Web-based productivity suite Zoho is launching a new product today, Zoho Recruit. A niche product, Zoho Recruit, is an application designed to help HR Departments and staffing agencies management recruitment.

Zoho Recruit, which is an offshoot of Zoho People’s recruitment technology, is an Applicant Tracking System that helps staffing agencies and recruiting departments track job openings, resumes, candidates and contacts. The application will source candidates by gathering resumes from multiple sources on the web and includes a technology that will weed out the candidates.

The application will include a database that manages resumes and track potential candidates throughout the interviewing process. You can also schedule interviews, send automatic e-mail notifications and log candidate activities and notes.

Zoho Recruit will also power a platform to create and publish job openings. The app includes an activity stream to let users stay on tops of new within Zoho Recruit and is fully customizable. Zoho Recruit is based on a freemium model, with the more feature-rich platform priced at $12/per user/per month.

Zoho continues to innovate and iterate by launching new products and add-ons to its existing offerings. Most recently, the startup launched Zoho Discussions, a online forum tool for businesses. Over the past two years, Zohos has added support for Sharepoint, mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing. Zoho knows that it will have to fight an uphill battle to keep users from flocking to Google Apps and soon Microsoft’s Web-based version of Microsoft 2010. Although Zoho ’s the underdog, the startup’s strategy may be paying off—the startup has reached 2 million users in just 4 years. And the startup is on Microsoft’s radar, with a Microsoft exec calling of Zoho as a competitor that offered “fake Office capabilities.”

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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.

The integration comes on the heels of the initial roll out of Google’s own all-in-one, futuristic collaboration tool, Google Wave. But despite facing competition from the big guns like Microsoft and Google, Zoho continues to remain as a player in the document management space thanks to continuous innovations and iterations to its products. It’s almost reminiscent of Salesforce.com’s strategy.

In fact, because of this highly competitive landscape, integrations are vital to the software’s success as an application suite. Recently, Zoho launched integration with Microsoft Sharepoint as well as with Microsoft Access. Zoho’s project management application, Zoho Projects 2.0, also added the capability to import existing projects from MS Project, Microsoft’s project management desktop software. And Zoho also launched a forum tool, called Zoho Discussions. It looks like the startup’s strategy is paying off—Zoho has been able to accumulate 2 million users in just 4 years.

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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.

Similar to any forum, Zoho Discussion lets users create threads based on a particular topic. In terms of features, Zoho has focused in creating plenty of social tools to make the discussions more interactive and engaging. For example, users can vote on comments within a forum, indicating whether they “Like” a particular comment or forum. Aside from posting in the forums, users can interact in real-time through the built-in chat feature. Within the forum, users can create a profile, follow other users, bookmark particular threads and send private messages to administrators and users.

On the administrator side, you can make announcements, make particular threads more “sticky,” assign different users as moderators, remove inappropriate content and more. Plus, users and moderators can embed images and most types of files into threads as well. Like all of Zoho’s products, Zoho Discussion has a freemium model, with additional features like more storage, number of forums, number of moderators priced at $25 and $75 per month.

Zoho’s Evangelist, Raju Vegesna, told me that Zoho Discussions is designed to fulfill two kinds of purposes. The first is to serve as way for businesses to host a discussion forum to communicate with customers. The second purpose of the product is to be an internal platform for discussion within a business, in which case the product will be private.

This product seems to be representative of Zoho’s strategy to continue to innovate and iterate by launching new products and add-ons to its existing offerings. It’s almost reminiscent of Salesforce.com’s strategy. Over the past two years, Zohos has added support for Sharepoint, mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing. Perhaps Zoho knows that it will have to fight a battle to keep users from flocking to Google Apps and soon Microsoft’s Web-based version of Microsoft 2010. But Zoho’s strategy may be sound—the startup has reached 2 million users in just 4 years.

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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.

Google Apps is actually a serious competitor to Zoho, so the integration isn’t surprising. But Zoho says that many of its business applications, including Zoho CRM, Invoice, Meeting, and others, actually complement Google Apps and makes the transition between the two product suites seamless.

Despite facing competition from Microsoft and Google, Zoho continues to remain as a player in the document management space thanks to continuous innovations in its product. In fact, because of this competitive atmosphere that’s chock full of big-name companies, integrations are vital to the software’s success as an application suite. Recently, Zoho launched integration with Microsoft Sharepoint as well as with Microsoft Access. Zoho’s project management application, Zoho Projects 2.0, also added the capability to import existing projects from MS Project, Microsoft’s project management desktop software.

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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 continues to add innovations to its document management suite and includes easy access thanks to support for mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing across different app features. Last week, Zoho’s project management application, Zoho Projects 2.0, added the capability to import existing projects from MS Project, Microsoft’s project management desktop software. Zoho faces stiff competition from web-based applications offered by companies with a vast reach (Google, Adobe, etc.) which is why integrations with a big player like Microsoft are integral to the software’s success as an application suite.

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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 says that the seamless integration between Zoho and SharePoint will help businesses who want the best of both worlds: the ability to collaborate on documents on the web while still keeping data behind the firewall. If you have SharePoint installed in your intranet behind your corporate firewall, your documents in Zoho are saved back to your SharePoint server behind your corporate firewall leaving no data on Zoho Servers.

As we’ve written in the past, Zoho is an innovative document management tool, and includes easy access thanks to support for mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing across different app features. Zoho knows that it is going to have to fight an uphill battle to keep users from flocking to the web-based applications offered by companies with a vast reach (Google, Adobe, etc.) which is why these sort of integrations are helpful to the software’s success as an application suite.

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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.

As we’ve written in the past, Zoho is an innovative document management tool, and includes easy access thanks to support for Google and Yahoo IDs and the group sharing across different apps feature. While Zoho has added useful features to its software suite, Zoho is going to have to fight an uphill battle to keep consumers from going towards web-based applications offered by companies with a vast reach (Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.).

Here’s a slideshow on Zoho’s mobile integration:

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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. This should make users who are making the switch from the well-known desktop word-processing software programs feel right at home, unless of course they’ve grown accustomed to Office 2007’s ‘ribbon’ menus by now (which I have, by the way).

The sidebar in Writer has also been changed to look more like the sidebar in Zoho Sheet. It now includes search functionality (very welcome), multi-selection of documents and support for performing several actions in one go. There were several other enhancements to the application in Header/Footers with support for auto-insertion of fields, Collaborative Editing, inclusion of Word and Character count in status bar, and so on, but maybe it’s best if you just give it a spin yourself. After all, it’s free.

Also worth noting is the fact that the changes will be reflected to all applications using Zoho Writer, including internal applications and third-party ones making use of the Zoho Writer API.

Update: here’s a screenshot tour (best watched in fullscreen)

I like Zoho a lot, especially because of their offline capabilities, easy access thanks to support for Google and Yahoo IDs and the group sharing across different apps feature. That said, some people will simply stick to desktop software for office tasks no matter what, and Zoho is going to have to fight an uphill battle to keep the rest of users from flocking to the web-based applications offered by companies with a vast reach (Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.).

Or maybe Zoho will keep on surprising everyone.

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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.”

Free for everyone lasted until February 2007, when Google announced a premier edition of the service with more storage and an uptime guarantee. The cost was (and is) $50 per user per year.

When Google Apps first launched up to 200 user accounts could be created for each business under the free version. But that limit was quietly reduced to just 100 user accounts. And then when the reseller program was announced earlier this month, the limit was cut in half again, to just 50 accounts.

Google also changed the sign up page for Google Apps. The page used to show (screenshot) a comparison between the free and premium versions. Now it only shows the premium version and offers a free trial. To see the comparison chart you have to click the link “compare to standard edition” to see the free and premium versions compared.

The goal is clear – to get more premium accounts that pay $50/user/year. Income growth has slowed considerably at Google and the company is looking for more ways to ramp revenue, particularly newer revenue streams, and control costs. And it’s more than fine that Google experiments with pricing on these products. But they have to remember that they’re not just competing with Microsoft and its expensive exchange server product; they also have cheaper competitors like Zoho and Yahoo’s Zimbra to deal with as well. They may not have as much pricing flexibility as they think.

Update: Dave Girouard, Google’s President of Enterprise, emails to say that before the recent change to limit free accounts to 50 users, admins could request additional users without upgrading. The recent limitation was set to encourage reseller enthusiasm. He also says Google has no plans to further decrease the limit:

I run the enterprise/apps division at Google – we met a couple of years ago at the Apps launch. I read your story this AM on Techcrunch. Just a bit of clarification and explanation for our change. Until just now, we actually had no caps whatsoever on # of users on Apps Standard (ie free version). The 100 and 200 user “limits” you saw were actually just the defaults that showed up there – admins could request any additional number they wanted.

As to the question of our motivation, the reality is a little more subtle. If it weren’t for the reseller program, I can say for sure that we wouldn’t have put the cap on the free edition. The reality pre-reseller is that the vast majority of larger businesses opt for the paid version for all the reasons you can guess (support, api access, ldap synch, etc). So the mere imposition of the cap has a trivial direct impact on our revs. However, with the new channel program designed to attract a big ecosystem of resellers, it’s hard to convince them that this isn’t really an issue – eg that they shouldn’t worry about competing with a free product. Indirectly, we think the cap will help us grow revenues more quickly, because it makes it easier to attract high-quality partners.

We started 2 years ago with the belief that we needed a huge installled base first . . . and that subscription monetization would happen mostly in companies of larger than 25-50 employees. And also that we had a very viable ad-supported product for very small businesses, who tend to think more like consumers (free is good). We designed our approach to get a massive user base, and then to get increased monetization as more bigger companies adopt. This isn’t the same as saying that we want to get companies started on “free” and get them to pay later – that’s a relatively small effect in my view. Both user growth and revenue is in fact accelerating. Maturity of the product accounts for that, though we still have a ways to go.

There’s no reason to believe that the cap will continue to “move down” – we have no plans whatsoever to do that.

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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.

I’ve removed six products from last year’s list: Amazon Music, Amie Street, Firefox, Flickr, Netvibes, Technorati.

I still use the products I’ve removed, just not as much as in previous years. I find I’m just using Netvibes and Technorati less this year (Netvibes because Google Reader is so excellent, Technorati has fallen in favor of Google Blog Search mostly because it’s too slow and has too many internal links). I tend to upload photos to Facebook now because of the people tagging feature and since it flows well with the rest of my news feed (I use Posterous for mobile uploads); Flickr is becoming less important for me. I have moved most of my music consumption to MySpace Music, and download DRM-free MP3s from iTunes when I want to buy. Amie Street is still a great place to discover new music though, and I think their business model, which is variable pricing for music based on its popularity, is sound. Firefox is off the list as I experiment with Chrome, but I haven’t made a decision one way or the other. When Chrome launches for the Mac, I’m likely to switch.

As in past years, there are a gaggle of other great products that I use regularly but didn’t add to the list in order to keep it manageable. I also haven’t added individual iPhone apps that I use daily, even though they are nearly as important to productivity and fun as the products that did make the list. Next year I expect more than a few will be added.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

800-Free-411

800-Free-411 first made the list in 2007 and it isn’t leaving any time soon. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. The company has taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too.

Animoto

Animoto, which joins the list for the first time this year, does one thing, and well: it creates slide shows from photos. Unlike all the other services on the list, I don’t use it daily. But their new iPhone application put it over the edge this year. I really like this service.

Delicious

Social bookmarking site Delicious has been on the list for three of the four years (I took a brief detour in 2007 to a competing service called Blue Dot, then switched back). Delicious 2.0 is finally stable and the Firefox add-on is the reason I keep using it. Also, they long ago switched away from the annoying del.icio.us domain name, so I don’t have to look up where the dots go every time I visit the site.

Digg

Digg has been on the list the last three years. The site remains a fun place to hang out when I have some spare time to review the news, and Digg is one of our top ten sources of traffic. Hacker News is another Digg-like news site that focuses on tech that I visit daily as well.

Facebook

I visit Facebook daily to keep up with what my 5,000 closest friends are up to. I’m not a big fan of most of the applications that have launched on Facebook, but I do use it for photos and events. Unlike last year, though, I also now use MySpace as well regularly to reach people. These are the two social networks you have to be on to keep in touch with everyone.

Friendfeed

Friendfeed, a microblogging and activity aggregating service, only officially launched in February 2008. I use the service daily, although I’m not nearly as addicted as some bloggers are to the service. But like Twitter, Friendfeed is a good place to find breaking news on a variety of topics, and it’s become a must have service.

Gmail

I’ve never been a fan of the way Gmail groups message threads, and things like tagging of messages could be improved, but the service is far and away superior to any other web mail service in terms of features (Yahoo Mail has the best user interface in my opinion). I continue to rely on Gmail as my main personal email provider. Once Gears is integrated for offline use, I may stop accessing it via IMAP.

Google Reader

Three years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Then I tried NetNewsWire for a while. But Google Reader, which first launched in October 2005 as a seriously flawed product, continues to evolve and is by far the best feed reader on the market today.

Hulu

Hulu isn’t about work, it’s about watching TV and films after the work is done. I openly mocked the service for nearly a year as they fumbled around, but now here it is, on a list of sites I visit constantly. I spend more time watching Hulu than I do normal cable television.

iPhone 3G

The first gadget I’ve included over the years – the iPhone 3G, which was announced on June 9, 2008, is simply the best device I’ve ever used. Sure, it doesn’t have a physical keyboard. But I can actually browse the web with this thing, and that more than makes up for a slower typing speed. This is a beautiful thing.

MySpace Music

MySpace Music is just a couple of months old and is still very buggy, but it changed the way users think about music on a big scale. MySpace combined its millions of band/artist pages with legal and free streaming music from the labels and creating a very compelling music product. Services like LaLa have a better user experience, but they still charge for streaming. Free is the future of music.

Pandora

Pandora, an Internet radio service that creates stations based on music you like, was on the list the first two years. I still listen to it all the time, and their new iPhone application put it over the top again to get on this year’s list. Pandora was one of the first startups we covered on TechCrunch, and they recently passed 20 million registered users.

Scribd & Docstoc

We use both Docstoc and Scribd here at TechCrunch regularly. Both services let you upload office type documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, etc.) and then embed them on other sites. When there’s a lawsuit complaint or interesting PDF, we add it to one of the services and embed it in our post.

Skype

Skype Skype has been on my list every year and I expect it will stay there. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have – I’d give up email before I gave up Skype.

TechMeme

TechMeme is another four-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I’m amazed that founder Gabe Rivera hasn’t accepted any of the many buyout offers I’ve heard he’s been floated. In December 2008 TechMeme gave up on fully automated news, which I believe changes the site for the worse.

TripIt

If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt, which returns to the list this year. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device.

Twitter

Last year a lot of people still hadn’t heard about microblogging service Twitter. Now, Britney is on it and the company is turning down half-billion dollar buyout offers. I mostly access Twitter through a desktop client called Twhirl, and I check it multiple times per day.

Wordpress

We continue to use Wordpress open source software to power all of our blogs, and it has been on the list all four years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend – without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

Yammer

Yammer, a spin off of a startup called Geni, is a newcomer this year. They launched at TechCrunch50 in the Fall and took the top prize. The service acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it here at TechCrunch.

YouTube

YouTube has been on the list the last three years. I continue to burn time watching random videos on the site, and we use it to upload our own videos as well. Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em.

Zoho

Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, continues to replace Microsoft Office for most of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. The feature list is still light compared to the heavy, expensive Microsoft version, but its free and I can collaborate with others on documents. This is the future of office productivity.

Update: I’m seeing other bloggers put together their own lists. Let me know in the comments if you do one and I’ll link to it. Here’s one by Tony Bain. More: Guilmain, NewsCred, Honkin (Chinese blogger), Ghost Hack Beauty, Mario Bruggemann

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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.

Google appears to be an OpenID “provider,” not a “relying party.” In other words, you cannot sign into Google with your Yahoo account. But this still helps the OpenID movement as a whole because it gives smaller sites more incentive to join as “relying parties.” Among the first sites to accept Gmail accounts for sign in are Zoho and Plaxo.

AOL and MySpace are expected to jump aboard as OpenID providers as well. The only big holdout appears to be Facebook, which has its own competing Facebook Connect program. But even Facebook might eventually join the OpenID fold. (Its partners seem slightly less than enthusiastic about deploying Facebook Connect).

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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.

The new Marketplace is here and launches officially today after a press leak two weeks ago. The company says that over 100,000 applications have already been built on its Creator platform, most of which are available to all users. Those applications are not being moved over the the Marketplace automatically, but developers will not have the option to do so, and either charge for the apps or give them away for free. Zoho is giving 100% of the fees to developers. There’s also an area of Marketplace that lets users request new apps and features, and developers can choose to respond and create what’s requested.

Zoho continues to forge a path among these much larger competitors, but it clearly isn’t shy about pitching for business. General Electric announced that they’d be using Zoho over Google at the recent Office 2.0 conference. The company has 400,000 desktops, adding to the already large pool of regular users.

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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.

According to Zoho, its new Docs application will allow users to upload any file type they wish with a ZIP upload process. The new software will also give users the ability to view documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in a tab within the application via view mode. If they want to edit the document, they can open it with a particular Zoho app in a separate window.

Taking a page out of the Google Docs playbook, Zoho Docs now also offers group sharing, which, as you might expect, will let specific groups have access to, and edit, documents. And while working in Zoho Docs, the company has added a chat function, which will let you correspond with people in those groups as you work.

The new and improved Zoho Docs seems like a logical next step for the company. Finally, Zoho will offer many of the functions already found in Google Docs and won’t frustrate its users by requiring them to move back and forth between applications without a central location to work out from.

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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).

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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.

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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.

Here is a video explaining the new features:

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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.

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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.

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.

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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?

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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.

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Bungee Labs

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.

Bungee Connect competes with DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks.

Total funding to date was not available, with the previous rounds having been raised in August 2005 and November 2006.

(via PEHub)

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Zoho People is a Web-based enterprise app for managing human resources—recruiting, org charts, HR forms, an employee self-service portal. Here are some screenshots and an online demo.

Zoho People is targeted at small businesses with 50 or more employees—companies that cannot afford PeopleSoft, but cannot manage their business on Excel spreadsheets anymore. More directly, Zoho is going after WorkDay (started by PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield), Salesforce.com, and smaller online HR apps such as Vemo’s. To get businesses to try it, the software will be free for the beta period. The pricing is yet to be determined, but will probably be in the range of $50/month for HR administrators and $4/month for other employees. It will also be available as part of Zoho’s suite of enterprise apps under blended pricing. Maybe Salesforce should just buy Zoho. Oh yeah, it already tried that.

Zoho People from Raju Vegesna on Vimeo.

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Google is bringing offline apps to mobile phones – and this has nothing to do with Android.

Google Gears, which allows developers to create apps that run on Firefox and Internet Explorer when offline, is supposed to launch later today under the name Google Gears for mobile. (Information for developers is already available here). It will support only Pocket IE running on Windows Mobile devices to start (Windows Mobile 5 and 6), but will expand to other mobile browsers eventually. (Presumably, that includes Safari on the iPhone and Opera Mobile).

At launch, several partners, including Zoho and Buxfer, will introduce mobile apps that can run on Pocket IE even when not connected to the network. Zoho Writer (which first went offline with Google Gears in August) will now be available for Windows Mobile 6, and it will have an offline capability as well thanks to Google Gears. (Here is a video demo). The offline mobile version is a read-only version. Zoho Writer already has a mobile online version for the iPhone, and was the first word processor to go offline with the desktop version of Google Gears.

Google itself has yet to offer a Google Gears version of Google Docs. But we understand that it’s coming soon, as are offline desktop versions of Gmail and Google Calendar.

This announcement also means that it’s game time for Adobe and Microsoft. They either need to come out with mobile versions of AIR and Silverlight or risk being left in the dust. Update: That was fast. Silverlight countermoves with a mobile version for Nokia phones.

Update: Google Mobile post here, Google Gears API post here. And here’s a video:

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Today, Zoho released an update to Zoho Writer that includes:

Docx Suppor—the ability to export documents in the new docx Word file format (this is in addition to existing support for doc, txt, html, pdf, odf, sxw, rtf files).

Thesaurus—a thesaurus in ten languages (English, Czech, German, Greek, French, Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Slovak).

Groups—Now you can save emails forgroups instead of re-entering each one every time you want to share a document.

Enhanced support for Endnotes/Footnotes, Headers/Footers—Formatting is now maintained when a document is exported, as are manual page breaks.

Zoho still has along way to go to catch up to Microsoft Word, and it trails Google Docs in usage, but it is making steady progress.

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Bungee Connect , which leaves private beta today, competes with all of these. But the company, based in Utah, thinks they have the advanced features to attract a much different audience than most of those startups. They’re targeting hard core developers, not non-developers who want a way to create simple software programs to solve problems at the office.

Bungee Connect is a single online environment for developers to write, test, deploy and host applications. Like Force.com, it is a platform-as-a-service. The service is free until end users actually start using the products built and deployed on the service.

Dana Gardner wrote an excellent overview of the service a year ago when Bungee Connect was first introduced.

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