Just days ago we read that China, already the world leader in cellphone use, has surpassed the USA as the No. 1 nation in Internet users., so of course it’s a huge market that SaaS providers would love to enter. What better way than have the market come to you?

That’s what happened to Zoho when their Beijing Office was contacted by PC Stars, the largest online distributor in China with more than 2400 resellers and over 1000 system integrators. The are assembling a portal at Baihui, currently offering specific search and productivity tools. Their search products appear to be geared to product groups like software, hardware, games and automotive.

For the productivity apps they teamed up with Zoho, who would provide white-label versions of their products. After a few months of private beta testing, Baihui built a new data center (*), and today they are launching the Zoho Suite under their own brand:

• Zoho Writer - Baihui Xiexie
• Zoho Sheet - Baihui Gege
• Zoho Show - Baihui Xiuxiu
• Zoho CRM - Baihui CRM

These apps will be offered free to individual users, just like they are in the US, and CRM will have a similar pricing, too: free for the first 3 users, then 99RMB /user/months, which is about $14, close to the US pricing. (I would have thought Chinese prices to be less, but they know what they’re doing…) Baihui will later add other Zoho (Business) products.

Zoho’s current user base is 800,000 adding 100k about every 5-6 weeks, and they certainly expect that number to jump with the China deal.

OEM-ing their product is not unusual for Zoho, and especially for the parent company: there are other deals under consideration, and if you own a D-Link access point, chances are the wifi-manager software you have is from Adventnet. I plan to write a backgrounder on Adventnet, their approach to business and their international presence in the near future.

(* Please note, Baihui’s investment is into their own data center, running the Zoho Apps, not Zoho’s parent company, Adventnet, as (first) incorrectly reported on TechCrunch.) Update: it’s now fixed on TC.

Tags: baihau, china, office 2.0, SaaS, web office, zoho

Today’s Zoho Writer update is not what it looks like. Yes, I get the story about:

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

..etc, but that’s not what I find exciting. DocX support? Personally, I don’t care, MS Office 2003 was the last version I bought, people much smarter than me call it a completely insane format … but hey, the Borg is the market leader, so why not support it… Layout improvements? I’m already in a paperless world, barely ever print, so I don’t really care about these features. But Microsoft Office was created at a time when the purpose of document creation was to eventually print it, and in our legacy world the challenger is measured against the standards of the incumbent, so, yes, I can accept these are important features for Writer. Besides, the academic / student community has been dying for endnotes / footnotes, so now they can have it.

But the hidden bomb here isn’t just a Writer improvement: it’s a feature that shows Zoho’s hands regarding collaboration in the entire Zoho Business Suite. Yes, I am talking about Group Sharing. After all, one of the key drivers behind moving to web-based Office applications is to enable easier collaboration.

Most of the collaborative apps, including Zoho or mighty Google typically allow either public sharing, or inviting users individually, but until now there has been no way to share your documents with a predefined set of users, i.e. members of a group. A year and a half ago I praised Google Groups for stepping out of being just a group email mechanism, becoming a mini community/collaborative platform - but the definition of a “group”, i.e.it’s members does not exist outside the Groups application. Gmail does not recognize the Group as a valid address, and I certainly can’t share Google Docs or Spreadsheets with my Group. (And make no mistake it’s been the same with Zoho until now.)

With today’s update you can now create a Group in the ‘My Account‘ section of Zoho, and that Group is recognizable in any other Zoho Application, including Writer, Sheet, Show or even Zoho Mail. Eventually there will be multiple privacy / sharing levels within the Zoho Universe:

• private
• shared with individual email id’s
• shared with Groups (defined once, recognized in all apps)
• shared by Domain (i.e. share info within your business)

The last one will be a feature of Zoho Business, currently in private Beta, but the other two are available. Thesaurus in 10 languages, format and layout improvements are all nice, but the real news of the day is the improved cross-application collaboration.

Related posts: TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Wired, Digital Inspiration, Zoho Blogs.

Tags: Collaboration, Google, google apps, google Groups, group sharing, microsoft, ms office, office 2.0, paperless office, web office, zoho, zoho writer

Before I say anything, I want to prefix this post by stating that I am an Advisor to Zoho, which can be perceived as a competitor to Ulteo, the company that just announced providing OpenOffice On-Demand. That said, I often I’ve repeatedly stated my belief that we’re at a state of early expansion for Software as a Service, and for now, the more players the better. It’s not about slicing the pie yet, it’s about making sure the pie will be huge:

Summing it all up, I believe the winner of the “on-demand race” will not be Google, Zoho, or any of their competitors - the winners will be the customers who will have a lot more choice in picking the right business solutions later this year.

So I am happy to see new On-Demand offerings that work - and am royally p***ed when they don’t. I tried to use Ulteo, repeatedly. At the first attempt in the morning, I got stuck with a blank screen:

Next I tried in the evening: I spent a minute or so at the above blank screen, but finally I got some signs of life:

Oops… I don’t know of another instance, I don’t have Openoffice installed on this machine, and a Vista glitch forced me to reboot since my early morning attempt with Ulteo. And I certainly have no clue who the *** user u7670 is or how I should close Openoffice for this user on the Ulteo servers. But let’s click Yes to continue anyway:

Why am I in document recovery mode and just what is it I am about to recover? Finally, I got into this somewhat broken screen:

Not a very positive experience, if you ask me. On the other hand, it’s still more than the previous web-office “announcement”: Live Documents, which is still to materialize…some time next year.

Like I said, I am happy to see more On-Demand services. Those that actually exist, and perhaps even work.

Update: Jason Brooks at eWeek had similar experience.

Tags: Google, live documents, microsot, ms office, office 2.0, On-Demand, Open Source, openoffice, openoffice.org, SaaS, ulteo, web office, zoho

If there’s one application where the benefits of collaborative creation, sharing, easy access from anywhere speak for themselves, that’s presentations. After all, we rarely create presentations to ourselves: it’s a one-to-many, or more typically few-to-many situation. But dealing with version number 115 of the Sales Presentation, just figuring out which one is current, let alone contributing to it while someone else might be working on a different version is a nightmare - and when you’re ready to present, you’re still prone to accidents like this.

However, until now, we did not have a truly powerful online Presentation tool. Today (actually, on the weekend) it all changes: Zoho Show 2.0 is a truly PowerPoint-class application to collaboratively create, edit, show and share online presentations.

The user interface has been completely revamped, and you can start building your presentation by picking one of the 50+ default themes. You’ll find extensive support for shapes, clip-art, flow-charting, bullets and numbering. Images can be easily manipulated, rotated, flipped around.

Most presentations don’t start from scratch though (you had to get to version #155 somehow..), so Zoho’s import facility is now significantly improved. I’ve tested it by importing several PPT decks that had suffered some deterioration in Show 1.0 - they come out perfectly in 2.0.

Show 2.0 now is a perfect online replacement for PowerPoint, except for transition effects, which are in the plans for Zoho. And that’s a comparison from a single user’s point of view. But again, presentations are rarely single-user projects… Zoho Show has built in Chat to facilitate work with your co-creators, and it also integrates Zoho Meeting, a full-blown conferencing, desktop-sharing application. Here’s Wired on the subject:

Given the slew of new features and slick interface, it makes more sense to compare Zoho to Powerpoint than other online competitors like Google. But even against desktop apps Zoho Show comes out a ahead in many areas — version control, sharing, online collaboration and ability to embed finished slideshows on your website are all features you won’t find in most desktop applications.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll stop talking - here’s a Show 2.0 presentation instead:

There’s also a video, which I am not embedding, as my blog often chokes while waiting for Viddler…you can easily watch it here though.

Finally, that remark above about the weekend: this is not a pre-announcement, Zoho Show 2.0 is ready, I’ve played with it. However, the servers will be updated this weekend, as there may be some downtime involved, and the Zoho team is trying to minimize the inconvenience. Show 2.0 is expected to be available late Sunday.

Read more on: TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, CenterNetworks , Mashable!, Between the Lines, Wired, Zoho Blogs

(Disclaimer: I am an Advisor to Zoho)

Update (12/15): The update appears to be done, if you log in to your Zoho account, you’ll see Show 2.0. (Remember, the update was expected later during the weekend, I’ve just accidentally discovered it now, which does not mean it’s really complete - the Zoho team might very well be still tuning it.)

There are some amazing slideshows in the Public presentations area, like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this, just to pick a few.

Tags: Collaboration, microsoft, office 2.0, online presentations, powerpoint, ppt, presentations, web office, zoho, zoho show

As much as I am a certified web-app fan, I’m not naive enough to believe I’ll always have 100% broadband availability. Crazy shooters, limited conference availability, or just traveling to less covered areas (and I don’t mean here) - there will be times when we need our documents offline.

That’s why I’m happy to see Zoho Writer get offline editing capabilities today. The offline implementation is based on Google Gears, which, ironically, has yet to show up in Google’s own Apps. This video tutorial walks you through the new features - note, the steps to install Google Gears are obviously required only once. After that, you just click “Go Offline”, and can access your documents at writer.zoho.com/offline. When you’re connected again, click “Go Online” and Zoho will sync your changes back to the original document.

The features are more than covered by all the “big names”, including TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, GigaOM, /Message, Digital Inspiration, CenterNetworks, Webware.com and Wired - to name just a few. I’ll focus on what’s still missing, and a few comments.

Yes, this is not a perfect solution - yet. Going offline has to be a planned activity since you actively need to click the option while still online; this is the way Google Gears works for now. But life produces unexpected situations, like the other day when I had to hop on a train, and was staring at an empty Google Reader as I had forgotten to click “Offline” at home (Google Reader’s offline capability is also based on Gears). But Zoho never stops enhancing their products, and they plan to tackle auto detecting online/offline status and periodically sync the contents of online and offline documents.

Some reviewers compare Zoho’s approach to full integration by Live Documents. I find it rather funny: since when can we compare a PR release to existing products? GigaOM’s headline is also quite surprising: Zoho Seeks to Replace, Not Embrace, Microsoft Office. Again, this in comparison to yet-to-be-launched Live Documents‘ “embrace and extend” strategy. What this comparison forgets to mention is that Zoho has their own MS Office plugins, so, using their analogy, Zoho’s strategy includes “embrace, extend or replace”. The choice is up to the users, as it should be.

Last but not least, the little birds are singing that the next Zoho announcement will prove that web-based apps can be on par with their desktop counterparts: care to guess which application I am talking about?

Tags: Google, google gears, live documents, ms office, ms word, office 2.0, offline/online, web office, zoho, zoho writer

You read it here first: Zoho must be planning to take over the entertainment business. Need proof? Just watch the promo video for Zoho Creator Mobile version. Gone are the screenshots, canned demos… it’s all Life 2.0

Hm… I hope his sweethearts’s phone number is not real … otherwise he’s got competition for that movie.

On a more serious note: Zoho is mostly known for their Office Suite and are often compared to Google and Microsoft, when talking about documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Database management and application generation are often overlooked, probably since Google does not have anything to offer in these areas. But Zoho does, and in fact that’s the application that attracts the largest active user base. Creator allows non-tech-types (like yours truly) to easily create fairly sophisticated applications, which are often shared by dozens or hundreds of users. There are about 60K (!)applications developed in Creator, used by over half a million people. (Side note: there must be a fair amount of redundancy among 60 thousand applicationss, and while you can share them publicly today, I’d like to see Zoho develop the search / categorization tools to easily locate them; a sort of “marketplace” even if there’s no actual money flow.)

We can’t really talk about Creator without mentioning a related product: Zoho DB. While Creator is an application generator, DB is primarily for data manipulation, analysis and reporting. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu explains the differences here.

Computerworld recently listed Zoho Creator amongst the Five free Web apps we can’t live without. There is also a blog started started by users, entirely dedicated to Zoho Creator, with special focus on using it as a small business software platform: Land of Zoho Creator.

(Disclaimer: I’m an Advisor to Zoho.)

Tags: dabbledb, Google, microsoft, mobile, mobility, office 2.0, Online Applications, small business software, smb, web office, zoho, zoho creator

If you follow the online productivity / collaboration market, you’ve probably noticed that Zoho, the company that earned their fame releasing new products at breakneck speed is slowing down. But are they, really?

I think they are just going through adolescence - you know, the stage when you can grow muscles fast. They’ve been silently updating several of their products in the past months. Today’s Writer update includes support for pagination, headers, footers and spell checking in 43 (!) languages. Incidentally, some of these are the very features the Burton group listed as missing from Google Apps in their recent report titled “Google Apps in the Enterprise: A Promotion-Enhancing or Career-Limiting Move for Enterprise Architects?” The original report is 55 pages long, but here’s the InfoWorld summary:

Microsoft Office has a huge lead in features over Google Apps, the Burton Group says, giving these examples:

– Documents: “Google Docs does not support a table of contents, headers, footers, automatic creation of footnotes or end notes.” …

Although the Burton report focused specifically on GAPE (Google Apps Premier Edition), it could be construed as criticism of the the web office market in general. Well, with today’s updates Zoho Writer meets all the Burton Group “requirements”. In fact, Zoho delivers most of what the Burton study considered missing features outside Documents, in the areas of spreadsheet(Sheet), presentation (Show), custom business applications (Zoho DB & Creator) , web conferencing (Zoho Meeting), and wikis (Zoho Wiki).

Several of the above services received updates in the past month - sometimes announced, other times silently appearing, without further ado. In fact that’s an obvious benefit of using web applications: the enhancements are simply available, without the need to apply annoying patches (I could go on listing failed client-side updates from Microsoft, Macromedia, Adobe.. you name it). Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu explained his views on updates vs. new products recently. He is obsessed about eventually delivering the “perfect” web applications that fully stand up to Microsoft Office, and recognizes the limitations these services have today.

Frankly, I think he is a perfectionist and perhaps would not even need to go all the way…after all, the point in web applications isn’t simply to replicate the offline experience. Moving applications to the web opens new dimensions, namely mobility and easy, native collaboration. Today’s Writer updates are important, because in our legacy world the challenger is measured against the standards of the incumbent. But Microsoft Office was created at a time when the purpose of document creation was to eventually print it. In the 90’s we thought we’d reach the dream of “paperless office” only to see paper-consumption grow dramatically. (Secretary prints email, faxes it to boss, who makes hand notations, faxes it back for secretary to type again…). Today, in the age of better online collaboration (that you can NOT manage on paper) and ergonomic large screens, who prints anymore?

So while I recognize the importance of layout-oriented features (user acceptance), the real value to me is in real-time collaboration (co-editing), version control and restore, embedded chat, web-conferencing, linking, linking and linking - the things that make web documents live. On a side-note, this is why I am surprised that the latest Web Word Processor entrant, Buzzword, beautiful as it is, does not support entering URL’s and real-time co-editing: those omissions defeat the purpose of being on the web.

By the same logic I find Box.net’s Openbox a significant move: it allows to store one’s files online, while making it really easy to use a range of services, initially including Autodesk, Echosign, eFax, Myxer, Picnik, Scribd, Snipshot, Thinkfree, Twitter, Zazzle and Zoho on those files. There will be users who prefer the All-in-one concept, and they will likely settle on Google (bigger brand) or Zoho (more and better apps), but others will prefer picking their individual services, and for those Openbox is a good platform. Choice is good.

Related posts: Wired, CenterNetworks, Mashable, web 2.0 weblog, Zoho Blogs.

Tags: box.net, burton group, Collaboration, gape, Google, google apps, microsoft, office 2.0, openbox, small Business, smb, web office, zoho

Well.. not fully .. just yet. But I’ve argued it would be so in a recent post: Flow vs. Structure: Escaping From the Document & Directory Jungle.

Forget attachments, the version control nightmare, software incompatibility issues, storage requirements: share documents by URL. That’s what the newly released Zoho Viewer enables you to do with your Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files as well as PDF, RTF, ODF and OpenOffice documents. It’s private, not indexed by Google or other search engines, so you don’t have to worry about leaking confidential data, yet you can easily share documents, right from the Viewer interface, or by using the URL it generates. Essentially it’s a TinyURL, SnipURL ..etc for documents, with additional options, like embedding the URL, tracking the number of views, or even editing your uploaded doc’s with the relevant Zoho programs.

While it’s really simple to use, here’s an intro video :

Attachments are Evil…

Related posts: Lifehacker, Wired, TechCrunch, Digital Inspiration, Zoho Blogs.

Update: (2/13/08):  ReadWriteWeb introduces PDFMeNot, a similar service for PDF’s only.

Tags: document sharing, office 2.0, pdfmenot, web office, zoho, zoho viewer

I do not think/work/create like a machine.

My thoughts flow freely and I tend to discover relationships between events (hence “Connecting the Dots” above in the Blog Header), so I like linking things - at least mentally. Why would I confine myself to the rigid directory & file structure that computers have forced on us for decades? There are better ways… let’s look at some.

A while ago Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes wrote and excellent piece on how Enterprise Wikis Replace Shared Drives. Shared drives as collective document depositories are a disaster, we typically can’t determine where, to put things, and certainly don’t know where to find them. And if we do find a document, how do we know whether we have the latest version? How do we know who changed what in the dozen other copies with similar but cryptic filenames spread around the shared drive?

Wouldn’t it be easier to use the equivalent of a directory structure with meaningful names, the ability to attach longer narratives to our documents and find them easily via search and tags? That’s essentially what you get when you use an enterprise wiki as your “shared drive”. Think of not documents/files only, but the very reason they exist: in business we typically work on a few “projects” at any one time. If we create wikis / wiki pages for each project / function, the page content becomes the “narrative” that describes what we do, why and how, and further supporting details are in the document attachments. There really is no reason to bury documents (doc, xls, ppt) in some central dumping place (document depository) anymore - they belong to the wiki page (project description) where by definition they are in context. Of course they can be used in several other places, in different context, which is where linking comes handy - linking to wiki pages as well as other content (documents, web sites, etc).

Now that we established the wiki as the “glue” to tie all our documents together, let’s take a step further. As we get comfortable with the wiki, we’ll often wonder when to create a separate document and when to use native wiki pages. If your wiki supports a rich word processor, textual content can easily move in the wiki pages themselves. (Interestingly, Blogtronix, the Enterprise 2.0 platform vendor uses the “document” metaphor for what others call a wiki-page.) Of course whether we call them pages or documents, they should still be easy to share with “outsiders”, by using workspace or page-level permissions, or exporting to PDF and other file formats should you need to “detach” content and email it.
This works well for text, while for other needs we shoot out to the point applications and attach the resulting files (ppt, xls… etc.)

However, like I stated before, I do see the irony of working in an online collaboration platform (the wiki) yet having to upload/download attachments. Atlassian’s Webdav plugin for Confluence is an elegant solution (edit offline, save directly to the wiki), but for most other wikis the process involves far too many steps. Why not directly edit all these documents online? This of course takes us to the old debate whether the wiki should become the new office, or just the “integrator” holding the many pieces together. As a user, I don’t see why I should care: I just want seamless workflow between my wiki, spreadsheet, presentation manager, project management tool …etc. Such integration is easier when all applications/documents are online, and there are excellent applications from Zoho, ThinkFree, Editgrid, Google, to do just that.

Working directly on the Web is not just a matter of convenience. Zoho’s Raju Vegesna points to mobility, sharing & collaboration, presence & communication, auto-Versioning, auto-save, access & edit history as native benefits of web-documents.

As we link web documents to each other, and smoothly transition between applications, a paradigm shift occurs: the definition of what we call a “document” expands. Offline, a document equals a file, defined by application constraints. Spreadsheets, presentations need to be saved in their own specific format, and they become “black boxes”: there’s not much we know about them, other than a short title. There is an overhead in opening every one of them, they need to be virus-checked, then “stitched” together to support the “flow-thinking” I was referring to earlier.
Those boundaries are stretched on the web: a document is no longer a file of a specific type, generated by a specific application: it’s a logical unit, defined by context, which weaves together content created by several applications.

Zoho’s Notebook is an experimental application that allows us to create, merge and store information the way we think, no matter whether it involves writing text, drawing charts, shapes, crunching numbers or recording/playing videos. Experimental in the sense that we don’t know how it will be used. In fact I don’t know what the future web worker productivity / collaboration tools will look like, but I suspect they will have elements of Notebook - multi-format, multi-media - and wikis - user-created structure, everything linked to everything - merged together.

Files, formats become irrelevant: there is only one format, and it’s the Web, defined by URL’s.

Additional reading:

• Shared Docs: Gateway Drug to Wikis?
• Document Management vs Knowledge Management
• Wiki as alternative to document management and email

Update (11/13/07): Read I Hate Files on Collaboration Loop. (via Stewart Mader)

Tags: atlassian, Collaboration, confluence, directories, documents, office 2.0, Online Applications, Web Applications, web documents, web office, wiki, zoho, Zoho Notebook

24SevenOffice, the European SaaS provider of an integrated, All-In-One system for small businesses may be in acquisition talks with a major US vendor. The news went almost unnoticed, partly because it leaked just before Christmas, partly because the company is largely unknown outside a few European countries - not for long if a deal comes through.

I covered 24SevenOffice, a very promising SaaS provider for the SMB (SME) market several times. Their system is modular but integrated with a breath of functionality I simply haven’t seen elsewhere: Accounting, CRM (Contacts, Lead Mgt, SFA), ERP (Supply Chain, Orders, Products, Inventory), Communication, Group Scheduling, HR, Project Management, Publishing, Intranet. Essentially a NetSuite+Communication and Collaboration.

About the only thing I did not like was the lack of availability for US customers - this might change soon. The news release and blog post mentions three names: Salesforce.com, WebEx and Google, but adds a somewhat cloudy remark: “the companies here are only examples of what the rumors have outlined.” It does not explicitly confirm one of these specific companies as the potential buyer. I should also add that while I had in the past been in touch with Management, at this time I have no information whatsoever from the company, so the ideas below are purely my speculation.

Salesforce.com as suitor: A well-integrated All-In-One product would come handy to Salesforce.com which could dramatically expand their customer base this way. However, they’ve gone a long way in the other direction, trying to become a platform and extending their reach via the ecosystem built around the AppExchange. Acquiring 24SevenOffice would be a huge about-face for Marc Benioff, and essentially would mean admitting that archrival Zach Nelson of NetSuite was right all this time about the superiority of the integrated All-In-One approach.

WebEx: Their original market, the web conferencing space is being commoditized, they clearly are looking for more lucrative markets, as evidenced by the recently launched WebEx Connect (their “AppExchange”). I haven’t heard about much activity since the announcement - certainly owning a product like 24SevenOffice (btw., it really should be called 24SevenBusiness) would allow WebEx a powerful entry into the SMB applications market.

Google: No way, you might say. Google and business process / transaction oriented software are lightyears apart - at least today.

Yet unlikely as it sounds the deal would make perfect sense. Google clearly aspires to be a significant player in the enterprise space, and the SMB market is a good stepping stone, in fact more than that, a lucrative market in itself. Bits and pieces in Google’s growing arsenal: Apps for Your Domain, JotSpot, Docs and Sheets …recently there was some speculation that Google might jump into another acquisition (Thinkfree? Zoho?) to be able to offer a more tightly integrated Office. Well, why stop at “Office”, why not go for a complete business solution, offering both the business/transactional system as well as an online office, complemented by a wiki? Such an offering combined with Google’s robust infrastructure could very well be the killer package for the SMB space catapulting Google to the position of dominant small business system provider. Who’d benefit from such a deal? Google, millions of small businesses, and of course 24SevenOffice.

I admit I would feel somewhat sorry for 24SevenOfice though, as I clearly think they could have a shot of becoming a billion-dollar business on their own - the next NetSuite. Either way, if they make it to the US market this year, they’ll likely see explosive growth. When they are a well -known brand, remember, you discovered them here.

Tags: 24sevenoffice, all-in-one, crm, Enterprise Software, erp, Google, netsuite, office 2.0, On-Demand, SaaS, salesforce.com, small Business, smb, sme, thinkfree, webex, zoho