Online productivity company Zoho is finally bringing all its various services together into one offering with the release of the Zoho Virtual Office at tomorrow’s Office 2.0 conference.
Virtual Office, or ZohoX, will integrate most of the 10+ Zoho services already available and add several more like Webmail and calendaring. The whole thing will be unveiled on Wednesday but there’s a small screenshot at the end of this post. The service will be free for individual use and cost $9 per user for SMBs. Users across multiple locations can access the same workspace with their own admin and user list; the ability to collaborate across organizations will be available soon.
Zoho offers almost any productivity application you can think of online and almost everything not included now that I asked about the company told me is on its way soon. Zoho is also included in the exclusive WebEx Connect partnership program for web conferencing. See our previous coverage of Zoho here.
Last week the company implemented a single sign on system across Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Planner, Zoho Creator and Zoho Chat. The remaining services from the company will be included in single sign on soon. Zoho products generally work well - an Infoworld review of web based productivity services last week for example said that Zoho “blew the rest out of the water.”
I asked the company what they were going to do about the spectre of Google Office. Besides the fact that there is no such product available yet, Zoho emphasized that they are aiming at usability akin to desktop applications. GMail, for example, is not something that an entire office of Outlook based workers can be expected to rapidly adopt they say. I think that’s a viable strategy. Zoho is making a strong, early showing in the online productivity space and I think they stand a good chance in the market.
The 60 employee company reports that they already have more than 100,000 distinct individual users. With single sign on that means they aren’t counting Zoho Show and Zoho Writer users twice. With the unveiling of Zoho Virtual Office this week, that number may make a big jump.
New Services
The newest individual tool available with the new release is Zoho Webmail. Instead of getting a new email account, Zoho users can plug multiple POP email accounts into the Zoho interface. That interface can switch from an Outlook style view to a Gmail style view with a single click. Emails can be previewed in Ajax drop down boxes, organized in hierarchal folders and viewed as threads. Each email account comes with 1 GB of free storage. RSS subscription will be added to webmail soon.
The webmail service is tightly integrated with Zoho’s new calendar, task lists and note taking. When you create a new event or note based on an email, those items include a link back to the email from which they came. The full calendar program supports import and export in iCal now and RSS subscription is forthcoming.
Email, calendar and task manager functions are all tied as well to a group discussion or forum component. From inside the Groups forums users can also do IM with Zoho Chat, share events, tasks and documents.
Virtual Desktop
These new features, not to mention the long list of services already offered by Zoho, are all managed through the desktop view in Virtual Office. It’s a well organized dashboard that pulls in the newest information from and access to all the different features.
Files can be edited without being downloaded and multiple versions are saved. MP3 files can also be listened to from inside the Virtual Office. Right now the various Zoho services open in a frame inside the Virtual Office, but in coming weeks all the functionality of services like Zoho Writer and Zoho Show will be baked into the desktop view itself.
A link list can be added to the sidebar for pages users want to view from inside Virtual Office. The company demonstrated this to me using the Google RSS Reader and it worked well to click from that link over to a Zoho app and back again.
That dashboard can be displayed with custom skins, custom header links and a user’s company logo. There’s WAP mobile access.
All of the above worked fairly well in the demo I did and I expect it will only improve in time. The interface was very responsive, making good use of Ajax. Zoho Virtual Office does a good job of pulling a long list of productivity apps into one coherent workspace. It didn’t feel overloaded to me at all.
The Future of Zoho
This is a very dynamic company so I had to pry into their plans for the future. Here’s some things users can look forward to.
- Zoho CRM integration with Virtual Office.
- An EchoSign partnership to allow esignature requests and processing from within Zoho Writer (look for this in a matter of weeks.)
- Outlook and Thunderbird sync plugins.
- Skype integration with all the products, probably three months away.
- Six more Zoho products launching over the next 6 months.
Computing is moving to the cloud and Zoho is positioning itself well to be an important player. Concerns like security, interface responsiveness and service stability are being worked on throughout the sector now and I think will be shored up quickly as customers arrive and resources are transferred into R&D by these companies or very forward looking startups are acquired. See for example Seattle startup MyPW, a consumer facing RSA type provier of consumer security for web services. I just got off the phone with another company that I’ll write about Friday that seeks to provide a free API to services like Zoho for automatic syncing with local storage.
The Office 2.0 conference should exciting but we’ll see if anyone can steal the show from Zoho.
Comments
nice! first!
Marshall, this is a good start. I’m also excited up the stuff they have in the pipeline. I’ve been playing with these tools for a while now, and the integration is truly starting to position ZOHO as a viable alternative to the “other” software suite that we currently use.
Zoho exceeds Google’s offerings by so much it’s not even funny.
As soon as this baby gets Outlook syncing (full, not just calendar), it gets my business.
Zohowriter is vastly superior to Writely. Writely never quite felt “right” to me, the beta period was a bad experience, they seemed to be constantly changing the editing engine. Zoho has always been rock-solid - I spend half my time in HTML mode and it flawlessly switches back and forth to wysiwyg, I’ve always had problems doing this in Writely.
I think it’s an interesting solution
Zoho does seem ahead of Google as far as development with these products. Regardless of speed to market or product design it is really tough to believe that they will compete toe to toe with Google. The tech world has agreed that Mac has produced better products than Microsoft for years, but it is a matter of reach as well as the barrier of switching people’s habits. When they chose to fight with a gorilla like Google I assume they realize that their success will depend on those who care enough about the subtle differences and who are savvy enough to even know they exist (i.e. the type of people who read stuff like this).
wow!!! i am amzaed by ZOHO … great great thing it is
Wow. I was originally not that impressed with Zoho Virtual Office (the old one), because the docs were not integrated with Zoho Writer. You had to upload them and download them in a version frenzy. Not fun.
Now that Zoho Writer will be integrated, I will be extremely happy.
Zoho will get the attention of google guys. If they like the product then same story. They will buy their product and all the engineers workied for zoho. But, they will give full freedom to implement their ideas and stand on their own. As already posetd, without the support from big companies like Google or Yahoo, its not easy to catch the attention of people.
Very cool. I’m kind of interested to see the release!
Rex
One word: Bloat!
Though this might be useful to large corporations.
I must say that I’m not that impressed with the Zoho products. They look like all the others to me, and to add single sign-on now seems like a lack of foresight. Ioannus’s comment only confirms that the product suite has been put together piecemeal. They do have all the “apps” in one place, I’ll give you that.
Zoho = Lowsy Products
1. Zoho Slide = Worst Presentation software
2. Zoho Projects & Zoho Planner & Zoho Chat are poor imitation of 37 signals product line
3. Zoho Creator is poor imitation of Ning
Zoho Writer & Zoho Sheet are the only decent products they have.
Instead of adding features and launching new products these guys need to spend time on usability and quality.
Wow, it is great to know that zoho is using our icons (www.icongalore.com) and even greater to see them on techcrunch (in the zoho screenshot). We are also looking forward to the launch.
If Zoho is going tomorrow looks like Google beat them to the punch tonight:
http://docs.google.com/
Is the consensus that Zoho’s security protocols are sufficient right now to safeguard confidential customer data?
Zoho rocks! Leaving google behind for now. I wonder what kind of office suite google will reveal tomorrow at Office 2.0
http://www.degardener.com/2006.....of-google/
Zoho’s ability to develop highly useable apps at the speed of light is second to none. They do demonstrate the power of not being part of something quite as large as Google or Microsoft . . .
Its great to see Zoho and Google (Plus the others) battle it out, I love competition it really benefits all of us.
regards
Al
Zoho has done a good job of demonstrating leadership in the virtual office domain. Now making money by selling subscription to business users is not going to go a long way.
I predict an acquisition by Yahoo or Citrix.
-rkt
Anyone know if the ZOHO webmail app will support IMAP as well as POP3?
The mypw stuff looks interesting but has an important security flaw : the same device is expected to generate one time password for a plurality of websites , which increase the probality of capture of otp by a non friendly outsider.
This Romanian startup http://www.kerpass.com/ works along the same line of mypw [2 factors authentication as an easy to embed in the cloud service] but they rely on the end user cell phone to generate the one time password. They have developped an advanced protocol so as to seed password generation in between end user cell phone and the validation service. Each application to be protected access a dedicated realm. Password generated for realm1 are never valid in realm2.
In all seriousness who cares about Zoho? Can anyone point out a significant use it may have?
Google didn’t go this route for one reason. Zoho is trying to target the Business savy with a interface made for the everday business man. Why did Google not do this? Because corporations use something called an Exchange server, and most likely have Citrix installed. Meaning they can access Outlook, Word, Powerpoint, Access and anything else through a remote connection or web address via a login access point.
And it has a better load time than Zoho. The fact you mention its a 60 man time is kinda laughable since I heard of no corporation making any investments. Maybe a 60 man outsourced team sounds more likely.
Truth of the matter is, Zoho will never kick off. It is a product produced in incremental stages when the owners recieve money to pay their outsourced programmers or when they have time to do it themsleves. Thats why its built in such a horrible fashion and odd fashion. No US/European Business would invest their companys information in such a poorly built application. Thats the bottom line.
This is a perfect example of a wow and go, you get a quick ok this is cool and you go. Nice job have a good day, back to the security of a .NET Framework hosted in your office. Thats how its going to be with your product Zoho , there is nothing unique here. You guys arnt like the creators of 37 Signals were they created a good identity for themselves. There is nothing here to make the user to want and use your product. Oh well, trial and error right mate?
Looks like something Etelos (http://www.etelos.com) should get on their on their platfrom.
Spindlefox:
This release supports POP3. IMAP will be enabled in one of our future updates.
Raju
Zoho
Glad the office 2.0 conference is happening when it is. Lots of fun things in the virtual office realm happening right before my vacation so I can play with them for a day or so while I”m vacationing lol. Love my virtual office, and loving the convenience of zoho on the road (Can’t beat the single log in now heheh)
ZOHO Virtual Office. It sure will be a challange to Google in future. Zoho has a big range of web solutions along with the office suite. It already has its Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet and Zoho Show(an online presentation tool). Sure deserves attention.
http://googlelogs.blogspot.com.....oogle.html
When will this new version be available online?
Steve:
This is currently a closed beta. We started opening it up to some users yesterday. We will give access to more users on a daily basis. We will inform you (if you requested for an account) when your account is enabled so that you can login using your existing Zoho username/pwd.
Raju
Zoho
Doesnt Zoho have venture backing/part of AdventNet? Theyve been doing enterprise level apps for years. Seems like a serious organization to me. I for one am looking forward to more good things from Zoho and the rest of their team. More power!
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A little different different concept: http://www.openeffort.com . They’re mostly focused on collaboration. However editor is also pretty powerful.
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