’t anticipated that a spreadsheet (we are not talking about a popular video here!) would get hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of a few hours. We are working to speed up and avoid such performance bottlenecks when public spreadsheets become very popular. It is not a difficult problem to solve (caching), just one we didn’t anticipate.

Again, we apologize for the intermittent issues and slow response times in Zoho Sheet last night. Until we put in a permanent solution (about 2 weeks), please contact us at support to let us know if you expect your spreadsheet or document is going to get a lot of page views, so we can plan ahead and redirect the traffic accordingly.

Open IT Online | Introduction

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:09:33 -0700

A firefox tool that allows you to open and edit your documents form anywhere - no need to install MS Office, Star Office, Open Office or any other application. Integrated with Zoho.com

Things That Work Well in ZOHO CRM: Find and Merge Duplicate Records

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 10:03:59 -0700

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.

Live Olympics 2008 Dashboard - Powered by Zoho DB & Reports

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:11:04 -0700

Olympic fever has gripped many of us. This edition could provide a much closer finish at the top of the table with China and USA running head-head. China being the host nation, could have the home advantage to topple US leadership this Olympics. Anyway lets wait and watch….

Some of the Olympics enthusiasts here at Zoho thought about building a Live Olympics 2008 Dashboard for a quick preview of the latest trends. We used Zoho DB & Reports to upload the latest Olympics results periodically and built some insightful reports. We designed a live dashboard using Zoho Wiki collating some of the top reports created. You can access this @ http://olympics2008.wiki.zoho.com

Some of the reports available:

1. Day by Day Medal progress in Olympics 2008 of top performing countries
2. China vs USA head-head comparison
3. Top 7 countries - By Overall Medal count, By Men Event Winners, By Women Event Winners
4. Performance of a Country when being a Olympics Host vs as Non Host
5. many more…

You can also access the entire public Olympic 2008 database done in Zoho DB & Reports.

So just bookmark the Olympics Dashboard, keep track of the progress and enjoy the games…..

Clarence
Zoho DB & Reports - Online Reporting & BI service

WSJ Op-Ed: For Most People College is a Waste of Time

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:03:53 -0700

Knowing what we do with our own alternative to college in India, multiple people sent me this op-ed at the WSJ by Charles Murray For Most People College is a Waste of Time, asking for my opinion. Before I proceed, let me first state one thing clearly: the problems I have with Indian college education, which inspired our alternative, are of a different nature than the problems (I do have some!) I have with American college education. I have experience with both, and I believe the issues are fundamentally different.

Charles Murray mainly attacks the traditional (if that is the right word here) liberal arts component of American college experience:

Outside a handful of majors — engineering and some of the sciences — a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

In my experience, American undergraduate engineering education is very, very good, but you have to know where to find it. A “middling” or even a “low” school is better for most students because the faculty is more focused on teaching vs a “prestige” school, where the faculty is purchasing that prestige through research (more on that later) so teaching is a chore for them. The humble community colleges offer the most bang for the buck (literally) in most basic math/science/engineering courses - and indeed, that has been our role model in our own internal initiative. If you are short of money, this is the path I would recommend: take all the basic math/science/engineering classes in your local community college, and then transfer credits to a middling state school for more advanced ones. You can get a fine engineering education for very little money this way.

On the subject of research, let me state it very plainly: most research in engineering, even in prestige schools, is bunk (note: I didn’t say “all”, I said “most”, there are rare exceptions). Academia at that level is a tenure-chasing paper production game. You master the art of packaging trivia in impressive sounding language. In hard sciences and engineering, the language that truly establishes your superiority over the rest of humanity is mathematics, so you end up writing highly unreadable - I doubt even dissertation committees truly read that stuff - mathematical garbage. I had seen it when I was doing my PhD in the early 1990s (I was well connected, with tons of friends from India across a broad range of schools) and most recently I see it clearly in programming language research in Computer Science, which I have attempted to follow.

On liberal arts American education, I fully agree with Murray. Let me give a bit of background to this. When I was an engineering undergraduate in India, I found myself utterly bored and miserable with the education that was on offer. There was a period I did nothing but read, read and read. George Orwell, in particular, was my favorite (I was recently reminded of it at Hacker News, and ended up re-reading Nineteen Eighty Four) - I read every one of his works. I was also well schooled by Bertrand Russell, attempted to but failed with Karl Marx, and found inspiration with Ayn Rand. None of it had anything to do with my “official” education in Electrical Engineering - let me just say that I sacrificed Maxwell for Orwell - but by then, I had decided I was going to do it on my own.

So why is that relevant here? Orwell’s Politics and the English Language proved even more educational than I realized, when I came to America, with liberal arts faculty providing the perfect, if unwitting, illustration - here is a link on deconstruction for you.

Returning to engineering, there is a fundamentally different reason I believe alternatives to college education are needed, and that has to do with contextual knowledge and the ability to hold the interest of students. Think about a subject like programming languages. A typical “good” Computer Science program (assume a really good teacher) gives you a very good grounding in parsing, compilers and such. The issue I have is the psychology of most students. No matter how well this subject matter is taught, it is going to be boring for most, because the context is all wrong for them to pay attention. There is no shared purpose in that classroom context: when it comes right down to it, the typical student is focused on getting through with the torture and getting a decent grade, so he or she can get on with their lives.

More on the subject of contextual knowledge later.

Macro Recording & Playback in Zoho Sheet

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:03:47 -0700

Some of you may know that we recently launched Macros (and Pivot Tables) support in Zoho Sheet. With our recent update, we now have a new addition - Support for Visual Basic Macro Record & Playback in Zoho Sheet.

While writing Macros from scratch requires knowledge of Visual Basic, recording Macros for your spreadsheet just needs couple of mouse clicks. Under the Macros Menu, you’ll now see the ‘Record Macro’ option to record your Macro.

After you start recording, all the changes you make to the spreadsheet will be recorded and the appropriate Visual Basic code will be created at the back-end for you. Once you are done recording, you can view the Visual Basic Macro code and apply that Macro to other Sheets.

This video shows this functionality in action.

We have been rolling out quite a number of features and enhancements to our applications and some of them give us a great level of satisfaction.This new feature in Zoho Sheet certainly falls into this category.

The fact that Zoho Sheet is the only spreadsheet (apart from Excel) to support Visual Basic Macros says a lot about our focus on the depth of our individual applications. With feature-rich apps, we are trying to address the business needs of our user base.

Please give this new Zoho Sheet functionality a try and let us know what you think.

Things That Work Well in ZOHO CRM: - Sheet View

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:03:26 -0700

Introduction here

As far as I know Sheet View is exclusive to ZOHO CRM. A common task (chore) in the management of any CRM system is editing large swaths of data at once. Some systems like Oasis CRM only give you a really crappy (trust me) mass update function. Other systems like Salesforce make you export to Excel to update a bunch of records and then re-import. (not fun)

ZOHO has a great mass update function that works as expected but sometimes you want to be able to change selected records as a group. For example changing just certain records to a new sales territory without changing all of them at once. You want to be able to get a view of all the possibles, sort as needed and then make the changes as needed. Common problem in the CRM admin world and until now I have not seen a good solution until I started working with the ZOHO CRM Sheet View.

Check it out. In this case I want to add a Sub-Territory to the main Territory. All I have to do is create a custom list view of the information. Press the ZOHO Sheet View link and I get an instant ZOHO Spreadsheet of the exact data presented in a new browser tab.

Once I am in the ZOHO Sheet View I can use any normal spreadsheet functions to copy, add cells change case, whatever I want can be done in the spreadsheet and when I hit save the records are automatically updated in the CRM system.

Very well implemented feature, totally useful, easy to use and HUGE time saver.

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

F|R: Zoho Founder Offers 5 Rules for Recruiting Well

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 10:12:19 -0700

Finding good employees is challenging for companies of any size, but for cash-strapped startups in the midst of a talent war, it’s particularly difficult. AdventNet, Zoho’s parent company, is no longer small (now more than 700 employees), but our recruiting strategy was forged from the challenges we faced when we were just starting out.

Most HR departments use fairly conventional criteria to identify talent, namely an individual’s academic and employment pedigrees. There is nothing wrong with this, except that when everyone uses them, the candidate pool gets over-fished. As a bootstrapping startup unable to compete with compensation, Zoho had to recruit a different way.

Since we didn’t find any significant correlation between traditional pedigrees and real-world performance anyway, we thought, why not look to non-pedigreed workers and evaluate talent in terms of actual job performance? OK, performance can only be evaluated after a candidate is hired. But Zoho has developed a practice that allow us to recruit non-traditionally — and effectively.

Keep in mind that most of Zoho’s staff are in India, so our experience must be taken in context. But we have used the same recruiting rules for our operations in the U.S. and Japan, if on a smaller scale.

1. Use internal referrals
The best recruitment source is our own current employees; almost two-thirds of our hiring is done through this route. Rather than relying on monetary incentives for referrals, which merely produce a flood of resumes, we ask referrers to indicate how well they know the candidate and if they would be willing to make a strong recommendation. Referrers build a track record and hiring managers stay in close touch with them, which creates accountability.

2. Evaluate for passion, determination and adaptability
What about the remaining one-third of employees not coming in through a referral? We look for strong analytical and reasoning skills. Crucially, we also look for an ability to passionately argue a point of view, or for a level of enthusiasm and initiative in some non-academic area, such as sports. Particularly in India, where sports is barely encouraged in schools, people have to jump through hoops (no pun intended) to excel in sports. Since we have fairly flexible role definitions, we also look for a willingness to adapt, a key attribute of successful employees.

3. Be willing to train
For a system like ours to work, we have to invest in training. We used to simply have colleagues mentor and coach new hires. We still do that, but we augment it with classroom instruction if we feel that a new recruit has a substantial gap to cover.

The ultimate extension of this philosophy is what we call AdventNet University. In southern India, where colleges are little more than degree-granting mills, we found that college just doesn’t provide much in the way of an education. We decided to offer an alternative, and take students directly after high school.

We have a full-time faculty that devised a curriculum based on a typical undergraduate Computer Science course, with a heavy emphasis on actual programming. (We noticed that our students prefer the practical to the abstract. One reason college students get turned off Computer Science is the heavy emphasis on theory.) The program has been very successful for us, and it has been expanded recently, which has also allowed us to bring in fresh recruits from our Japan office.

4. Be flexible on role definitions
We find that it helps not to centralize job definitions too much, particularly for fresh employees. We have fairly fluid boundaries between development & QA, systems administration, sales and marketing, and so forth. We leave it to ground-level team managers to determine the role/responsibilities that will best leverage an individual’s talents.

5. Be patient
When we do these things right, the rewards are high commitment, high productivity, high job satisfaction and low attrition.

So, what’s the catch? Our approach requires patience: We cannot ramp up hiring quickly. This has implications for a VC-funded company with time-bound exit expectations, which is one reason we have elected to bootstrap, growing at a pace our recruitment model can handle.

Sridhar Vembu is co-founder and CEO of AdventNet, parent company of Zoho. Check out GigaOM’s video Q&A with Sri and his co-founder, Raju Vegesna, at Structure 08 here.

Online Office, Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, CRM and more

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:09:06 -0700

Finding the right CRM solution

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:08:47 -0700

This post is part five from my company blog detailing my history with CRM. You can start here if you can’t sleep and want to read the first four parts. This post specifically deals with how I found Zoho CRM and how it compared with some of the CRM industry leaders.

I did not want to make the same mistake twice. We looked in depth at all the viable CRM apps currently available. At one point I realized that we should have just bitten the bullet and stayed with NetSuite. The $200K we lost with Oasis CRM would have covered us for five years with NetSuite. I am fond of saying the two biggest mistakes I have made in business were going with NetSuite and leaving NetSuite. Kind of like buying a boat I guess.

The short list was narrowed down to Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, Entellium CRM and ZOHO CRM.

I looked at MS CRM a year ago and I could not get my head around it. It needed a lot of hardware and middleware and it really looked like more of a CRM platform than a CRM solution. Everything had to be customized to get any functionality out of it. We took another look at it this year and pretty much all agreed that it still was not right for our business.

I implemented Salesforce for a non-profit that I volunteer for. In general very good software but in order to get the full solution we were going to have to integrate with three other vendors for campaign integration, accounting integration and proposals. Not only was that getting very expensive it was going to be a very tippy boat trying to get all that implemented. As a straight CRM app it really stands at the top of the heap

Entellium seemed to be a solid middle ground product. The UI looked kind of weird but seemed to be very functional and they had some sort of early beta of a QuickBooks interface. It also seemed to be fairly priced for the functionality.

I first looked at ZOHO CRM to use for the non-profit I work with because of the price. At the time $12 per user/month after the third user. About two weeks into the ZOHO CRM implementation for the non-profit was approved for a free, one year 10 seat Enterprise Salesforce account that we had applied for a month ago. I abandoned ZOHO CRM because we were just handed 11K worth of enterprise class software from the industry’s leading vendor. ZOHO CRM was too cheap to be any good anyway.

As I was implementing Salesforce for the non-profit I realized that it was very similar to ZOHO CRM. At one point I started implementing a feature in Salesforce and then I would try and implement the same feature in ZOHO CRM. ZOHO CRM matched Salesforce feature for feature but for the most part the ZOHO implementation was easier and cleaner.

I will post a more in-depth comparison between all of the platforms but to the end the history lesson we decided to implement ZOHO CRM for D-Tools and I just abandoned the free Salesforce account for the non-profit and re-implimented ZOHO CRM for them.

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

HowTo : Use Zoho CRM to Send a Newsletter

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:09:03 -0700

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 :

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.
When time comes to send the Newsletter (monthly), we log on to our Zoho CRM account, make an email template and save it
Then select all the contacts who are to be emailed
Schedule when to send the email
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
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.

A Better Way to Manage Temporary/Contract Employees’ data

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:01:55 -0700

More often, a HR professional meets a situation where he/she wants to manage a temporary/contract employee’s data in their HR system. But with most of the HR software pricing plans being based on number of employees, this becomes a delicate issue. Issue where the HR professional feels, “Why should I increase my cost by paying for a temporary employee? But it’s necessary to maintain their data too, what should I do?”. And they turn to a spreadsheet for help again. With Zoho People, you can overcome this problem using the “Dummy User” profile.

Employees who need not login to the system (Zoho People pricing is based on Employees who require login) can be added as dummy employees in Zoho People. Click on Organization -> Employee -> Add dummy employee or Settings -> Dummy employee -> Add dummy employee. These employees will not be considered for licensing fees and will be available for any business process like a normal employee inside the system and will appear in “Org chart”, “Employee List”, “Available as an interviewer”,”can be of any role” etc. But will not be able to login to the system and do not receive any mails from the system.

You can migrate Dummy Employees to Employees

Your temporary/contract employees can be migrated to regular employees, from Settings -> Dummy employee -> Migrate. Once migrated, they will receive invitation mails to join into the organization and they can login into the system.

Non-admin user can add Dummy Employees

Adding dummy employee is permission based and can be given to any role. To configure, Go to Settings -> Security -> Role of the person to whom you want to allow adding dummy employees -> Global permission -> Check Dummy Employee. Once configured, then the user can login and go to Self service -> All Forms -> Employee -> View (my/team/all) data -> Form Actions -> Add dummy user.

Hope you find this Zoho People feature useful. We will be happy to hear your comments.

Social Mapping Bret Taylor with 70,000+ FriendFeeders

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:56:57 -0700

Akshay at Social Media Research Blog has done something very interesting. He wants to find how every user in FriendFeed is connected to Bret Taylor, FriendFeed’s founder (reminded me of a similar example in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, ‘The Tipping Point’ - the one mentioned there is actor Kevin Bacon). Akshay has all his data on Zoho Sheet containing more than 70,000 users listed along with their ‘bret number’ - the degrees of freedom or separation between you & Bret. That’s the largest public sheet that I’ve come across so far.

If you are on FriendFeed, find your ‘bret number‘.

Zoho Wiki : Watch Wikis and Wiki Pages

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 06:52:59 -0700

You have created a couple of Zoho wikis and have shared it with your team or made it public. Now you would like to be notified whenever someone edits your Wiki or a specific Wiki page. And here’s one more scenario - you want to watch a public Wiki that you are interested in. Zoho Wiki’s ‘Watch this Wiki/Wiki page’ option comes in useful.

You can either choose to watch a specific wiki page or a whole wiki.

And you will be notified by email whenever there’s some edit happening to that wiki page or wiki. Use this Zoho Wiki feature to keep yourselves up-to-date on wikis you own or your favorite wiki.

Zoho Projects Update : Multiple Admins, Task - Documents/Forums Mapping etc

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:52:20 -0700

Zoho Projects underwent an update just now and the below features are now available.

Multiple Admins : Till now, Zoho Projects followed the single admin concept. But from now on, there can be multiple admins. The one who created the Zoho Projects account is assigned the super-admin / portal owner role. And he/she can designate other members as Administrators. These administrators have all the privileges as the portal owner except upgrading/downgrading the Zoho Projects account & changing the credit card details.

Task-Documents and Task-Forums Mapping : Along with adding Notes to a task (which is useful for knowing a task’s status etc), documents uploaded to Zoho Projects and discussion forums created for a project can now be associated with tasks. Multiple documents/forums can be associated with a task and a forum/document can be associated with any number of tasks.

Managers can add Clients : Project members in Manager role can now add (external) client members to the projects they manage. This gives a Manager fuller control over the project(s) he/she manages.

Separate iCal link for Google Calendar : Google Calendar follows the VEVENT component versus the VTODO component that needs to be followed for tasks/tasklists/milestones. To support GCal, Zoho Projects now has a separate GCal link. Clicking on the links, you can download an .ics file which you can import into your iCalendar / Google Calendar.

Test drive the new features in Zoho Projects and we would be glad hearing your comments.

Zoho People HowTo for Staffing Firms

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 06:44:16 -0700

Any recruiting / staffing firm may face problems like negotiating client deals, keeping the clients updated on the job opening status, sourcing appropriate candidates, pooling resources for interviews, tracking applicants, offering negotiations etc, which distract them from their focus of hiring an appropriate candidate. Zoho People helps automate the process of staffing with minimal effort and customization, thus allowing you to focus on your business goal. A screencast that explains how Zoho People, the affordable on-demand HRIS and recruitment solution, can be used by a staffing firm to meet its needs.

More on the above topic here. Let us know how you are using Zoho People and features that you would like to be added to it.

User appreciation for ToonDoo, Jambav, Zoho

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 23:45:04 -0700

We have featured the friendly Technologist cum Educator, Barry Dahl of Lake Superior College before. Barry continues to be a strong Zoho (and ToonDoo, Jambav) advocate for more than a couple of years now. From a recent post of his,

At the risk of sounding too much like a fanboy – I just have to say it one more time - love Toondoo and Zoho. This is nothing new for me since I’ve been sort of an evangelist for the past couple of years now. However, they continue to surprise me with how much they pay attention to their users and how responsive they are to suggestions or comments. With regard to Toondoo, back in Dec. 2007, I included them in my end of year list of the Top 12 Web 2.0 Tools. In that post I lamented the fact that I had wanted to use Toondoo with the elementary schools kids where I run the after-school Tech Club, but that I wouldn’t do it because there was too much inappropriate content on the site – mostly lame attempts at adult humor in cartoon format. Within a day or two of that post I received an email from Toondoo telling me that they had added a safe search button at the top of each page and a personal setting that can be turned on to not show any content that has been flagged as inappropriate. I was impressed with their responsiveness, but not terribly impressed with the solutions.

Then, earlier this month I included Toondoo in my post of the free web tools that I would be willing to pay for. My caveat here was that I would be willing to pay for the tool in order to use it with the youngsters if they could give me a protected environment

Lo and behold, I received an e-mail from Rajendran D. of Jambav within just a few days of making that post. TPTB at Jambav thought that was a good idea and were especially intrigued that I had even offered to pay for it. They are proposing that I be a beta tester for their new branded sites opportunity. They will provide a unique URL such as LakeSuperior.toondoo.com and allow me to host the members of my choosing. They are thinking that this service will probably sell for about $50 US per year, but they are offering it for free to me as a beta tester to use it with the students and to report back to them with suggestions and comments. This isn’t yet a totally done deal, but I’m confident that I will be able to try this out with the Tech Club when school starts up again in the fall.

Jambav is owned by Adventnet, which is a profitable software development company. Zoho is also owned by Adventnet, which gives them a potent 1-2 punch in my book. The most recent moment of Zen for me regarding Zoho tools was when I was presenting at the Tennessee Board of Regents Summer Institute last month (TBR08). I did two sessions on Zoho tools that were well attended and well received. There were many times that jaws dropped during those sessions as people saw some of the functionality that they didn’t know existed, or hadn’t taken the time to investigate. I always say that I think the Zoho suite is far advanced over Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and a few Google users confirmed what I was thinking about the power that is Zoho. I also did a session there about Toondoo, and there were so many great ideas about how to use comic strips for both student projects and for other purposes related to online courses and programs. For example, (1) make a Toonbook of frequently asked questions, (2) have students prepare a comic strip to introduce themselves at the beginning of the class, (3) instructor-created comic strip or toonbook as a topic teaser (introducing a new topic before more in-depth study), and several others.

Deepa, who uses Zoho for her day-to-day activities, writes about her usage of Zoho Creator, “Zoho Creator :- Only intuition, no programming”

I came across Zoho Creator, and have been trying it out for the past 6 months before making my first post about it here. I proudly admit the fact that I have integrated Zoho into my actual working environment, which has taken the load of report maintenance off my shoulders. These days, I spend only 2 hrs a week to consolidate my report. I use the free version, but sure have the plan to switch to business version soon enough.

The advantage of Zoho [Creator] lies in the fact that

There is no huge download or installation.. Because this is a WEB APPLICATION

The Registration is free

You need not have any programming knowledge

The interface is exceptionally intuitive

Drag – and – drop allows you to design custom forms

Logical flow of events will guide you to do the scripting.

Embed the form in your blog and collect data

Various choices on how you wish to process the data collected ( HTML, Excel, JASON, AJAX, Pdf , ) for novices and advanced users alike.

The feeds can be integrated into feed readers, HTML displayed within iframe,.. possibilities are immense.

Applications can be shared with any number of users ( say you have created the application and want you friend to moderate the content… go ahead and share it)

You can develop a simple form like Guest Book , which has minimum scripting ( auto date ), or , developing a complex form that allows you to generate and send email-verification code right from zoho form, which involves more complex scripting.

Bloggers have long loved interaction with their readers. After all, isn’t that why we enable comments? Here is something to take this level of interaction a step further. How about developing a custom application to cater to your needs?. Well, if you feel lack of programming knowledge, and the mind boggling software installation ( not to mention the price) is pinning you down, not anymore. Try Zoho Creator, I am sure you will eventually end up using it.

Thanks Barry & Deepa!

Do tell us how you are using Zoho, ToonDoo or Jambav. Email us or leave your comments below.

One, two, three - Export data from Zoho Invoice to Zoho Sheet

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 05:43:57 -0700

Yes, three easy steps are all it takes to export your data from Zoho Invoice to Zoho Sheet. You can export and view all of your invoices, quotes, contacts, customers and items in Zoho Sheet. I am sure most of you would be using this feature already, exploring it for the benefit of others-

Let’s say you want to export and view all your invoices in Zoho Sheet, all you have to do is-

1. Select the “Invoices” tab.
2. Click on the “Export Invoices” link at the top.
3. Click on the “View” link in the Spreadsheet/CSV/TSV format.

That’s it! All your invoices will be exported and will be shown in a new window in Zoho Sheet. Now you can play with it as any other sheet document.

Hope you find this feature useful. We will be happy to hear your comments.

Just like Zoho Sheet, we will also be supporting Google Sheet shortly.

Happy invoicing.
Regards
Siva

Mashup with External Data in Zoho Sheet

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:59:45 -0700

Zoho Sheet has this “Link External Data” functionality, which can be used to mashup with data on the web. It can sync your Zoho spreadsheet with data in public CSV files, HTML tables and RSS feeds. Zoho Sheet will basically fetch data periodically from the configured URL and update the spreadsheet automatically. You can then analyze on the external data by applying formulas or drawing charts. You can also publish / embed the resultant chart or a specific range or the whole spreadsheet. It gives you ample possibilities to mashup data from the web. A word of caution: While fetching data periodically from external websites, especially HTML pages, make sure you agree to the terms and conditions of the website.

Here is a short presentation which walks you through the various steps involved in configuring External Data in Zoho Sheet. It takes an example of automatic import of data from a public Zoho Creator view. The same can be done on a private Zoho Creator view by enabling private permalinks in Zoho Creator.

(view the presentation in full screen for better clarity)

Are you using this feature already? If so, let us know how you are using it.

Support for pre paid taxes in Zoho Invoice

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:53:57 -0700

Sometime back one of our beloved customer had asked us to support “ritenuta d’acconto” in Zoho Invoice. Yes, you read it right! “ritenuta d’acconto” in Italian stands for tax that is pre-paid by the seller.

In some countries (especially Italy) it is a common practice for the sellers to pre-pay the tax. Say for example (I am using the same example posted by our customer) a 1000$ consultancy made by a professional would have a +20% VAT on its price and a -20% “ritenuta d’acconto” (a pre-tax paid by the seller) on its price. The total would amount to 1000$. The law however requires both the tax and the pre-paid tax be shown on the invoices.

Now you can do that! Just add the tax as is it and add the pre-paid tax as a negative tax. Shown below is a snap of invoice that I had created for the above example.

You can see the original request here.

Hope this feature will come handy for our other customers also. Give this a try and let us know your comments.

Happy Invoicing
Siva

Test Center review: Office killers pack some heat | InfoWorld | Review | 2008-07-15 | By Curtis Franklin Jr.

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:52:56 -0700

[from bushwald] Zoho gets big partner win for its SaaS business apps

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:53:19 -0700

[from bushwald] Zoho gets big partner win for its SaaS business apps | InfoWorld | News | 2008-07-15 | By Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:54:16 -0700

Zoho Writer Update : Issues related to Safari browser fixed

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 03:50:21 -0700

We had a minor Zoho Writer update in which the issue of document content not getting displayed in Safari Browser on a Mac has been fixed. Users who have reported this particular issue in the past couple of days can try accessing Zoho Writer documents in their Safari browser and the content should come up fine for editing in the Writer editor.

Zoho Writer provides limited support for Safari browser as of now and hence some of the feature may behave inconsistently in it. We suggest Mac Users to access Zoho Writer on Firefox 2.0+ browser versions for a better experience. Full support for Safari browser will be provided in our next series of updates. It’s in the works right now.

Format your Columns as you like in Zoho DB & Reports

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:51:20 -0700

Zoho DB & Reports offers a wide range of data types (column types) to store your tabular data. So far, the options offered for formatting the data stored in these column types have been limited. We have addressed this in our latest update.

Zoho DB & Reports now offers a wide variety of formatting options for each data type. With these options you can choose how you would like to have your data displayed in the various reports created.

How to format a column?

Select the table or tabular view in which the columns are to be formatted
Right click on the column that is to be formatted
Set the necessary formatting option in the dialog that pops up
Click OK to apply the formatting changes

Immediately you will see the formatting options being applied over the column. Zoho DB & Reports also ensures to carry over this formatting set for a column across all the reports (chart, pivot, summary & tabular) created including this column.

Formatting options supported include Text Alignment, No. of Decimal places (for all numeric data types), Currency Symbol (for currency type), Negative Number Display (for currency type), Date display format and Include thousand separator (for all numeric data types).

Customize Chart Coloring:

In Zoho DB & Reports the colors used in charts have been system generated so far. With the latest update you can now change the colors used in a chart to suit your taste. Follow the below given simple steps to customize the color in a chart:

Select the Chart whose colors are to be customized
Click Edit Design and go to edit mode
Click on any of the category colors listed in the legend (seen on the right side of the chart) to change the same.
A color chooser will pop up
Choose the color required
Click Apply to apply the color Or Click on Use Default if you would like to revert to system generated colors.

Auto-recognizing currency data during Import:

Now Zoho DB & Reports has included the intelligence to auto-identify a data column as currency when you import it into Zoho DB & Reports. You do not have to manually set the data type of those columns as currency, which had been the case so far. The data could be in any of the accepted currency formats (with currency symbol or abbreviation eg., $, USD etc.,) of any country. Auto-recognition would be applied when you import data into Zoho DB & Reports from any of CSV or .XLS or HTML files

Hope you find the above features useful. As always do give it a try and let us know your comments….

With regards,
Clarence
Zoho DB & Reports - Online Reporting & BI Service

‘Open IT Online’ integrates Zoho

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 05:51:45 -0700

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.

How are you using Zoho Notebook?

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:49:32 -0700

Henry Thiele’s notebook titled, Should I know Web 2.0? Nice aggregation of text, links, images, audio & video from the world wide web combined with one’s own thoughts. Simply awesome! Another cool notebook from him : Digital Storytelling. Thanks Henry!

To our readers & Zoho users : Do leave your comments on how you are using Zoho Notebook.

Zoho Show: Slideshow embed tip

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:51:45 -0700

Here’s a little noticed feature in Zoho Show. You make a presentation public and embed it in a blog. Once the presentation is embedded, what if you made (want to make) changes to the original presentation? By default, it will reflect in the embedded presentation too. But this is not desirable in two cases

When you are adding or editing slides, the visitors to your blog/website will be seeing live the unfinished changes that you are making
When you want to have the original version linked to on the site while wanting to have the revised version private or shared only to a group

There is the Automatically re-publish when document is modified checkbox which does the trick. Leave it checked and you will always see the latest version in your blog/website. Uncheck it and you can do your edits safely without the external world knowing it.

Having the Automatically re-publish when document is modified option ticked makes the latest version available to the public always

Leaving the option unchecked, you can see that the last published version is 1.4 while the latest version is 1.6

The above is not just limited to embedding your presentation as it applies in general to making a presentation public! Hope you found the tip useful. Try this out in Zoho Show and do leave your comments on how you are using Zoho (Show).

Freedom to move your data whenever and wherever you need to – Support for Import and Export in Zoho Invoice

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:48:51 -0700

Now you have complete flexibility and freedom to move your data in and out of Zoho Invoice at your will. Yes, we are happy to announce the support for import and export functionality in Zoho Invoice, a feature long awaited but well worth the wait.

What can you import or export?

Your complete set of data!

Yes, you can import or export your customer information, contacts, the items you sell (products or services), invoices and quotes.

What are the formats supported?

We have support for most of the standard formats.

Data can be exported in CSV (Comma Separated Values), TSV (Tab Separated Values), XLS (Spreadsheet) and JSON formats. Additionally we also support exporting of customer and contact information in vCards (.vcf files) format.
You can import your data in CSV (Comma Separated Values) or TSV (Tab Separated Values) formats. Additionally we also support vCard format for importing your contacts or customer information

If you feel, we have missed out any important format drop us a note. We will be more than happy to add support for that format.

Couple of screenshots for a quick look:

Importing contact information into Zoho Invoice:

Exporting invoices from Zoho Invoice:

Please feel free to share your comments. You can try out this feature by signing into Zoho Invoice now.

Happy invoicing,
Siva