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Zoho Enters Human Resources Market with Zoho People.

Posted on March 10, 2008 ·

(I broke up my originally long post into two pieces: this one about the product announcement, and the next one with the business analysis)

Zoho, best known for their Web-based Productivity (Office+) Suite today released Zoho People, a feature-rich On-Demand HRMS – Human Resources Management System.

Several modules support the work of managers, HR professionals:

  • Organization for defining corporate and departmental structure
  • Recruitment for managing recruitment processes and maintaining resume databases
  • Checklist for defining business processes and workflows in the organization
  • Forms for defining custom business forms using the integrated Zoho Creator
  • Dashboard to overview it all

All the setup, be it form changes, new forms or field, org chart changes ..etc happens via a friendly drag-and-drop interface.

While all the above is for Management, HR, perhaps Training, Travel professionals, most “regular” employees in a company would only access the Self Service Module, which is split to an Employee and a Manager Self-Service section. Requests can be sent to the HR department on job openings, employees can submit information like Expense Reports, Vacation, Training Requests to the relevant departments/managers as pre-defined in the workflow…etc.

For a detailed feature overview, watch this demo video.


Zoho People from Raju Vegesna on Vimeo.

The application is currently in Beta, and for the Beta period it will be free, independent of the number of users. After the Beta pricing will likely involve a dual scheme, with ad-hoc users (regular employee accessing Self Service) paying less than full users (typically HR professionals.) While no numbers have been announced, Zoho claims the blended price level will be disruptive – something to the scale of Zoho CRM, which is about 10% of the cost of it’s main competitor.

Talk about CRM, it’s worth mentioning that while Zoho’s fame comes from the Office Suite (or the extended suite of Productivity Apps), this is not their first foray into business applications. Zoho People joins Zoho CRM, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Projects and Zoho DB. Below is an overview of the entire Zoho Portfolio:

Please read my next post for a business analysis on what Zoho’s entry to the HCM space means.

(Disclaimer: I am an Advisor for Zoho.)

Related posts:  Between the Lines,  Zoho Blogs, Deal Architect, Centernetworks, Wired,

Filed Under: Enterprise Software, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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Zoho Expands Group Collaboration

Posted on February 27, 2008 ·

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. smile_shades

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, I 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 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.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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NetBooks: Integrated SaaS Suite for Very Small Businesses. Almost.

Posted on February 19, 2008 ·

When I started this post 2 months ago, it had a more tongue-in-cheek working title: NetBooks – the Little Gem in Hiding – clearly a play on Dennis Howlett’s  post, NetBooks – a little gem.  That’s because despite Dennis’s positive review of this new SaaS solution for small businesses I found their website a major turn-off .   I did not find a feature-list, screen prints, demos: the closest they had was a contact form to request a scheduled demo.  Failure!  You can’t reach the “long tail” of the market via outbound sales; your site needs to be absolutely transparent, so potential customers can find all feature / price information at their fingertips, then just try-and-buy. 

But what a difference a few weeks make!  Having checked back, now NetBooks offers decent product information, online videos, in fact you can now set up a free trial account with sample data in minutes.  (While it looks like just another contact form, the process is automated, I received my email confirmation within a minute.) Self-navigation definitely beats just watching vid’s. Kudos to NetBooks for fixing a major shortcoming so fast!  (Note to self: don’t leave half-written posts, they may have a short shelf-life…)

Let’s look at the actual system now.  NetBooks aims to be an On-Demand integrated business management solution for small manufacturing businesses – in fact for other types of businesses, too, as long as they hold inventory and ship tangible products.  They cater for  what they call True Small Businesses (TSB), which I referred to as  VSB – very small businesses, the “S” in SMB / SME.  Typically companies with less then 25 employees, sometimes only 3-5, and, most importantly, without professional IT support, hence Software as a Service is a life-saver.

NetBooks tries to cover a complete business cycle, from opportunity through sales, manufacturing, inventory / warehouse management, shipping, billing, accounting – some with more success then others.  Manufacturing, Inventory, Shipping and their integration to Accounting appear to be a stronghold.  If you’re in sales, you’d like to see a Sales Catalog, if you’re in the warehouse, you want an Inventory List, and if you are in manufacturing, you need a Production Elements list: they are all one and the same, allowing you to define a product structure (Bill of Materials, BOM) with different physical characteristics, reorder points, pricing levels, warehousing requirements, marketing notes…etc.   In other words, different functions can update their own slice of the same information and it’s shared with others (of course in a small business several of these functions may very well be carried out by the same person.)

Not having any procurement / purchasing functions appears to be a glaring omission: after all, if you’re in manufacturing, you will likely need to buy some components / materials. 

Another function, nominally present, but rather weak is CRM.  I can set up a Revenue Opportunity list, track contacts, events, even financial terms per record, but what’s the point if I can’t turn these into a Quote, later a Sales Order?  In fact I have to start a sales order from scratch, and it does not update the opportunities: unless you close them out, they will show as prospects long after you shipped the order, invoiced the customer and received payment.

Sales Order creation appears to be  a watershed event in NetBooks: that’s when the system comes alive, integration gets better from here, with information flowing through nicely.  Completing the order creates a shipping document, confirmation of the shipment creates a a billing request, invoice.  Even external services are integrated well, like UPS for Online Shipping and PayCycle for payroll .  There’s a complete “document trail”, you can start from the accounting side, too: from Accounts Payable (invoice) you can trace all actions back to the shipping doc, sales order…etc.

I understand why Dennis with his accounting background considered this system a gem:

As an accountant by training I often make the mistake of taking the number cruncher’s view. On this occasion I don’t have to. The way NetBooks is organized, you enter it according to the role you fulfill. That means you only ever need use the screens that are pertinent to you.

Real-world people record their real-world transactions: manufacturing, physical movement of goods, and the system records the facts in Accounting.  NetBooks  is an accounting system at it’s heart, but one without the need to deal with accounting screens.  This should not come as a surprise, given Founder Ridgley Evers’s own background: he was co-founder at QuickBooks, the de facto standard for small businesses.

Most of the sample data in the NetBooks trial system appear to have come from Evers’s real-life business: Davero Ingredienti, a purveyor of olive oil products, and I think this very well represents the type of small business NetBooks may be ideal for: relatively stable, has a good repeat customer base, receives a  lot of inbound orders and needs to execute on manufacturing and shipping to these customers.  It badly lacks stronger Sales features, and a more flow-oriented thinking to support aggressively growing businesses.

The User Interface is nothing to call home about. You certainly won’t find the lively charts and dashboards seen at Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SugarCRM, Zoho CRM …etc.  But having a simplistic UI is one thing, making it outright boring is another, and hard to use is a capital crime.  In NetBooks you basically navigate through small text lists, then double -click on an item to drill down to more details, wait long (the system, at least the trial one feels very slow) for several overlapping screens to pop up. You have to close or move around some of these pop-ups to see what’s underneath.  And whoever came up with the idea of clicking on those tiny arrows should be banned from web design for life.  

 

Seriously, this isn’t just the lack of rounded-corners-gradient-colors web 2.0 goodness: the poor UI, the microscopic arrows to click on render NetBooks a pain to use. 

Although I’ve been quite critical in this review, I still like the NetBooks concept: give very small businesses an integrated system they previously could not afford. NetBooks starts at $200/month for 5 users, additional users seats are $20.  That’s a fraction of the current “gold standard” in the space, NetSuite – although the step up to NetSuite also brings a wealth of new functionality.  Finally, SAP’s Business ByDesign is worth mentioning: when it becomes widely available, it will be the most function-rich SMB SaaS solution – but their entry point is about where NetBooks’s upper limit is.

Filed Under: ERP / CRM, SaaS, SMB / SME, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Is Going Green Good Marketing?

Posted on January 28, 2008 ·

I’ve received an email from European SaaS All-in-One SMB provider 24SevenOffice (wow, that’s a mouthful, basically NetSuite+Office for really small businesses, see my earlier coverage):

2008 must be the year when we all act against the serious environmental threat that the world is facing. 24SevenOffice has developed “The Go Green Game”, a Flash-game that puts focus on the pollution caused by the millions of unnecessary server rooms and servers located in all companies.

In addition, 24SevenOffice will plant trees based on the number of players, in co-operation with Nobel Peace Prize winner Maathai’s Green Belt Movement. If you wish to make a direct contribution to the society, let yourself entertain at http://game.24SevenOffice.com/ or forward this e-mail to friends, colleagues and business partners who are committed to the environmental battle.

Thank you for showing responsibility for the environment! The game can be found here: http://game.24SevenOffice.com/

I had mixed thoughts at first reading: Obviously environmental consciousness is becoming fashionable. Companies rush to launch their green initiatives in order to look “responsible corporate citizens”. OK, that’s the cynical view, but after all, these are often useful initiatives, and I’ve already said you don’t have to be purely altruistic to do good.

Whatever this game may be, it’s just a “save the earth” message, it’s not a vehicle to push 24SevenOffice products…

But wait! Like Columbo, when you think he’s gone, but comes back and drops the gist of the conversation, there’s a footnote here:

NB! The products mentioned in this e-mail are not the environmental sinners in themselves.
The environmental problem is based on the fact that most businesses, unnecessarily, have their own
servers and server rooms. This is the issue that 24SevenOffice is addressing.

Ahh…so it is advertising after all. Oh, well, it still delivers a correct message .. let’s check out the game itself:

I need to practice my swing, I could barely smash a few servers, look how much they’ve already racked up! Even worse, I’m not good in reading instructions, totally missed option#2, which is…no, I can’t tell you, it’s too violent.smile_devil

Joke apart, 24SevenOffice clearly has a point: maintaining millions of servers for (small) businesses is wasteful, switching to Cloud Computing allows central servers to be more efficiently utilized, we’re all saving energy.

As a side-note, I’ve just looked at a web-based service that allows us, as individual consumers “go green” – will report about it when they are ready.

Filed Under: Marketing / PR, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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SmartTurn: Inventory & Warehouse Management SaaS-style

Posted on January 23, 2008 ·

Here’s further proof that the Software as a Service (SaaS) model will not be limited to CRM and Accounting: SmartTurn, providers of the first On-Demand Inventory and Warehouse Management System (WMS) announced today its $5M Series A financing led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Emergence Capital Partners.

I admit the announcement took me by surprise; I have not heard of the company before. A quick look at the Oakland address made me suspicious though, and yes, I was correct: this company is a spin-off of Navis, who are veterans of Warehouse Management systems, from the “old”, i.e. on-premise world. Old-world or not, the Navis team carries the SaaS DNA: a little-known fact is that their CEO, currently Chairman of SmartTurn John Dillon was CEO of Salesforce.com before Founder Marc Benioff took the reins back in 2001. The investors are not exactly new to SaaS either: Emergence Capital were early investors in Salesforce.com, and they specialize on SaaS and nothing else (I believe they are the first Valley VC firm to do so).

Warehouse Management is an awfully complex area (I know first hand, having lead SAP logistic projects in the 90s), so if SmartTurn is successful, it will truly be a validation of all aspects of “Enterprise Software” being eligible for the On-Demand model.

There are very few Enterprise SaaS players around, but SAP’s (SAP)new SaaS product, Business ByDesign for the SMB market and NetSuite (N) for small businesses are worth mentioning: they both offer complete, integrated systems, including Inventory and WMS. The opposite of the integrated systems is the best-of-breed approach, in which case one of the most difficult decisions in enterprise systems is where you draw your functional boundaries, and for companies implementing a multi-system scenario what functions are left in which systems, where to cut overlaps. Inventory Management is planning and accounting for your inventory levels; Warehouse Management is the extension of the concept down to physical locations (warehouses, buildings, down to bin levels). SmartTurn appears to support the Procurement and Order Fulfillment processes as well, which, from a logistics point of view are the inflows and outflows to/from your warehouse.

This is an area worth keeping an eye on and I expect to revisit it once I know more about the company and their customers.

On a lighter note… $5M to manage the inventory of major businesses vs. $50M to superpoke FaceBook users… am I the only one sensing imbalance here? smile_wink

Update: No, apparently I am not the only one… Will Price, Managing Partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners:

It way well be that Slide raising $55m from mutual fund companies at $500m+ pre-money will be the “what were we thinking” moment of the current cycle. I think, however, the investor who leads a $4 on $4m Series A in a company with a differentiated technology and a direct tie to hard ROI will feel calm in the storm.

Filed Under: Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, SaaS, SMB / SME, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Intuit’s Update Fiasco: There is a Better Way

Posted on December 17, 2007 ·

Intuit appears to have entered a new market, that of permanent file deletion. Whether you want it or notsmile_angry:

“Mac users who installed an update to their QuickBooks software over the weekend were met with a nasty surprise: missing data.

The update caused several Mac users to lose data from their Desktop folders, infuriating many who were hoping to close their books this week for 2007, only to lose valuable purchase orders and spreadsheets” – reports News.com.

Intuit’s recommendation:

“For those of you who have been affected, we are testing out options for recovering the deleted files. Our recommendation for now is to turn off your computer and do not use it further. If you continue using your computer or reboot, you may over-write the area on the disk where the deleted data is stored, preventing any recovery efforts from being effective.”

Hm…considering the type/size of businesses typically using QuickBooks, not touching their computer in the middle of the year-end rush may not be a viable option.smile_sad. Intuit is clearly throwing in support resources, customers can register and will be called back to individually assess their situation. For many, the damage may very well be more than losing a few hours:

(This is where I wanted to quote an Intuit forum message claiming lost file, lost business damage – I saw the post 15 minutes ago, now it’s gone. Could it have been deleted?)

We’re living in the age of crappy software. QuickBooks is not alone, this incident is just more dramatic than the typical update failures. Even when updates don’t fail, they are becoming a nuisance. Last week I just pinged someone on Skype, when my Internet connection dropped again – a “standard” Vista feature, to be remedied by a reboot. So there I was, waiting to resume the chat session when the machine decided to implement 9 updates. This being a ‘screamer’ PC the update only took 7 minutes before shut-off, and a few more to configure on re-start; by the time I could come back online, my chat partner was gone. The two XP laptops in the house are a lot slower, so I just left them alone to complete their 11 updates… experience tells me sometimes these take half an hour or more.clock Who has time for this? Between the applications we actually use and all the crapware needed just to keep our computers running (virus scan, firewall, anti-spy, desktop search, backup, synchronization …etc), it’s just getting way too much to deal with.

By now my regular readers probably know where I am heading: there is a better, safer, easier way. Proponents of Cloud computing (On-demand, SaaS) typically point out portability, collaboration as key benefits, but there’s another huge benefit: ease of mind. The web applications I often use (Gmail, the Zoho Productivity Suite, CRM..etc) get updated just as frequently (actually, more) than their desktop counterparts, but I don’t have to worry about these updates: the service provider takes care of them. The whole process is not transparent to me, the user. I dumped the responsibility on the service provider: they work for me. smile_wink

Are you ready to have peace of mind?

Update: I could not have made this up: just as I was about to post this, I checked TechMeme for updates to the Intuit story, only to see this headline: Microsoft security update cripples IE .

I rest my case.

Related posts: support.quickbooks.intuit.com, CNET News.com, The Apple Core, CrunchGear, MacUser, Macsimum News, Ubergizmo, Apple Gazette, O’Grady’s PowerPage, Zero Day , Donna’s SecurityFlash, AccMan Pro.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Will Google Enter the Business Applications Market?

Posted on December 13, 2007 ·

Google’s next killer app will be an accounting system, speculates Read/WriteWeb. While I am doubtful, I enthusiastically agree, it could be the next killer app; in fact don’t stop there, why not add CRM, Procurement, Inventory, HR?

The though of Google moving into business process / transactional system is not entirely new: early this year Nick Carr speculated that Google should buy Intuit, soon to be followed by Phil Wainewright and others: Perhaps Google will buy Salesforce.com after all. My take was that it made sense for Google to enter this space, but it did not need to buy an overpriced heavyweight, rather acquire a small company with a good all-in-one product:

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.

This is probably a good time to disclose that I am an Advisor to a Google competitor, Zoho, yet I am cheering for Google to enter this market. More than a year ago I wrote a highly speculative piece: From Office Suite to Business Suite:

How about transactional business systems? Zoho has a CRM solution – big deal, one might say, the market is saturated with CRM solutions. However, what Zoho has here goes way beyond the scope of traditional CRM: they support Sales Order Management, Procurement, Inventory Management, Invoicing – to this ex-ERP guy it appears Zoho has the makings of a CRM+ERP solution, under the disguise of the CRM label.

Think about it. All they need is the addition Accounting, and Zoho can come up with an unparalleled Small Business Suite, which includes the productivity suite (what we now consider the Office Suite) and all process-driven, transactional systems: something like NetSuite + Microsoft, targeted at SMB’s.

The difficulty for Zoho and other smaller players will be on the Marketing / Sales side. Many of us, SaaS-pundits believe the major shift SaaS brings about isn’t just in delivery/support, but in the way we can reach the “long tail of the market” cost-efficiently, via the Internet. The web-customer is informed, comes to you site, tries the products then buys – or leaves. There’s no room (or budget) for extended sales cycle, site visits, customer lunches, the typical dog-and-pony show. This pull-model seems to be working for smaller services, like Charlie Wood’s Spanning Sync:

So far the model looks to be working. We have yet to spend our first advertising dollar and yet we’re on track to have 10,000 paying subscribers by Thanksgiving.

It may also work for lightweight Enterprise Software:

It’s about customers wanting easy to use, practical, easy to install (or hosted) software that is far less expensive and that does not entail an arduous, painful purchasing process. It’s should be simple, straightforward and easy to buy.

The company, whose President I’ve just quoted, Atlassian, is the market leader in their space, listing the top Fortune 500 as their customers, yet they still have no sales force whatsoever.

However, when it comes to business process software, we’re just too damn conditioned to expect cajoling, hand-holding… the pull-model does not quite seem to work. Salesforce.com, the “granddaddy” of SaaS has a very traditional enterprise sales army, and even NetSuite, targeting the SMB market came to similar conclusions. Says CEO Zach Nelson:

NetSuite, which also offers free trials, takes, on average, 60 days to close a deal and might run three to five demonstrations of the program before customers are convinced.

European All-in-One SaaS provider 24SevenOffice, which caters for the VSB (Very Small Business) market also sees a hybrid model: automated web-sales for 1-5 employee businesses, but above that they often get involved in some pre-sales consulting, hand-holding. Of course I can quote the opposite: WinWeb’s service is bought, not sold, and so is Zoho CRM. But this model is far from universal.

What happens if Google enters this market? If anyone, they have the clout to create/expand market, change customer behavior. Critics of Google’s Enterprise plans cite their poor support level, and call on them to essentially change their DNA, or fail in the Enterprise market. Well, I say, Google, don’t try to change, take advantage of who you are, and cater for the right market. As consumers we all (?) use Google services – they are great, when they work, **** when they don’t. Service is non-existent – but we’re used to it. Google is a faceless algorithm, not people, and we know that – adjusted our expectations.

Whether it’s Search, Gmail, Docs, Spreadsheets, Wiki, Accounting, CRM, when it comes from Google, we’re conditioned to try-and-buy, without any babysitting. Small businesses don’t subscribe to Gartner, don’t hire Accenture for a feasibility study: their buying decision is very much a consumer-style process. Read a few reviews (ZDNet, not Gartner), test, decide and buy.

The way we’ll all consume software as a service some day.

Update: As an aside, the Read/WriteWeb article that inspired this post demonstrates the “enterprise software sexiness” issue, which was started by Robert Scoble and became a Firestorm, per Nick Carr. I really think it’s a very thoughtful post, which, quite unusually for Read/WriteWeb sat alone at the bottom of TechMeme, then dropped off quickly. Now, has this not been about Accounting (yeah, I know, boring) software by Google, but, say adding colors to Gmail labels, in the next half an hour all the usual suspects would have piled on, and this would have taken up the top half of TechMeme. smile_sarcastic

Filed Under: Enterprise Software, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The Wait is Over – Zoho Show 2.0 is the Real Deal

Posted on December 12, 2007 ·

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.smile_embaressed

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.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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Now You Can Really Zoho Offline

Posted on November 26, 2007 ·

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? smile_wink

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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Zoho in the Entertainment Business?

Posted on November 19, 2007 ·

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 smile_shades

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

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.)

Filed Under: Collaboration, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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