We’ve been tracking the progress of Zoho’s online office suite for since its launch last year.
The Zoho development team regularly releases new feature and tweaks (one or two per month on average) instead of the occasional monster update. We like that, but we don’t cover every update here on TechCrunch. If you’re interested in up to date information on what they are up to, we recommend subscribing to the Zoho blog.
One problem with the constant flow of updates is that the Zoho suite, which includes 10+ products, required a different sign on for each service. This was a problem because many of the services were already integrated. For example, you can embed a Zoho Sheet spreadsheet into a Zoho Writer document, and the spreadsheet will auto update in the Writer document whenever it was updated in Zoho Sheet. Great feature, but the fact that Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet required different sign ons reduced the value of the feature.
That changed today when Zoho released a single sign on for six of their core services - Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Planner, Zoho Creator and Zoho Chat. There are some issues with sorting out unique user names, though. Details on the Zoho blog.
This isn’t a particularly exciting update, but it goes a long way towards making the Zoho Suite more usable.
Previous TechCrunch coverage on Zoho is here.
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This really makes my day. My weakend was looking pretty dreary before hearing this news but I plan to pop a bottle of Dom tonight to celebrate. Cheers to Zoho integrated logins!
Thanks, Mike. This update took more effort from our engineering than the typical feature updates we do. For one, this required coordination across the various Zoho teams, which is a harder problem than writing code
We actually had to slow down feature development to get this done.
Sridhar
This should of have been done from the gecko…… Zoho offers no unique services… Which is sad. Zoho team needs to pull together and create something innovative. Or a spin to something already existing.
Looks like best time to get started on this…btw is this free for regular usage as well or there is any price?
“pop a bottle of Dom”…..lol @ drama 2.0
Sunil,
Yes it is free to use. We will always keep a well-featured free version. In future, as we enhance the feature set, we plan to offer subscription based version as well.
Sridhar
Michael, I think it would be worth noting as a disclaimer that Zoho is also a regular sponsor of Techcrunch.
Frank (Cefalu),
“… Zoho offers no unique services… Which is sad. “…
I’m not sure if too much readers will agree with you Frank. Zoho is one of the top offce 2.0 (on the web) apps out there. Sure, I’d like to have the ability to work “offline” — a critical feature for me –, but i’m sure there are many who can do without it…
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