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At The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog, Jeremy Caplan has some good questions for Sridhar. Excerpts from the interview ‘Q&A: Upstart Takes on Google, Microsoft in the Cloud‘:

Both Google and Microsoft have committed significant resources to building Web-based software. How can you compete?
The primary advantage Google and Microsoft have is their size and reach, which is a formidable advantage. Google’s product suite is limited to Mail & Office suite, while Zoho has a much broader product suite
targeted at small and mid-sized businesses. We integrate well with everyone, including with Google Apps.

Microsoft has formidable technology resources, but faces the economic challenge of transitioning their business model to the cloud, without sacrificing revenue in the process. In the small and mid-sized market,
there is room for multiple players, as companies like Intuit and Adobe have demonstrated even as they have faced repeated challenges from Microsoft.

How will cloud software differ three years from now?
Over the next three years, you will see cloud offerings really mature in terms of features and functions, and become feature rich, overtaking desktop offerings in many areas. As feature parity is reached, market adoption will explode. Just as mobile phones overtook wired phones in terms of features, functions and of course usage over the past 10 years, cloud software will overtake installed software over the next 10. The reason in both cases is the sheer speed of technology evolution.

Thanks to Jeremy and The WSJ.

At Zoho, we have several applications that need/have calendaring functionality. Some of these apps include Zoho Mail, CRM, Projects, Planner, Meeting etc. To consolidate all calendars, we launched Zoho Calendar in beta last year. The goal for this separate application was two fold. One, it has to be one of the best calendar applications in the market and Two, it has to integrate/replace other calendars apps within the Zoho suite.

Today, Zoho Calendar is stepping out of beta and we believe it is mature enough to be considered one of the best Calendaring apps in the market. Zoho Calendar’s latest update comes with an extensive set of features for business use. 

Let’s look at some of these new features.

Multiple Calendars

Users can manage multiple calendars in Zoho Calendar. Events created for each calendar are color coded. Apart from multiple personal calendars, you can also subscribe to external calendars, again color coded.

Calendar Sharing

You can now privately share your Calendars with other members with a Zoho account. There are several options for sharing your calendar. There are two options for sharing your calendar in read-only mode and two options for read-write mode. In Read-only mode, you can share your calendar with other users where they can just view only Free/Busy times while the second option provides all your event details with others.

We also offer two options in Read-Write mode. One option lets other users edit your existing events while the second option lets other users create/edit events on your calendar. This option basically gives complete control of your calendar to another user. This will be useful when you have your assistant managing the calendar for you.

To share your Calendar, go to Settings > My Calendars  and choose the ‘Share’ option. You just need to provide the email address of the person you want to share your calendar with.

Subscribing to Calendars

There are couple of options to import events to Zoho Calendar. One option is to import all your events in a single shot using ‘Import by file’ or ‘Import by URL’. The second option is to subscribe to an external Calendar. Importing is a one time event while subscription updates your calendar regularly. In this version, we now added both options. 

We also have options to subscribe to external and internal calendars. By Internal Calendar, we mean, calendars from other Zoho Applications. You can now subscribe to Zoho Projects & Zoho CRM Calendars. To do this, go to Settings > Subscribe to and select the Calendars you want to subscribe to. In case of Zoho Projects, if you are part of multiple projects, you can even subscribe to a specific project.

You can subscribe to any external calendar, in ICAL format, by providing the URL. This updates your events couple of times a day.

You can also subscribe to your Friend’s public calendars using their email address. We also have built-in calendars for holidays which you can subscribe to. We plan to expand this built-in calendar list as we move forward.

Subscriptions are not just one way coming into Zoho Calendar. You can also take your calendar events outside Zoho by enabling private address for your calendars (under My Calendars > Share) and subscribe to your Zoho Calendar in other external Calendar clients like iPhone.

Embedding Zoho Calendar

Want to embed your calendar on your blog? No problem. Option to embed your calendar in external sites is a new feature in this update. Obviously, your calendar has to be public to do this. We have ten different templates to choose from and you can also customize the options for the embed. 

To choose the templates for embedding your calendar, go to Settings > My Calendars > Details option. 

Natural Language Processing

It is important for a Calendaring app to make the input easy. So we added NLP support. In the ‘Smart Add’ section of Zoho Calendar, you can type in something like ‘Meeting with customer on Friday at 3pm’, Zoho Calendar will create the event for you on Fri at 3PM.

Agenda View

If you want to look at all your events in a grid view instead of a Calendar view, we now have that option. You’ll notice a new ‘Agenda’ tab on the top where we (Read more...)

In Part 1 of this series of blog posts, we talked about visual customization and branding features of Zoho Discussions. However, branding does not stop with visual customization alone. Most businesses collect user data (email, name, demographic info etc) and use it to provide better support, introduce features, conduct campaigns and also to offer a member area.

End users expect to use their profile information right in all areas of the website – including user communities. Most online community services encourage their customers to transit to “Open ID” (or Google, Yahoo, FB, Twitter based) authentication. This approach definitely has its merits since the end user has to manage one less profile and password. But, this approach presents 2 problems:

1. Businesses need to change their existing model and develop and deploy code updates to their existing system
2. Existing users (most businesses already have an registration requiring forum / community) will have to forget their current profile and migrate over.

These drawbacks have been a driving force for most businesses to fall back to deployable open source solutions as opposed to online-hosted solutions.

But it need not be this way! It is possible to implement single sign on a hosted community solution, thus liberating yourself from maintenance and scalability issues, without giving up on the flexibility and ease of use.

Zoho Discussions has always supported enterprise techniques like LDAP sync, SAML based authentication. We have recently added a highly simplified, yet secure, REST API based Single Sign On technique. Coupled with visual customization options, SSO integration provides a unified “one-brand” experience for your end users. This allows your end users to seamlessly navigate between your website and your community (hosted by Zoho Discussions) and use any login scheme that you currently have or choose to upgrade to.

And the best part is, implementing this technique for your community can be done without any significant programming (Learn more). You can roll out this feature – including code changes and testing in a matter of days.

And before you ask, yes we do offer migration of your existing forum content from sources like phpBB, Google Groups mail archives, EML, CSV and more. Contact us for more details.

Sign up to Zoho Discussions today and get an interactive customer support community, sans the headache of customizing and maintaining one.

Today, we are announcing a feature that will be very useful for both our academic and business users alike – Zoho Challenge now has support for comprehension questions. In Zoho Challenge, a comprehension question is one that first presents a paragraph, a passage, a graph/image or maybe a combination of them, and then makes a series of follow-questions about that introduction. Typically, these questions measure how good the test-taker is at comprehending what is being discussed in the introductory part, how well he can extrapolate based on information presented, or, for example, his abilities to analyze and arrive to conclusions based on some information being presented.

So now you can get that psychometric test for your [potential] employees or you can you include graphic interpretation questions – that test a candidate’s ability to answer questions that involve more comprehension or broader skills than normal, single questions. Here is a video that illustrates the workflow. You can also refer to the online help documents

Some users in the academic space have been using form-generators to solve the online testing/quick problem, but that’s not the best way to go around it. And with Zoho Challenge’s Free plan, it has never been so easy to get started! Comprehension questions now make the experience even better. Several passionate educators have been in touch with us via email or blog posts and have been offering incredible feedback – and we will be releasing another round of community-driven features shortly.

What better way to experience this feature than to take a test? Below is a comprehension passage based test that is embedded right into this blog.

‘Information is Wealth’ is a saying that we all know of. But the truth is unorganized information is not of much help. For information to be useful and more effective, it becomes all the more important that it is properly organized and made easily searchable. Wikis are increasingly being used for information gathering and storage. And they are being used as a collaboration medium by individual users and also by organizations.

We are happy to announce the release of Zoho Wiki 2.0, whose focus now is on better organization of information (effective content sharing) and building group collaboration. By introducing multiple groups sharing and team workspaces, we have made collaboration much easier and effective.

So, What’s New in Zoho Wiki 2.0?

• Workspaces
  Organizations can create independent, fully customizable workspaces exclusively for their departments, teams, branches, etc. Workspaces promote sharing and collaboration within the team and also with other groups. They can function as separate wikis, complete with own administrative controls, security setup and full customization option. For eg., An IT Company can have team spaces for different projects, for HR, for marketing, for sales, etc. Within a school wiki,  teachers can create individual workspaces for each class.

• Enterprise Level Wiki Permissions
  Wikis can have multiple group permissions for better access controls and thereby ensure fine grained security. A project wiki can be assigned to a particular team and can be shared with other team members and also with clients across the globe. You can clearly define as to who has edit permissions and who has view permissions.

• Zoho Business Support
  Organizations that have bought Zoho Business can now seamlessly integrate Zoho Wiki for better content sharing and collaboration between their employees. Each Zoho Business account gets a free Zoho Wiki with 3 workspaces and 3 users.

• Improved Wiki Home Page
  Your wiki home page is better organized now. Your wikis are classified as organizational, your own and those you are subscribed to. And you can mark your favorite wikis, workspaces and individual wiki pages too.

• Enhancements in File Cabinet
  From within Zoho Wiki itself,  you can now create new documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Also, you can upload documents stored in Google Docs.

The embedded Zoho Show slide show below brings out the salient points in Zoho Wiki 2.0.

Pricing and Availability
Zoho Wiki has now moved to a user-based licensing model. Our free version comes with a single wiki with 3 workspaces and 3 users. Each additional user costs $8 per month and each additional wiki costs $5 per month. Existing Zoho Wiki users will not be affected by the new pricing structure. Our pricing plans are here.

Zoho Wiki 2.0 is available now at http://wiki.zoho.com. Try out our new version and let us know the feedback.

When Google launched its G Apps Marketplace, Zoho was one of the chosen few launch partners. We presented our integration of Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects with Google using GData API and were chosen to be one of the featured applications in the newly launched marketplace. Pleased by the response that we got from the G Apps users, we decided to take it further and integrate some of our other business applications with Google.

Today, we have two new applications integrated with Google Apps – Zoho Invoice & Zoho Creator Helpdesk.

Zoho Invoice
Zoho Invoice is a full featured online invoicing application. Earlier this year, we revamped the app with a new look and great set of new features. All these features, including the option to send invoices through postal mail, are now available to Google Apps users.

Zoho Invoice is now available in Google Apps Marketplace under Accounts & Finance category. Once Zoho Invoice is added to Google Apps, you can provide access to select users from your Google Apps account. Zoho Invoice also has the ability to import contacts from Google Contacts allowing you to send invoices/estimates to your Google Apps contacts. An Open Social gadget for Zoho Invoice is also available to be contextually included in apps like Gmail, iGoogle & Google Sites.

Zoho Creator Helpdesk
Zoho Creator Helpdesk is a Helpdesk and Customer Support Software fully integrated with Google Apps. Zoho Creator Helpdesk is a fully featured, web-based help desk software that lets Google App users to manage all their support requests coming in from email, support website or web forms

Here are some of the key highlights of the app.

• Trouble Ticket Management
  Your customers can create trouble tickets via web form or through an e-mail. Zoho Creator Helpdesk automates request routing, defines your SLA compliance, enables SLA escalations and gives a consolidated report view of what’s happening with your help desk.
• Asset Management
  Zoho Creator Helpdesk has an integrated Asset Management solution along with the help desk functions. With the integrated Asset Management, Zoho Creator Helpdesk provides you with an accurate inventory of all the hardware, software assets in your organization
• Knowledge Base
  A web-based searchable knowledge base system helps in reducing the turn around time for the request resolution. The Knowledge Base acts as a knowledge sharing medium, increases support productivity and assists in effective knowledge management.
• Reporting
  Zoho Creator Helpdesk provides extensive reports on Priority, Status, Technician and Deadline of Support requests
• Fully Customizable – Path breaking and First time ever
  Zoho Creator Helpdesk is probably the first Helpdesk software that lets you customize Helpdesk forms, fields, reports and look and feel to suit specific needs of your organization. You don’t have to write any code or hire a tech-guy, you can customize it all by yourself using easy to use drag-and-drop interface

You can

• Create  UNLIMITED number of Forms to collect information
• Add UNLIMITED number of Fields (Eg: Name, Email, Phone Number…..)
• Rearrange the order of the fields and rename with ease
• Create Reports – View your data as a List, Calendar, Summary or as a Chart
• Change the look and feel of your Helpdesk app. Choose from different sets of layout and the color themes

Pricing & Availability
Both Zoho Invoice & Zoho Creator Helpdesk are priced affordably. You can create up to 5 invoices for free per month in Zoho Invoice. Paid plans start at $8/month. Additional information is available here.

Zoho Creator Helpdesk is available for free for up to 2 technicians. The pricing for 3 technicians starts at $15/month. For yearly and half-yearly subscriptions, discounts are available. Additional details are available here.

You can get started by installing our apps from Google Apps Marketplace.

ps: We would like to thank the Google team for their continued cooperation and support.

I ran across this press release that reminded me of the days, that I thought were in the distant past, when software vendors sold what we referred to as “back up the truck software” because it was so hefty it needed to be forklifted in. Take a look at these offerings and see if you are as confused as I was with the tech speak mumbo jumbo and the ability to take something so simple and make it so complex.

Assess and plan for Business Impact through defined goals and objectives in order to reach consensus among stakeholders, validate solution viability and facilitate successful adoption

What?!?

Create and leverage an effective Governance Service model that incorporates industry best practices and standards for information architecture, user experience, communication, and training

Huh?

Deploy cutting-edge Social Networking Services based upon defined goals and objectives, business impact and governance, architecture design, pilot programs and adoption roadmaps

Adoption roadmaps?!?

Migration Planning for legacy applications such as IBM® Lotus Notes® through business impact assessment, planning, and architectural design

Sounds painful!

Deploy an Enterprise Search Application Architecture based upon business requirements, build a prototype for a pilot or real-world implementation, and leverage best practices for deploying Microsoft search technologies

Google for business?

Wow! I think in plain English the intent is to offer businesses the ability to utilize collaboration tools like Wikis, forums and shared business documents to help them be more productive.

Fortunately, you can get all these business optimizing tools from Zoho, including our newly launched Actionable Search app. Oh, and businesses can leave their forklifts at home because they don’t need to install it and leave their checkbooks in their pockets because there’s no services required and it’s all available for a nominal subscription fee.

Boy, haven’t heard techno babble like that in a long time! If you see anything like this out there please share it as this one gave me a good laugh.