Web-based productivity suite Zoho has continued to integrate its products with Google in order to make it easier to use Gmail and Zoho apps simultaneously. Last summer, Zoho, a web-based software suite that includes document, project and invoicing management tools, integrated Google and Yahoo sign-ins, allowing users to sign into Zoho using a Google or Yahoo account. And over the summer, Zoho is launched sign-in integration with Google Apps, letting users login to Zoho using their Google Apps credentials. Today, Zoho’s project collaboration product, Zoho Projects, will become an extended application to Google Apps.
Zoho Projects is a team collaboration and project management application that allows teams to plan, track and collaborate on everyday activities and big projects with external customers. With the new integration, Google Apps users can login to Zoho Projects using their Google Apps sign-in info. Users can then upload their documents from Google Docs to Zoho Projects directly. Any tasks, meetings or activities in Zoho Project will automatically bee updated in Google Calendar. And Zoho Projects gadgets can be embedded within Gmail, iGoogle and any other OpenSocial compatible sites.
Web-based productivity suite Zoho is launching a brand new product today called Zoho Discussions. Zoho lets any business, individual or organization create public or private support forums where employees or customers can share comments around a particular discussion topic. We have a special offer for TechCrunch readers; the first 25 readers (who are paid Zoho users) to email techcrunch@zohodiscussions.com will be able to use the product for free for up to 6 months.
I had the opportunity to test out Zoho Discussions and it’s both remarkably easy for anyone to set up and filled with useful features. With the new product you can create a platform for discussion forums, similar to Google Groups. The differentiating factor is that your forums can be customized and branded to adopt the look and feel of your site. Zoho even lets you pick out a domain name that coincides with your site. Plus, Zoho Discussions can be integrated with many of Zoho’s other productivity applications.
Last summer, Zoho, a web-based software suite that includes document, project and invoicing management tools, integrated Google and Yahoo sign-ins, allowing users to sign into Zoho using a Google or Yahoo account. Today, Zoho is launching sign-in integration with Google Apps, letting users login to Zoho using their Google Apps credentials.
When Zoho users try to login to Zoho, they’ll be given a ‘Google Apps’ option in the sign-in box. Users can input their Google Apps domain name, and will be redirected to Google to sign-in using their Google Apps credentials. They will be given the option of authorizing “accounts.zoho.com” and will then be logged in to Zoho directly.
Zoho Suite, a web-based software suite comprised of document, project and invoicing management tools, has rolled out another plug-in that allows integration with a Microsoft product. A few weeks ago Zoho launched an add-on that allows Zoho Office to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint. Today, Zoho will now provide access to Microsoft Access, a database management system for the desktop.
Zoho Creator is web-based cloud computing platform that lets you build and run applications online. With the new plugin, Zoho will allow users to easily migrate data from Microsoft Access to Zoho Creator and Zoho Reports. Zoho says that when you migrate entire databases from Microsoft Access to Zoho creator, you are able to retain your database structure and data while being able to still create a collaborative database app in Zoho. Once imported into Zoho Creator, the entire application or parts of it can be shared with several users.
Zoho Suite, a web-based software suite comprised of document, project and invoicing management tools, has launched an add-on that allows Zoho Office to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint.
Zoho users can now create new documents and save them to SharePoint in MS Office formats, view existing documents within SharePoint using Zoho apps, and edit existing documents with Zoho Apps and save them back to SharePoint. The new add-on also provides collaborative editing functionality in Zoho with the integration with SharePoint. Zoho says the add-on costs $2/user/month on an yearly subscription or $3/user/month for monthly subscription.
Zoho, the creators of a web-based software suite made up of document, project and invoicing management tools, has launched the availability of its comprehensive webtop productivity products on mobile devices.
Zoho previously had basic mobile support for its applications on iPhone and some limited capability on Windows Mobile but now fully integrates Zoho Applications with several mobile devices. Zoho Mail, Calendar, Writer, Sheet, Show & Creator are now available for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, WindowsMobile and Symbian devices.
Zoho, makers of an awesome web-based software suite comprised of document, project and invoicing management tools, has given its online word processing tool Writer a fresh look along with a couple of new features worth checking out. The Chennai, India-based startup says Zoho Writer 2.0 comes with hundreds of improvements, for the most part on the user interface.
But the makeover isn’t the whole story. Zoho is also introducing a couple of enhancements and new features worth highlighting. The menu toolbar, for example, has been completely redesigned and renamed to reflect these changes. Now called the ‘MenuTab’, it categorizes the features as tabs based on functionality and mimics the familiarity of traditional office software by opening a drop-down menu upon clicking.
Google says the vast majority of the 1 million businesses that use Google Apps opt for the free advertising supported version. To make the free option less attractive they’ve been quietly lowering the number of user accounts that can be associated with a free account. Now as businesses grow, they’ll be forced to move to the paid version much more quickly than before.
Google Apps is a suite of online applications like gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, etc. that are packaged and tailored for business use. It’s growing fast – in a recent post where Google announced the opening of a reseller program, the company said that more than 1 million businesses and 10 million users use Google Apps today, and 3,000 new businesses sign up daily. The largest business user, Genentech, has 20,000 employees on Google Apps.
When Google Apps first launched in August 2006 it was free and described as “a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.”
At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this – previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies – this list is all mine.
This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.
The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.
I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer.
You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID.
By joining the OpenID movement, Google completes the trifecta and adds all of its Gmail users to the hundreds of millions of Yahoo and Windows Live accounts that can also be used as a single login for any Website that accepts OpenID. While Google is more than happy to become an issuer of OpenIDs, what is not so clear is whether it will accept other OpenIDs for people who want to sign up for Google services.
Zoho continues to carve a niche for itself among the giants in the software-as-a-service market. The three-year old online application suite, which started off as a basic online version of Word, has grown to 1.2 million registered users and 500,000 unique monthly logins.
The competes head on with Google in the office productivity space, with 18 applications and 4 “utilities” (Zoho Polls, Zoho Viewer, etc.). And now it will compete with Salesforce’s AppExchange, albeit on a small scale, with a marketplace for third party applications. Developers can now create applications on Zoho Creator and give or sell them to all those users.
Zoho on Thursday announced the availability of Zoho Docs, which will help Zoho users manage their documents centrally so they won’t need to skip from Writer, Sheet, and Show to get work done.
Zoho Docs is a bit overdue, but it’s good to see the company finally moving towards improving an offering that’s still a bit all over the place.
Zoho is pulling together its three main Webtop productivity products (Zoho Write, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show) into a central destination: Zoho Share. Just as Microsoft bundles its corresponding desktop products into its Office suite, bundling makes sense on the Web as well. Zoho already does this with Zoho Apps, as does Google which has long bundled its Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation apps into Google Docs. With Zoho Share, Zoho does take things a step forward, though, by adding social elements and a friendlier user interface.
As with Google Docs, you can share your Zoho docs privately or publicly. And any public Zoho App is automatically posted to Zoho Share. You can also upload documents and PDFs directly to Zoho Share. But the site also includes tabs for finding the most popular public content and people.
Any public document can be rated, bookmarked, emailed, or embedded as a widget elsewhere. You can find related documents by the same author, and any author’s documents can be delivered as a feed. If you don’t know an author, you can add them as a friend, and chat functionality is built in. In this way, Zoho Share is trying to create a more social experience around sharing documents.
Businesses can use Zoho Share to share documents only in private groups, and individuals can use it as a dashboard to manage all of their own Zoho documents, spreadsheets, and presentations (as well as keep tabs on their friends’ documents).
Office productivity suite Zoho removed the need to create an account to use their services today – you can now log in to any of their products using a Google or Yahoo account. Sign in is completed via Yahoo’s and Google’s authentication APIs.
I asked Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna why they don’t just adopt OpenID to handle authentications instead. He says they will, soon, but also want to integrate directly with the most requested third parties to address users immediate needs (and it is still a pain to log in with OpenID). Vegesna also says they may integrate directly with other third parties, such as Microsoft and Facebook, in the future as well based on user requests.
The goal, Vegesnu says, is to get users to try Zoho with as little hassle as possible: “One thing we noticed is, when users try both Zoho and Google, more than 70% of them prefer Zoho. It made sense for us to do this. We want more users to try our apps.”
This certainly accomplishes that. In a matter of a couple of clicks, new users can get in to Zoho and start creating and editing documents. My guess is this works out well for them.
Zoho keeps pushing the limits of what online productivity apps can do, It was the first to use Google Gears to create an offline version of Zoho Writer last year, for instance. And now it is adding macros and pivot tables to its online spreadsheet, Zoho Sheet. (Once again, it is way ahead of Google, which indicated last December it would not add those advanced features any time this year).
The addition of macros and pivot tables should go far in making Zoho’s online spreadsheet a more realistic alternative for power business users. Macros are customized code, written in Visual Basic, that adds features and functionality to a spreadsheet (like highlighting an item above a certain dollar-limit in an expense report, for instance). Pivot tables are complex tables inside a spreadsheet that makes it easier to analyze data. Anyone can create a macro for Zoho Sheets and contribute it to this wiki that Zoho set up. (So users can potentially get the benefit of everyone else’s macros). And since it is understands Visual Basic (and converts it on the backend to Java before executing the code), existing macros for Excel will also work inside Zoho Sheet. Out of the gate, Zoho only supports about half of all spreadsheet functions in its macros, and does not yet support exporting of macros, but in time it will.
This is an obvious move for Zoho, which has created a suite of online office applications: Chinese versions of their products. The Office piracy rate in China is 90+% according to Microsoft, and that market will be even more willing to use online versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. than the U.S. and European markets have been.
The applications are being delivered via a partnership with Baihui, which hosts the Zoho sites. For now, they are launching Writer, Sheet, Show and CRM, with more applications coming soon.
Since the software is being run independently by Baihui, users will not be able to share documents with normal Zoho users. However, Zoho itself supports 11 different languages (English, Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, Danish, Russian, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish), so they also compete directly with this new distribution partner.
The only non-free application being launched in China now is CRM. The price is 99 RMB/user/month, which is about $14. That’s actually more expensive than the $12/user/month that Zoho charges in the U.S.
Zoho says that 50% of their usage today is already outside of the U.S., but their site is very slow inside of China due to the firewall. This partnership gets them onto the other side.
There’s seemingly no end to the number of collaboration tools out there: blogs, wikis, forums, bookmarking, photos, chat. Chances are you already use one or more of them already to keep in touch with friends or coworkers. The only problem is that all these platforms don’t work together very well.
Grou.ps is trying to fix that integration problem. They’ve created a service that lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one Grou.ps domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups – each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, more listed in the image below). Each module adds a new tab to your navigation bar where users can access the module’s features. Here’s an example group for Chemists worldwide.
While today marks their Beta launch in the US, the company already has over 150K members and 10K groups internationally (Chile and Turkey are most popular). Grou.ps is backed by Golden Horn Ventures.
Grou.ps isn’t the only startup trying to solve the integration problem. Ning and Wetpaint have integrated forums and various forms of media into their community products. Google and Zoho also have have very compelling collaboration suites. A single sign-on can get you chat, email, presentations, documents, wikis, and many other tools.
However, Grou.ps benefits from being simple like Ning and Wetpaint, yet focused on productivity like Google and Zoho. They present a simple free solution for moderated online collaboration.
Google’s Web-based word processor, Google Docs, can now be used offline to view and edit documents in your browser. That means you no longer need to be connected to the Internet to write a letter or draft an agreement. When you connect again, all your changes are updated. Google Docs now joins Google Reader as a Web app that can work offline. Spreadsheets and Presentations are coming up next.
This offline capability has been a long time coming. Google Docs is finally taking advantage of Google Gears, a browser plugin for creating all sorts of offline apps which launched nearly a year ago. Using Google Gears, Zoho came out with an offline version of its Web-based word processor last August.
Is it me, or is innovation at Google slowing down?
Zoho continues to launch a new product every month or two. Next up is a way for businesses to send electronic invoices. It joins a suite of sixteen other business-focused applications, including a full “Office” suite (online clones for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.). Most of their applications are free or significantly less expensive than competitors.
Other applications include web conferencing, and most recently a portal to manage human resources—recruiting, org charts, HR forms, etc.
This is certainly not the first online invoicing tool. But the value in Zoho is, increasingly, the fact that they have so many services under the same brand/sign on. The invoices product will be free for users who send up to five invoices per month. Paid packages range up to $35/month.
A quick way to understand which Zoho applications are free and which have a fee – the productivity applications listed on the left hand column are free, the business applications on the right will have a fee.
Bungee Labs has raised $8 million Series C in a round that included Wasatch Venture Fund and existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners and Venrock Associates.
Orem, Utah based Bungee Labs offers Bungee Connect, a web-based Ajax environment for creating interactive web applications. Bungee Connect allows developers to “efficiently create and instantly deliver rich web applications for the small-to-medium business market” by providing an online environment where developers and clients don’t have to install anything. Bungee Connect also automates SOAP and REST based web services. See our February 2008 review of Bungee Connect here.
Google’s Web-based word processor, Google Docs, 
Bungee Labs
