Online office suite Zoho continues to quietly, and quickly, release new products and features on a regular basis. Last month they launched a Microsoft Office plugin that lets users save files directly to their Zoho accounts. Today they add a Wiki product to the mix.
The product itself contains all the bells and whistles of competing standalone, hosted Wikis (good comparison chart here). The feature set includes separate read/write permissions, RSS feeds, an admin dashboard for overall wiki management, and a number of skins to choose from. The underlying engine is Zoho Writer, and the popular keyboard shortcuts also work in the Wiki. The Wiki pages support HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.
For an example Wiki page, plus some additional information about the product, see Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna’s sample page here.
Two things make this product stand out. The first is that the Wiki supports embedded data from other Zoho products. For example, a spreadsheet from Zoho Sheet can be embedded directly into the Wiki. Any changes to the spreadsheet, whether they are made in the Wiki or in Zoho Sheet, will be synced. The Wiki product also has a single sign in with other Zoho products.
Second, the entire Zoho suite of products is on the same overall architecture, making syncronization and new feature releases much easier between applications. Contrast that to Google’s suite, including two acquired products (Writely and JotSpot) and one mostly home-grown one (Spreadsheets). It will never be as homogenous as what Zoho has created.
In fact, it’s not clear (from a cost or speed standpoint) that Google will be better off by buying best-of-breed office applications one at a time and then integrating them. The Zoho project is not a small one by any test - they’ve been working on Zoho applications for two years and have 80 developers currently working on the project. But 75 of those developers are in India, where costs are far lower than here. My guess is that the overall investment by Zoho has been less than Google’s, and they have far more to show for it at this point.
Zoho, which claims 150,000 registered users, continues to develop an excellent product, that is ripe for picking off by someone other than Google. Whoever does it, will have the best online office suite at that time. Yes, their logo sucks. And yes, these guys don’t speak American English without an accent. Their product releases don’t get nearly the attention that Google’s do. But they are kicking ass and gaining a lot of respect along the way.
Thanks Mike. We just announced it @ http://www.zohowiki.com
Blog post on the announcement is here.
http://blogs.zoho.com/general/.....zoho-wiki/
Let’s hope they don’t get picked off too soon. There is extraordinary creativity, flexibility, and use of common sense in an entrepreneurial environment. Great job Zoho.
I have tried several of Zoho’s products, with particular interest in Zoho Creator. Each time I go back to try it (about once a month) I find it too slow to rely on. Sometime requests can take minutes to process. I am excited to give it another try, especially with the plug-ing and the wiki, but feel I am setting myself up for disappointment.
Kudoz to ZOHO team… But still lot of home improvements has to be done on the interface part!!!
I’d like to take Zoho as a online editor instead of a online Office.
Tech Tutorials: http://www.hotcoding.com
I think google should buy them. It is a really good suite, and is getting only better. I use google apps, and they are good, but i like zoho better.
If google buys them, i’m sure there won’t be sluggish issues.
I use Zoho Planner daily. It is a great way for me to set To Do List items and have my assistant complete them. I will definitely consider using Zoho over any other office-type product (docs, spreadsheets, presentations, etc…)
I can’t say enough about how good their products are for me.
Carl:
I agree that Zoho Creator was slow. We moved it to our grid platform recently and it should be fast now. Can you give it a try and let us know what you think.
Ben:
There is a long way to go….and this is just a start.
Yeah I wonder why Zoho suite doesn’t get more buzz - it is clearly the best thing out there at the moment.
Also, I wonder why they haven’t added in the wiki to their main page yet.
Hi Raju,
Great work! Can’t wait to try it out.
Any ideas on why I am getting this error after creating my wiki at Zoho-Wiki?
http://amar_shah.wiki.zoho.com/Zoho-Wiki-Page.html
The requested URL was not found on this server.
1. You may have mis-typed the URL; it may also be dead, moved or renamed
2. Please try retyping the URL, go back to Zoho Wiki home page
Thanks,
The underscore in the sub domain ( amar_sha ) is the issue. Sorry for the inconvenience. If you give a user name without an underscore, it will work fine. We will look into this & fix this ASAP.
Amar:
Apologize for the issue. This is because of the underscore in your username/URL. This should be fixed by tomorrow. Underscore will be replaced by a ‘-’ in the URL. Can you please check back in a day.
I initially had some troubles with Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet, but they have been smooth ever since. I use Writer the most. I initially alternated between Writely and Zoho Writer because they were both good products. But once Writely became part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, I switched almost entirely to Zoho Writer and never looked back. I hated the interface of Google Docs - it was more like email than a word processor. If Zoho gets acquired, my fervent hope is that they don’t screw up the product like Google did with Writely. I still think Zoho can improve — the document management system, for instance, is annoying sometimes. I would like folders or improved tagging. But it’s the best thing out there, and it keeps getting better.
Raju:-
yea.. I agree.. It’s a long way to go..!!! but it would be great if we climb the ladders faster than others.
Ben:
We guarantee that pace and thats one of the advantages of Zoho. Just tell us what improvements you want and we will include them asap. I am raju at zoho dot com.
The reason Zoho does not get more praise, attention, and buzz because Zoho makes cheap ripoffs products.
It is the same reason people do not praise companies that make fake Nikes or fake Raybans or fake Kate Spade bags or fake Movado watches. Ripoffs are ripoffs and people know that. When you praise a rip off you hurt your own credibility.
Zoho is going to get themselves in trouble one day when they cross one too many lines. I think people sense that and they do not want to hitch a ride on that wagon.
I presume that “the entire Zoho suite of products is on the same overall architecture” is an assumption, one which I find hard to believe given that until recently they did not have single sign-on.
Pretty interesting comparisons with Google apps. Might be cool to poll the audience of who prefers what! I have a buddy who swears by the Planner capabilities for his personal and business tasks.
Overall, a nice suite that is easy to use and tightly integrated.
http://davidchao.typepad.com
Chris,
Really? What exactly did they rip off? I have not seen anyone implement a complete suite of tools like Zoho has. They may suck or be ugly or whatever, but you can’t call their tools a “ripoff” if they don’t have anyone to rip off. Are they stealing code? What do you mean? Please elaborate.
Mike, maybe I missed something but what has the American English accent have to do with developing Web or for that matter any software?
Ever since I downloaded Openoffice.org a few months back… online applications of this sort have lost their zeal. I don’t understand why people still need Office in this day and age… the combination of Mozilla.org applications with Suns make for a very productive day.
Jon
I can highly recommend JotSpot. The service is free and provides a really excellent hosted Wiki.
For an enterprise Wiki I’d choose Atlassian Confluence.
Kudos to Zoho…they’ve done a good job of integrating a wiki application into their product suite. However, if you’re trying to really build a collaborative community-based website, I’m not sure using Zoho is the best choice - do they really have the time to understand the needs of such diverse audiences across so many differnent types of applications? For my money, if a hosted wiki application is what you want more than anything else, I’d start with WetPaint.com or PBwiki. It’s what they do…and the only thing they do.
Lars, Jot is no longer available for new signups since the Google acquisition…
It is soooo slow. Dude, if you wanna sell it to gxxgle, you’d better host the website in U.S.A. You can use Amazon’s S3; but just don’t try to save cost by hosing it in Bangalore. Well, if indeed the site is hosted in U.S.A. there is only one thing to explain — that 75 coders are talented writing slow code to do simple things.
Bill
Zoho is hosted in USA only. Hosting in Banglore/India is a lot more expensive than in USA. Bandwidth & Hardware costs are very high in India and there no good data centers in here.
A wonderful product suite. I have switched to zoho from google apps.
Perhaps Google will re-write Jot-Spot, Writely, and Spreadsheets to become a truly cohesive platform? They re-wrote blogger, as a result it is supposedly going to be a much more robust, fast, and stable service (according to the Blogger developer blog)!
I totally don’t think this is integrated enough. It’s also pretty lame in converting PPTs (ZoHoShow).
Keep crankin, but as I point out on http://www.crunchback.com, ZoHoShow is a NoGo.
I just signed up and plan on doing a good comparison between this socialtext.com and jotspot hopefully (if it comes out soon!).
Zohowiki is a good beta start, but has a big problem with inserting HTML. If the HTML is script, and the script writes into the document (like badge scripts do) then it will eventually start saving the rendered HTML and lose the original script. The wiki page becomes uneditable after this happens.
I’ve an account at Jotspot, and what I see there now that it’s under Google’s banner is outstanding. It includes a modern powerful blogging interface (can include wiki content), calendaring, spreadsheets, file folders and picture galleries. I’m completely enamored with this service.
http://rickdog.jot.com/WikiHome/The%20Doghouse
I’ll send you an invite.
I don’t have an opinion on Zoho as a online office suite (beyond it’s quite slow…perhaps it’s the demo server) but the wiki breaks totally with the wiki philosophy: it should be simple and fast.
It’s ok to offer wysiwyg editing, even as default option, but there should be a way to edit pages in text plain with a wiki markup syntax.
I’ve checked the settings dialog and didn’t found how to edit pages like that.
I suggest integrating wiki with e-mail and obviously with the rest of the Zoho suite (something like creating a page with a special syntax and automagically it’s a Contact Record in the CRM product…and the other way, inserting a macro and you get the list of pending tasks from the Project Mgt tool)
Zoho is owned by AdventNet. Google might be smart to acquire this division of AdventNet and have a full office suite. I became familiar with AdventNet actually through their other products - such as OpManager (a network monitoring utility) and ServiceDesk (a help desk and inventorying software). Their prices are much more reasonable than many comparable products and offer significantly full feature-sets (though I wonder if development on these products is suffering because of their race to complete Zoho features).
David:
AdventNet product development will not be effected by Zoho products as there are dedicated teams working for AdventNet products. Infact, the pace of AdventNet is faster than Zoho with atleast one new product release a month.
Zoho just has 80 people working on the apps while AdventNet has 400+ developers working on 60+ products.
Amar : The underscore in the domain name issue has been fixed, the underscore being replaced with hyphen. Try accessing your Zoho Wiki at http://amar-shah.wiki.zoho.com.
Julián : Thanks for your inputs. We currently have the WYSIWYG option alone. Zoho Wiki has some of the very useful Wiki specific functionalities intact - like CamelCase words getting converted to wiki links automatically. We will add ‘Wiki markup syntax as an option’ to our roadmap and we do have plans to integrate the Zoho services more closely together.
why would google want to acquire zohowiki when it has jot?