Exclusive: Zoho Notebook Sneak Peek

I was just testing out their CRM application a minute ago. Thanks for the heads up on this new release.

At first glance, it looks a lot like a web 2.0 version of Microsoft’s Onenote desktop application. It’s about time! I currently use Tiddlywiki as my “digital notebook” but have always had a hard time swallowing the unfriendly user interface of tiddlywikis.

zoho is full of crap. People use it for fun, that is where it ends. Show me on good enterprise apps. All are open-source material.

Two things:

1. This isn’t an exclusive, Richard MacManus has a preview too starring the very same Raju Vegesna.

2. It’s peek, not peak! Grr! Unless you’re implying the appearance of a stealthy mountaintop, which I daresay you are not.

I think that this will considerable overlaps with Zoho Wiki. I am looking forward to check out the browser integration though.

Look at Microsoft OneNote in a “web” mirror and you get Zoho notebook !

They seem to have too much time on their hands…

I’d want to know if they have any companies beyond 5 employees signed up. This all looks cool, nice & exciting, but how does it work in real corporate environment?

Most companies just buy Confluence and put documents there… All this Web Office is crap, come on, we got poweful computers sitting on our desks, with Office/OpenOffice/StarOffice… Why bet on some unknown startup that can go bust in a month. It’s all overhyped geek-play…

The problem that I have had with Zoho in that past (and still seems to be an issue) is the speed of their applications. I wish they would take a break from the new product development side and work on speeding up what they have in place. All apps I have tried are PAINFULLY slow…

I have never used Zoho software but seems to me that there are some issues with speed etc. Saying that after looking at the screencast of their software on YouTube it clearly shows a heck of a lot of tools.

I’m amazed by their resources in terms of developers, project managers etc.

Does look like a solid product with lots of feature but can somebody tell me how are they making money. Free apps are nice but there will never be mass adoption by personal users. Where are they getting the money from.

I used Zoho from machine that didn’t have things like PowerPoint, Word Processor etc, and I am very happy that its out there. This Zoho Notebook look very promising and I welcome a competition to Microsoft OneNote or whatever the hell out there available for us to use for this type of use. I just don’t understand why all the negative feedback….

The interface is simply amazing and tool looks great too. It is just release time and I am sure it will find its place in schools and Universities, if not in large organisation. Great job guys. Atleast somebody is thinking simple and easy.

wow. i’m finally impressed by zoho.

Michael Vu - Zoho CRM is just repackaged vTiger which is an old fork of SugarCRM. It is definately NOT AJAX.

If you want a true Ajax CRM, take a look at what we are doing (shameless plug coming - http://www.bigcontacts.com

I use Zoho sheet and Zoho word both are great products and know with the intergration with omni drive makes gives me online collabration so the possibilities are endless it seems we complain when a company does not roll out features or produtcs fast enough and here we have a company doing just that rolling out features and products all I can say is I’am loving it

Matthew Barker, Raj Anand,
Yes, we acknowledge that speed has been an issue. We have a major hardware upgrade coming in end of February; second, we have been working hard tuning the code based on the experience we have gathered. ZohoCRM is one of the first services to be upgraded and others will follow.

Paul Freet, no Zoho CRM is not repackaged vtiger. They are on completely different code base (Zoho CRM, like other Zoho apps, is written in Java while vtiger is PHP, and that is just the beginning). Zoho CRM is getting more AJAXified, as we learn from users what they like.

Anshul, Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects are out of beta and have subscription plans, on top of the free plans, with a fair number of paying business users. Other Zoho services are still evolving rapidly, and aren’t out of beta yet. We will have some paid plans on those too, but there will always be a free plan. Look at the parent company AdventNet, which has been in business 10 years, to see how we do business combining free & paid editions of products. Longer term, business models for the online application space are still evolving. There are other ideas (other than subscriptions and advertising, that is) and the whole area has to mature a lot more before any of these are proven in practice.

Thanks for your comments & feedback.

Sridhar Vembu

Well thats great to hear Sridhar. Here is wishing you best of luck with your venture.

- Raj and Kwiqq.com Team

Michael/Nick,

Where are all the public disclosures? Zoho being an prolific advertiser on this site, your readers deserve to be informed that your profiles on Zoho products come with potential — if not actual — conflicts of interests. Isn’t this exactly what you have been addressing the traditional media journalists at the ONA dinner for?

John S

Zoho is okay, but I just started using gubb.net. It’s a much simpler, more fun app and even though it is fairly new, helps me keep track of my life without any of the unnecessary bells + whistles these other sites have.

Sam B

Zoho is nothing to write home about… They’re releasing way too fast, and their apps look like that.

Zoho is superior to all the online office apps in every way. It makes Google Office look like notepad.

Still a long way to go till it comes close to matching the functionality of a desktop-based office suite, but it is the definite online office suite.

>> apps I have tried are PAINFULLY slow…

this is why the web-application/office software movement is so full of it.

Given my previous post about ZohoShow (http://johntreadway.typepad.com/crunchback/2006/12/crunchback_zoho.html) and the horrendous job it did importing even fairly simple PPTs, I’d recommend that they focus on fixing what they’ve already released before putting out a tool with limited utility for most people.

http://www.crunchback.com

lemon obrien,
There is no fundamental reason these applications are slow. All these problems are all solvable - with fine tuning of code, more servers, better understanding of usage patterns and so on. Similar problems occurred for the earlier generation of web sites too (remember the Christmas effect for e-commerce companies?) Those sites are now really fast.

Give it some time - this whole thing is evolving rapidly, and as the applications mature, they will be much more fun to use.

Jorge,
Thanks for the kind words. Yes, there is a long way to go in terms of breadth and depth of functionality & integration across these services. We are working hard on these problems.

Anyone here is using office 2007? Seems microsoft is putting more efforts to the kind of “network” function of their products, in this case, if microsoft doing the same thing as zoho, who will be the winner?

@Sridhar Vembu

>>There is no fundamental reason these applications are slow
except for time and distance. my labtop has the processing power of a server, and no distance, or very little, is needed for Word to read the data from disk…you even admitted it in your response to me:

>> All these problems are all solvable -
>> with fine tuning of code,

I’m an engineer by trade and create awesome state of the art distributed system to handle mass loads…don’t bullshit me with the ‘fine tuning’ argument. I betcha your system isn’t even written in ‘C’ and you’re not at the socket level parsing that HTTP message….and you wanna talk about speed and fine tuning. Lets just say, If you can’t hit the problem straight on with the idea of speed as your first concern, you don’t have a chance.

>>more servers,
yeah, I see you have lots of experience scaling. You could’ve at least mentioned breaking up the database of using some super fast network storage system in the backend…but if your first answer is throwing ‘big iron’ at it, then your toast for any audience of significance.

>>better understanding of usage patterns and so on.
This is like fine tuning…guess work. You can’t be guessing when your customers are complaining. Everything should be as fast as possible. It should matter what order I press then buttons in for it to be fast.

>>Give it some time
why? I have office today, 2003 and 2007…what you got?

so…did you guys write your own servers in ‘C’ ? do you have anyone on your team who even knows ‘C’ cause if you can’t engineer at that level and think AJAX will save you; well, good luck.

but but…its two point ohhh

I too wish ZOHO would work hard on improving what they’ve already got. There are so many small problems and simple features that need to be added.

To cite one example: there is still no search function for ZOHO writer. This is incredible!

That said, it is still the best online app, but google docs is now fast catching up, especially as they’ve just added seamless GMAIL opening of word docs through GDocs. Although I can’t imagine google docs ever building a Word interface, since they (google) want to keep you off the desktop and in the web. But again, although the word plug-in is very good, it too has some very annoying bugs that I’ve written about in the ZOHO forum.

I’m mainly referring to ZOHO writer.

The branding is all over the place on this one - Play blocks with a Battlestar Galactica-esque typeface?? What are they thinking?

Rob > I think that keeping branding in check is always going to be a problem with a company like Zoho who has an aggregate workforce of 100s of developers all working in smaller product teams that seem to be largely doing whatever the hell they want in terms of UI.

I get what Zoho are trying to achieve, and it’s very noble, but it’s extremely apparent that the development (or at least, design) process within Zoho is fragmented at best and chaotic at worst.

I think once Zoho hires a UI guru and takes some responsibility for the quality of work that their teams are churning out, they will be a force to be reckoned with.

How simple that is to do within their current hierarchy of this network of outsourced developers remains to be seen.

lemon,
Sorry, I didn’t know that we didn’t know how to code. Next time, we will approach you for some C programming lessons.

johnlknight,
Your point on improving existing services is well taken. I apologize for the occasional frustrations you have had. We won’t have a service up and let it gather dust (we will withdraw it if we weren’t committed to it). We put out an update about once every month on each Zoho service.
We are working on improving each of the Zoho services, and Writer is particularly important, being the first of the office productivity suite we put out. Given how much is expected from a word processor (or spreadsheet or presentation or …) it just takes time.

yongfook,
I grant that UI consistency is important, and Zoho still has to get this right. But part of what we are learning is what kind of UI works best in such online applications, through experimentation. Same way, Zoho services could evolve by being made features of other services, or features could be separated out as stand-alone services, based on the experience we are gathering. People have commented, for example, on the broad similarity of goals between Wiki and Notebook on the one hand, and Wiki and Writer on the other.

By the way, we don’t “outsource” development - the parent company AdventNet was one of the earliest software product companies based out of India - our R&D started in 1996.

Nick,

Your comment…
>>A good analogy to Zoho Notebook is Microsoft OneNote, a desktop >>application. But with sharing and versioning

…is not true.

OneNote has sharing and versioning capabilities.

Also it is tightly married into the entire office suite. So I can push pages via email, pull calendar events into OneNote for quick meeting notes, has handwriting recognition…

I recently saw an Enterprise Wiki. It is called Etouch Samepage. Absolutely fantastic. Do evaluate this , if any one is going for a Wiki Solution

Well the fact is many of the people who commented here are racist american programmers who are envious to see zoho bringing out one good apps after another.

Go Zoho Go!! Beat the crap out of them

@ShowBiz

I like how you throw out the race card when you can’t come up with any logical way to defend against sucking bad.

oh yeah, I’m not envious, and never will be. I think its totally stupid to rewrite/remake the wheel. Microsoft won, Open Office tried, Google is trying, your trying. The world don’t care. Its done, that war is over. M$ won it in 98, probably before that. It just programmers tooling with themselves showing their AJAX skills. Its called a circlejerk.

So what are you guys gonna create a scripting language like visual basic so I can program my online spreadsheet?

Sridhar Vembu > hmmm I’d be careful of making your users pay (literally and figuratively) whilst you “experiment” on them. Call me cynical but I think experimenting is another way of saying “hrm, we dunno”.

This isn’t an attack - I think you have a solid platform to create something awesome, you just really need to pull your finger out and become more enthusiastic and passionate about your UI.

Right now it’s clear from the multitude of applications you have that your focus is on quantity. I don’t know, perhaps I’m being presumptuous and I’m sure you’ve probably thought about this a lot more than I have, but as a bystander, I personally think whatever marginal utility the alpha-adopters gain from you creating yet another addition to the Zoho suite is a small price to pay for you cooling down and giving the whole setup a big kick up the backside in the UI and UE area which will benefit all your users directly.

If nothing else it’s good to see someone from ZOHO taking comments seriously. Aside from, incidentally GDocs (i..e the writely team) who do engage with their users in the Google Group, its rare to find such open engagement from the big boys.

How shortsighted some people can be. Altjhough ‘A’ maye have won (or more accurately be in the lead), some people obviiously can’t acknowledge how more innovative smaller players stimulate the ‘leaders’ to innovate (kind of) themselves and improve (kind of) their product. Anyone around here use that loser of a browser called Firefox.

@johnlknight

I don’t see how going backwards is innovative.

oh yeah and firefox sucks; but you haven’t heard cause you don’t dev.

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.......441922.37

So I guess MS is not developing an online suite, and that IE7 (what a great browser that is…really rocks!) didn’t, by any chance, copy Firefox features. It’s about relative viewpoints.

You’re right I don’t ‘dev’, but I do use….alot!

@lemon you are nothing more than a pompous stupid ass who cannot see beyond his own nose (because your head is up your ass).

Understand one thing … the world is not usa and usa is not the world.

With broadband connectivity becoming more pervasive over the coming years and its level of penetration increasing more and more in all countries online software suites will have a very important role to play.

Zoho has a good start and it has done a fantastic job in bringing the apps online. Yes google has tried and so has microsoft but from a features pov Zoho beats the crap outta them.

As for using the correct programming language it depends on what you are programming. If the world goes your way then probably it will be still trying to program using web apps with Cobol and the farthest we might have reached with a browser would be same as lynx.

But anyway I am guessing your skillsets ends with C or probably Cobol and being a dinosaur you are probably also unemployed or at the least feeling very very insecure because of the hundreds and thousands of asian engineers who can do much better than you. So my dear friend the only advise I can give you is to see things in the correct context and try to learn something that you obviously dont understand.

I find myself in the odd position of defending one of our competitors, but Lemon, how do you see what Zoho is offering as going backwards?

The whole Web 2.0 world is predicated on yes to some extent copying what functionality users have on the desktop. We have to do that otherwise people won’t use the darn thing. But, putting it online opens some pretty great opportunities for collaboration and integration with other web services, not to mention ubiquitous access.

Ok, so Microsoft is winning right now, but how did they take over from IBM? By building similar functionality to what people already had, but changing the platform. That is what us Web 2.0 companies are doing now. I am not saying that any of us are going to overtake MS Office any time soon.

But, as Sridhar says give it some time. It is still very early in the game, although with all the hype surrounding Web 2.0 it seems like it has been around forever. Web 2.0 has a lot of potential but the hype pushes expectations way out there. Given the time, however, I think we can meet those expectations.

I for one am very interested in seeing what Zoho Notebooks can do.

yongfook,
Yes your criticism is accepted. We have to do a far better job on the consistency, and I am beating this drum inside. Our current highest priorities are performance (the demand became a little too hot, which also played a role) and UI consistency, in that order.

Jonathan,
Thank you for coming to our aid - I really appreciate it. Yes, it is sometimes hard to realize that this whole thing is so new - I came across an article dated November 2005, speculating about online productivity applications, and it didn’t mention any of us (though ThinkFree was already there, Zoho barely existed & Google hadn’t made any acquisition yet) and that is when it occurred to me that almost all the evolution in this space happened just in the past year, yet it feels such a long time. As usually happens, expectations get ahead of reality and we do need a reality check once in a while. We need the skeptics to keep us honest, so I try not to take it too personally …

Wow, there is a lot of latent racism here. I’m amazed - there simply would not be this many negative comments if it had been some valley hipster giving this presentation. Imagine that! A bunch of Indians rapidly pushing the envelope for web-based office applications.

To that guy who posted about sockets and stuff - get a clue, loser. So you’ve read W. Richard Stevens. That doesn’t make you an engineer. There is far more engineering in some of the things that Zoho has done than in fiddling with socket code. The work involved in this Zoho stuff is pretty impressive, I have to admit, and I’m a real engineer. You are just some dweeb. So get a clue, please. Even if Zoho crashes and burns and nobody uses it - the work they’ve done deserves respect.

Fact is, Zoho is the best online office application, period. It’s never going to fully replace a full installation of office. But it is incredibly useful if you can’t edit your documents on your own machine or if you need to do something quickly.

And Zoho - if you can hear me. I do have one suggestion. The UI specialist you need. Please get one. And try to use better fonts/typefaces for your products and marketing material. Lots of engineers is good, but it really shows in your presentation.

Example: that freeware Star-Trek font you are using. I think it comes with the GIMP. It really kills your demo.

ZohoDefender:

We are listening and you’ll see the progress in the coming weeks and months. Thanks for the feedback.

It’ll be interesting to see what the writely team is upto in google. they have a fantastic set of libraries built to do this online productivity stuff.

It does look like a good solid product with plenty of feature but how can they make money? everyone knows that free applications are a “must” but there will never be mass adoption by personal users, so earning money it’ll be allways a issue.

I am following zoho with interest and no prejudice but I loaded a ppt presentation in show and it literally mangled it, all the graphical elements all over the place, absolutely not fixable by hand. When I am travelling to give a presentation I need total reliability if I am to leave my laptop home. So I think Zoho show was delivered too early, at least that was a show stopper for me. I also think, and this is more opinion and less factual, that Zoho is undergoing product inflation, like Google. Was it really necessary to have three separate applications for texts, notes and wiki? If one can import all sort of things in a document and can network them together and can tag individual bits and bites, isn’t it possible to have convergence of these three applications? It would make things a lot easier.