Collaboration Archives - Page 4 of 20

Zoho Launches in China @ Baihui.com

Posted on April 24, 2008 ·

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.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: baihau, china, office 2.0, SaaS, web office, zoho

Wiki Review or Rant?

Posted on April 1, 2008 ·

I am deeply interested in wikis, and business oriented ones in particular, in fact was considering doing a fairly detailed comparative study, so I got really excited seeing on twitter that Tom Raftery posted an Enterprise wiki review. Too bad it’s not a review; it’s a rant that lacks any methodology or real comparison.

He goes at length describing the installation nightmare:

The setup of the Confluence wiki was far from straightforward. It took two of us the best part of a day to simply install it. Remember that as I was doing this for it@cork, this was not billable time. I was installing it on my own server and because Confluence requires TomCat as its webserver it had to run on a separate port to Apache. This meant several people couldn’t view it in their organisations.

Sounds to me like a case of bad platform choice. Now, I am by far not as technically inclined as Tom is, and am biased: I won’t touch anything that needs to be installed. That’s what Software as a Service is for. Which, incidentally is an available option for Confluence, so how Tom got into comparing “hard-to-install” Confluence with hosted PBwiki and Socialtext is beyond me – it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. And there’s not much of a comparison either… here’s all he has to say about two other products:

By the way, I did also try out DekiWiki and Twiki but I ruled them out quite early on.

That’s not a very detailed review, if you ask me. DekiWiki is downloaded about 3000 times a day (!), so some people must like it… even though their acquisition of SocialText was just an April 1 joke.

Joke apart, a word on picking the right tool for the right job: perhaps you don’t even need an “enterprise class” wiki for a conference. The official Oracle Wiki is based on Wetpaint, a decidedly consumer and community-focused platform.

My personal takeaway from this to me is to look at PBWiki: when I last checked it out, it was a baby-wiki for some reason popular in geek circles; apparently it has grown up. I’m not sure I will get to do the wiki review I’ve been planning, but in the meantime if Tom decides to write a real one, I am looking forward to reading it.

Update: Tom responded in a comment below. The hosted version of Confluence is NOT available under the community license. He ruled out DekiWiki as when he figured he could not to create Groups. There’s more, please read his comment.

Filed Under: Collaboration, SaaS · Tagged: atlassian, Collaboration, confluence, dekiwiki, mindtouch, pbwiki, socialtext, wetpaint, wiki, wikis

Enterprise Software: from ERP to BRP

Posted on March 5, 2008 ·

I had already spent half a decade implementing SAP solutions in the 90’s when I finally got enlightened, learning the “proper term” for what I was doing: ERP, as in Enterprise Resource Planning. The term was coined by then Gartner Analyst, now Enterprise Irregular Erik Keller. Now another fellow Enterprise Irregular, Sig Rinde introduces a new interpretation of ERP: Easily Repeatable Process. Of course he contrasts that with his new acronym, BRP (not to be confused with BPR, another 90’s favorite), which means Barely Repeatable Process. BRP is what Thingamy, Sig’s lightweight, extremely adoptable system attempts to address. But it’s a very-very tough sell…

ERP traditionally addresses the core, standard, and as such repeatable business processes. Whatever it can’t handle are the exceptions: processes to be handled by knowledge workers outside the realm of ERP, by traditional means: phone calls, spreadsheets, creative thinking and a lot of emailing back and forth. Exceptions may be a fraction of business volume, but they are what corporate employees spend most of their time resolving. If that’s the case, knowledge workers who come up with innovative solutions may consider it a good practice to document them just in case the “exception” ever occurs again… and if it does a few times, well then it’s no longer an exception, but a (Barely) Repeatable Process.

Wikis in the Enterprise are a simple yet effective solution to manage such BRPs: they facilitate collaboration of all knowledge workers involved, allow some structure (structure is helpful when not pre-imposed but flexibly created) to organize data and finally, as a by-product they serve as documentation of the solution for future re-use.

Neither process-driven heavyweight systems like ERP, nor innovative, lightweight collaboration tools like wikis are the one and only mantra for most businesses (see my previous rant on “you can’t run your supply chain on a wiki“), they have their own place and should complement each other. Standard business processes and exceptions are not black-and-white opposites either: it’s a continuum, and halfway is BRP. If ERP (in the traditional meaning) tries to address to many of theses BRPs, it gets overly complex (it already is!), hard to configure and use.

This is the dilemma Sig’s system, Thingamy addresses. It’s neither free-form collaboration, nor ERP: it’s a business system framework, that allows you to model and define business processes: a tool to create your own custom-made ERP, if you like.

And therein lies the rub. Most business users don’t want to create software. They want to use it. This was the problem that caused the demise of Teqlo: the unfunded, unproven belief, that users actually want to interactively create their tools. No, they want to deal with the urgent business problems (the BRP), using whatever tools are readily available.

Thingamy’s dilemma is finding the customer: it certainly won’t be the business user. A modeling tool, simple it may be has a learning curve, dealing with it is a distraction to say the least. Thingamy’s likely “owner” would be corporate IT which would have to create processes on demand. But we all know what happens if you need to call IT to create a “program” for you. Thingamy could possibly be a handy tool for consultants, system integrator firms – but they all have their own army of programmers, toolsets..etc, which makes it an awfully hard sell, IMHO.

Thingamy is no doubt an elegant solution, I just don’t see the mass market need for it, because it does not solve a mass market problem. Or I should say, it does, but there’s a mismatch between whose problems it solves and who can use it. Sig himself defines collaboration as a workaround for the Barely Repeatable Processes in the Enterprise: my bet is that this “workaround” is here to stay for a long time.

Update (3/18): CIO Magazine interviews Ross Mayfield, Founder and Chairman of Socialtext, an enterprise wiki company:

Most employees don’t spend their time executing business process. That’s a myth. They spend most of their time handling exceptions to business process.

… the greatest source of sustainable innovation is how you’re handling these exceptions to business process.

… So I’ve always looked at it as we’re doing the other half of enterprise software: making this unstructured information transparent.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, Startups · Tagged: brp, business processes, Collaboration, crm, enterprise sofware, erp, exceptions, oracle, sap, socialtext, structure, thingamy, wiki

JotSpot Born Again as Google Sites, the Wiki-less Wiki.

Posted on February 28, 2008 ·

Three weeks ago I speculated that JotSpot, the user-friendly wiki swallowed by Google a year and a half ago would soon come out of hibernation, and Voila! here it is, rebranded as Google Sites. It is the first service only available as part of Google Apps (including the free version), although I had some difficulty accessing it. Under “Manage this Domain” I could add “Sites” as a new service, but it did not show up on my account as an accessible application. When I typed sites.google.com it wanted me to sign up for Google Apps even though I was already logged in to my account. Of course trying to do so resulted in the error message:

Google Apps for zoliblog.com has already been registered by your domain administrator. Please contact your admin directly to get access to Google Apps services.

Catch 22. But there’s a solution: just type the direct URL (sites.google.com/a/yourdomain.com as default, or customize it to your liking) and you can get into Sites. I’m sure Google will soon add it to the Apps menu. (Sidenote: my old JotSpot account is still alive at name.jot.com).

Google no longer calls this a wiki, which I think is a good move. I previously wrote:

Wikis have arrived when …you don’t even have to know what they are to use one. You don’t have to know you’re using a wiki, just happily type away, creating shareable content on the Web.

I was discussing Wetpaint, the user friendly, wiki-less wiki there, and I think it’s smart of Google to follow that pattern… more later, but first, under the hood it is still a wiki, so let’s examine some of the wiki basics.

The interface is familiar from good old JotSpot (as a sidenote, the old JotSpot accounts are still alive at name.jot.com). There’s a basic wysiwyg editor, the Edit button is large and visible, and so is the New Page button. Good old JotSpot had several more ways of creating new pages, which are gone – perhaps for the best:

WikiWords or CamelCase: in old JotSpot anything you typed with embedded capitalization became a link to a page. As a relatively early wiki-user I liked it, as the easiest way to LinkAsYouThink. But in the Web 2.0 age we keep on bastardizing grammar writing EveryThingLikeThis, so more and more WikiWords had to be “unlinked”… too much confusion, especially for the new generation of mainstream users.
Linking to a shell-page before it’s created. This was a useful feature, even if we eliminate camelcase, I could use the “Link” icon, and mark up text as a link to a new sub-page, to be filled with content later. Again, this supports flow-thinking, or LinkAsYouThink, which I regret is gone.
The “New Page” button. This is the only remaining option in Google Sites, and I think the fact that it offers to pick a parent page (enforced hierarchy) is an improvement. No more orphan pages, yet relatively flexible hierarchy.

For those not too familiar with wiki terms, I discuss some of these concepts in more detail here: technically an article on SocialText 2.0, but I often make comparisons to JotSpot and Atlassian’s Confluence.

I’m glad to see Sites retained breadcrumbs for easier navigation, and they added sitemaps, a tree-style view of all your pages. This could be improved to allow for drag-and-drop style moving of the pages (changing the hierarchy), like Zoho Wiki does.

I’m surprised Sites still does not have inbound links: this is a critical feature for all wikis, whatever we call them. A wiki is all about associating pieces of information with each other, and the inbound link, also referred to as backlink shows you where the information on the current page is used elsewhere. The JotSpot tea half-recognized the importance of backlinks, as they were available as as a downloadable plugin on the Jot Development wiki, but never made it to the standard feature-set, and are apparently lost in the Google reincarnation, at least for now.

Attachment handling is as good as it was in the original JotSpot: it maintains previous versions, allows users to revert to earlier ones…etc. However, Google missed a huge chance here to by not offering to convert the attached documents to its own Google Docs style. This point takes us to the next level: stepping outside the boundaries of a standalone wiki and using it as a facility to pull together data created by other applications.

Last year I said after burying JotSpot for a year, Google can’t just release it as a wiki, instead:

…I hope that means they rethought everything and integrated JotSpot well into a number of offerings.

It could provide for much better document management than the current Docs & Spreadsheets UI.

It overlaps with Page Creator, also with the simplified version found in Google Groups – in fact Groups which is no longer just email lists but a rudimentary collaboration platform and JotSpot could very well be merged / integrated.

Finally JotSpot tried to provide primitive applications (spreadsheet, calendar..etc) all of which have a better Google counterpart, so one would hope they will be replaced, too.

Well, what’s the score on that prediction? Google Sites is a better replacement for Page Creator, Google ditched the JotSpot “apps”, replacing them with their own ones – so far 2 scores out of 3. As for document management.. well, I’d say half a score, or less. (Hey, that’s 2.5 out of 3)

You can somewhat integrate Google Docs (which includes documents, spreadsheets and presentations) by embedding them into any Google Sites page. You have to enter the specific URL though – why not just select from a list? Furthermore, your Google docs or spreadsheets have to be first made public and you have to use the public URL to embed them into Sites. Here’s my test site, showing first an error message, then the actual embedded spreadsheet, after I made it public.

The embedded docs appear properly in the saved page, but I can’t click on it, not even in Edit mode to get to the source. In fact in Edit mode all I see is a graphical placeholder for the embedded doc.

How about sharing / collaboration? As expected, your Sites can be:

private
public
shared with individual email id’s
shared with everyone within your domain

…and you can set view or edit options for all those levels. However, Google missed a big chance again. As a complete coincidence, it’s only yesterday that I raved about Zoho’s Group level sharing, half-announced in a fairly understated manner – hidden in a list of Zoho Writer enhancements. Well, Google already has a very good group facility: Google Groups, which started it’s life as a group discussion / forum system, but it gradually evolved into a decent collaboration platform. Once I have a “group” defined (i.e. the list of members), why doesn’t it become an entity I can share my wiki (sites) or docs with? When I invite users to share the wiki with, there’s an option to save the list as group, but I don’t know where it disappears, can not pull it up either within the wiki or gmail, or docs.

Finally there are gadgets, but if you read Dennis Howlett at ZDNet, gadgets might the feature you don’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole.

Summary: Nice to have Jot back (even if we did not get GSpot. ) Google now has a pretty good and easy web-page creator with some wiki features made user-friendly, and a half-hearted attempt at integrating the rest of the Apps empire using Sites. Perhaps they get it right in the next release.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: Collaboration, document management, flow, Google, google apps, google Groups, google sites, google wiki, gspot, Integration, Jotspot, Web Applications, wiki, zoho wiki

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.

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.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: Collaboration, Google, google apps, google Groups, group sharing, microsoft, ms office, office 2.0, paperless office, web office, zoho, zoho writer

EchoSign 3.0 Released – the Complexity Dilemma

Posted on February 13, 2008 ·

Echosign, the leading Web-based document e-signature / distribution / management provider has just released version 3.0, with major updates.

The UI got significantly revamped, there are new subscription levels to manage up to thousands of documents, new forms were introduced, but the most important change per CEO Jason Lemkin is the introduction of complex workflows – a definite need for large corporations:

“Hundreds of new workflow options have been added to EchoSign. The first group has been automatically added to the Account tab for Team and Enterprise customers. Want to sign ‘packs’ of documents? No problem. Routed signed copies of every contract in your company to a global e-mail address? Just tell us where. Collect title, company name? Whatever you want. Select who can — and cannot — sign in your company? Done, with one click.

And for the most complex workflows, EchoSign now offers a novel “Signature Workflow Language” where Enterprise customers can craft their own custom document worfklows. Want (A) your customer to fax sign your contract, (B) auto cc your sales rep, (C) autoroute to legal for electronic counter-signing, (D) but only by certain authorized signers, and then (E) have signed copies automatically sent back to the (F) customer, (G) legal, (H) sales ops, (I) accounting and (J) the sales rep? Now, no problem. Contact your account manager for access here and configuring workflow options beyond those you can set yourself on the Account tab.”

Let’s stop for a minute here: complexity is typically the last thing a software CEO would point out in his announcement, but Jason handles it with class and humor, for good reason. The illustration he picked (how did he find this gem?) shows a decidedly simple “process” made awfully complex by introducing far too many steps and “technology” prone to failure. EchoSign, on the other hand has earned a reputation of simplifying processes originally made complex by people, rules and lack of technology. I trust Jason and team – they will likely manage to reduce complexity, even while embracing it.

By the way, EchoSign is not only for large corporations, it’s for businesses of any size. I’m a one-person shop, and used it a few times. Even now as I type this post in Zoho Writer, I could just click on DigiSign (see highlight below) and have it routed to Jason to sign off. Not that I need to, after all, that would be …complexity.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: contracts, document management, e-signatures, EchoSign, workflow, zoho, zoho writer

Web Forms Gain Popularity

Posted on February 7, 2008 ·

Web forms are increasingly popular, as they provide an easy way to solicit user input, manage a database in the background, and display data in a controlled form. Typical uses are contact forms (this blog has one), surveys, signup-sheets. Wufoo is perhaps the most popular standalone form builder, but as popular as they are, Google’s entry to the space will likely bring more visibility to Web form use cases.

I set up a very rudimentary web form to demonstrate their use, but I am cheating: I took the data from Google Operating System and populated my database – sorry, Ionut, I don’t get anywhere close to your huge reader base. Please fill out the form below.

Although the form captures the time of entry, I am not displaying it below, to demonstrate that once can control the re-use of data after user entry.

You can manipulate the above data, filter it, sort it by clicking on the column headers, search the contents…etc.

Oh… is this more than you’ve seen on the other Google forms? And they’ve told you the lists were not embeddable? Sorry .. I’m cheating: I’ve re-created Ionut’s form in Zoho Creator. (Disclaimer: I am an Advisor to Zoho – but I am making a point by doing this.)

Different people will always prefer different tools. I don’t have any statistics, but I would assume the number of users for database-like tools (MS Access, Dabble DB, Zoho Creator & DB) is by an order of magnitude less than the number of spreadsheet users. A lot of basic spreadsheet users don’t perform calculations, don’t use pivot tables – they just create tables to track lists. (See my earlier rant on why JotSpot’s tracker is not a real spreadsheet). For their sake it’s nice to be able to have simple form support inside a spreadsheet, which is what they can now get from Google.

Several reviewers of the new Google Forms were missing field verification, calculated numeric fields…etc. These features and more are supported in Zoho Creator, which in fact allows you to build mini-apps by dropping script elements, without actually coding. Those who want more database manipulation can use Zoho DB. These are powerful applications, but which one to use when can be confusing to less technically inclined users (like yours truly). Hence simple forms in a spreadsheet are a good idea. But let me dream a little – here’s how I’d like to see web-based collaboration some day:

It won’t be about formats and applications – it will be about free-flowing thoughts and the data encapsulating them. Of course there will be differences in application capabilities, but it’s entirely likely that what you can manipulate in your database application, I will access using a spreadsheet. Likewise, I may write something in a wiki, and you want to edit it in an online word processor. It’s not a dream, we’re heading that way. For example Zoho’s wiki and Writer apps share a basically similar editor, Zoho DB introduced pivot tables which will show up in Sheet in the near future. I am impatient, would like to see this sharing happen faster, but have to accept the realities of how the leading Web companies work: individual products first, integration later. But we’ll get there… to the vision of format-less web-collaboration.

Oh, and until then, Welcome ~~Creator Mini~~ Google Forms.

Filed Under: Collaboration, SaaS, Startups · Tagged: data analysis, data query, databases, excel, Google, google apps, google forms, google spreadsheet, ms access, online database, pivot table, spreadsheets, sql, Web Applications, web office, webform, wufoo, zoho, zoho creator, zoho db

Is GSpot (Google + JotSpot) Release Imminent?

Posted on February 4, 2008 ·

This is a speculative post. As it is widely known, JotSpot, a very user-friendly wiki and application-platform-wannabe was acquired by Google in October 2006, only to be closed for new users for a long time. Existing users could continue to access their information free.

There was a lot of speculation as to when it would re-surface and in what shape. I certainly liked the wiki before they “disappeared”, and was hoping The Goog would take the opportunity to do more than just re-label it and make it more scalable:

I hope that means they rethought everything and integrated JotSpot well into a number of offerings.

It could provide for much better document management than the current Docs & Spreadsheets UI.
It overlaps with Page Creator, also with the simplified version found in Google Groups – in fact Groups which is no longer just email lists but a rudimentary collaboration platform and JotSpot could very well be merged / integrated.
Finally JotSpot tried to provide primitive applications (spreadsheet, calendar..etc) all of which have a better Google counterpart, so one would hope they will be replaced, too.

Perhaps we’re getting close to the re-emergence of JotSpot (yes, I know it won’t be called GSpot, but why not have some fun?). Obviously this is the speculative part, but several users report that JotSpot wikis disappear from the net. Users are understandably getting excited:

Is it over? Just like this? Without notice?

I just finished a major rework on the site. And 4 hours after it:
boom, it disappeared.

Any help?
Where is all the data gone?

The main jot.com page displays a Network Solutions domain capture page.

I can still access www.jot.com, which displays the standard notification about the Google transaction, and, more importantly I can get into my jot account using the direct URL: account.jot.com. I am using OpenDNS. Perhaps the difference is a matter of DNS propagation, and they are changing in preparation of the Google Wiki launch?

My previous coverage:

(Hat tip: Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop)

Update (2/6): Mashable list 14 of what they call Online Spreadsheet Applications (clearly, not all are) and surprise, surprise, JotSpot is one of them. That’s a joke. As much as Iiked JotSpot as a wiki, it failed to become an application platform, and it certainly isn’t (hasn’t been) a spreadsheet. Like I wrote before:

Just because a page looks like an application, it does not mean it really is. Try to import an Excel spreadsheet into a Jot Spreadsheet page, you’ll get a warning that it does not import formulas. Well, I’m sorry, but what else is there in a spreadsheet but formulas? The previous name, Tracker was fair: it’s a table where you track lists, but not a spreadsheet. (more)

But whatever we think of the former JotSpot Tracker capabilities, it’s hard to see it left intact once Google releases what they turned JotSpot into. Google themselves have a much better online spreadsheet, I certainly hope for their sake that they will integrate their apps with JotSpot, and kill off the overlap.

(FYI: The real online spreadsheets out of Mashable’s 14 are Google , Zoho, EditGrid, ThinkFree. )

Filed Under: Collaboration, SaaS, Startups · Tagged: Collaboration, editgrid, Google, google wiki, jot, Jotspot, thinkfree, wikis, zoho

Not All Presentation Managers Are Created Equal…

Posted on January 25, 2008 ·

Sorry if this post feels a bit tongue-in-cheek. It is. But I can’t help making the comparison when I see both Google and Zoho announcing new features of their Presentation Managers the same day.

We can’t stop adding features! – announces the Google Docs Blog. Today’s newbies are PDF support and adding vector shapes. Some shapes.. the pic to the left shows the available inventory.

The pic below lists the shapes available in Zoho Show:

Add to the above hundreds of clipart items in Zoho Show, all of which, as well as the shapes can not only be moved and resized, like those in Google, but also flipped, rotated directly by dragging them. And of course there’s Zoho’s theme gallery to jumpstart your presentation with… and a zillion more features.

Oh, well… draw your own conclusion. Bias alert: I am an advisor to Zoho. Don’t just take my word – go and play with Show yourself.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: Google, google docs, google presentations, powerpoint, presentations, presently, zoho, zoho show

Google Apps and Account Chaos Fixed (More or Less)

Posted on January 20, 2008 ·

I’ve previously complained about the total chaos between Google Accounts and Google Apps accounts, which basically rendered all Google Apps, other than Mail unusable for me:

In the early days of Google Apps the only way to sign up was by linking to an existing Google Account, in the format of myname@gmail.com. If you have one of those accounts, there is no way to tell Google that you are now myname@mydomain.com. This means that Google Apps thinks of your original @gmail and new, @domain identities and two different ones. You can directly access (via URL) your own Calendar, Docs, Groups ..etc. all under your own domain, however, programs that need to access those apps only find the other version, attached to your @gmail.com account. A simple example is trying to save an event from Upcoming.org, Zvents, or any other services: there’s no way to use them with your own domain.

Even the Google Groups is messed up: when I am logged in as myname@mydomain.com, Groups that I am a member of won’t recognize me. I actually have to have duplicate identities created in Google Groups: one to be able to send email (my own domain) and one to be able to access Group’s other features via the browser (@gmail format).

It appears to have been (almost) fixed now. Google Account and Google Apps Account still remain to different entities, but there is a way to (almost) have them work seamlessly. The steps:

Go to your Google Account (not Apps!), see your list of services, and remove Gmail. (see Warning at the bottom of this post)
Enter your Google Apps email (myname@mydomain.com) as the new primary email address for this Google Account. Your Apps account, the one with your own domain immediately becomes the new login to Google Accounts.

For the services that exist both in public and Apps version, e.g. Calendar, Docs, the Apps version will take priority, and becomes the default. (Warning: you won’t be able to access the “public” versions anymore). For other services, that don’t have an Apps version, e.g. Groups, Reader, you still need to sign in to your “basic” Google account. This may be a little confusing, especially if, prior to deleting the Gmail-based login you used a different password. Your Google Account now has the login name from the Google Apps account (your domain), but the old password. For simplicity, you may want to change the Accounts password to be identical with the Apps password. After this, although you may be surprised at the repeated login prompts, you don’t really have to worry about when you are in Google Apps or regular, public Google services, the experiences is fairly seamless.

Why “fairly”? There are still a few dead-ends. When you are in a public-only service, e.g. Reader, Groups, and click on some of the links in the upper-left corner, e.g Calendar, Google still attempts to pull up the “old” public version, and gives you some funny error message about a “null-calendar”… just ignore it.

I’ve done the transition, and with the exception of some of these bad links appear to be able to work normally now. I can save events from third-party sites, to my Apps Calendar, Plaxo synchronizes it happily, can participate in Google Groups with my own domain email, and even Doc’s come up properly. (There is an option to merge your old Docs account with the Apps version, but for this to work, every tiny setting between the two accounts has to be identical, down to the time zone).

Finally, there is some new information on Google Operating System today about associating additional email addresses with your Google Account. Google Blogoscoped has more details:

“This will allow Google services to recognize that [your additional email address] and your Google Account are associated (e.g. all invitations sent to this email address will automatically appear in your Google Calendar).”

For now, it seems the only benefit to doing this is for Google Calendar (although you can also then use any of your additional email addresses to sign in to your Google Account instead of using your username or Gmail address)

This may be the way to go in case you want to keep BOTH the Gmail account and the Apps email separately. (My process is a complete cutover), but it may not be a complete solution for services other than Calendar – at least for now.

Update: Warning! the process I am recommending essentially deletes your Gmail Account. You WILL lose all content in two days. See Ben’s comment and my response for details. A few more tips:

If you already removed Gmail service and want to save your content. go back to Manage Google Account, include Gmail again, and use your previous Gmail id – your content will still be there for two days.
If all you need is the old email for archiving/search purposes, but no longer need to maintain this particular Gmail address, you can always set up another Gmail address (which will not be associated with this Google Account), use Gmail Mail Fetcher to migrate all your old stuff (this can take days), then finally do the above steps again.

Update (Aug 15, 2009): See Troy Arrington’s posts on How to use Google Groups for Businesses that are using Google Apps.

Update ( Feb 21, 2010): Google changed things around authentication a few months ago, and the above solution is breaking down in several places. While obviously never a true solution, it was a decent workaround… now it looks Google is forcing users to split their identities between a branded (own domain) and gmail.com instance. Not good … will do an update post soon. In the meantime, read this new, related post: Fixing the Google Account problem. Update to the update: wow, everyone seems to be “discovering” the problem now…. here’s Gina Trapani: Google, Gmail, and Google Apps Accounts Explained.

Update (Mar 14 2010): Perhaps we will have a solution, after all…

Switching to Google Apps Without Tears

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: chaos, gmail, Google, google account chaos, google account problem, google accounts, google apps, Google Apps Account, google chaos, google docs, google Groups, google profiles, identity management