Forrester Research advises CFOs to take a close look at cloud computing for messaging and collaboration and enterprise applications. The payoffs could be noticeable during the current economic downturn. Microsoft, Google, Cisco, IBM and a number of smaller players are ready to take your money for SAAS solutions.

For most users, however, free Web apps are really all you need. And they’re getting better all the time. Zoho has spreadsheet, word-processing, presentation and organizing programs, and lets you work both online and off; it even has an iPhone app.

Before you pay even the lowest price for Microsoft Office, give Zoho or Google Docs a try. They aren’t confusing, and they won’t make you feel stupid. To make absolutely sure, I became my own guinea pig. I typed this story in Zoho Writer, even though I had never even tried it until this week.

We have so much respect for the Zoho team here at Google. They produce great software, and they do it regularly! Their latest accomplishment has been getting their email product, Zoho Mail, working offline.

Zoho already has over a million users in total of its portfolio of on-demand applications, and cross-adoption as users add extra applications has helped the CRM product scale up to 100,000 users so far.
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Zoho is a platform. Although Zoho started out offering online Office applications, in particular its online word processor, spreadsheet and file sharing tools, its most pivotal application to date is Zoho Creator, an online database-driven application builder. Creator is the platform on which Zoho has created its own business applications and thus also acts as the tool with which users can tailor those applications to their own needs. Think of Creator as the glue that not only binds the Zoho suite together but also the source of stickiness that draws customers in. Vembu told me that 300,000 Zoho users have Creator accounts, which suggests that Zoho’s most avid users are building or modifying their own custom applications to then roll out to other users within an organization.

Awesome is not a word I use often but when I saw Zoho Marketplace, the sound of my jaw hitting the desk was audible in the next street. What better way to get its collection of services working as the hub for other services that might build from Zoho products?
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Zoho firmly positions itself as an SMB player so potentially has a huge global audience. Larger companies that develop solutions based around Zoho might choose to use the marketplace as a way of sharing what they have learned. If that happens then goodness gets spread around to much broader audiences.

When it comes to the online office app market, Zoho absolutely kills the competition in terms of its offerings. To me, the product that most outshines the competition is Zoho Creator. I love the forms in Google Docs, but Zoho Creator is far more robust.
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The Zoho Marketplace, which offers both free and paid apps (though I haven't been able to even find any pay apps), offers users the ability to take advantage of pre-written apps and integrate it into their workflow. Everything is hosted on Zoho, so you don't have to worry about compatibility or viruses.
Users can even request a specific application and get a response from the development community. If you want to sell or offer up your own Zoho apps in the Marketplace, listing is free.

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.
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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.

The application marketplace is becoming a critical cog in the software development ecosystem. Zoho is that latest to hop on the bandwagon.
Zoho on Tuesday launched Zoho Marketplace, an app store with software from its developers, which offer their wares for free or a fee. Zoho’s app store is deployed in its Creator software, which launched its 3.0 version today.
The company, which adds apps at a rapid clip as it tackles everything from CRM to productivity software to the enterprise market, said its Marketplace wares are specific to “a particular use case or situation.” In other words, Zoho’s Marketplace isn’t nearly as fun as Apple’s App Store, but arguably more business friendly.

Listen to Zoho company “evangelist” Raju Vegesna, and you start to understand the dynamic. The company, which started three years ago, recently announced it has 1 million users. He estimates 30 percent of them are students.

Zoho, which makes an online office suite of 18 apps including word processor, spreadsheet, e-mail, chat, CRM, and Web conferencing, plans a couple of upgrades in the next two weeks.

We all love the David and Goliath story. What about David vs two Goliaths? That is the improbable story of Zoho, the Web Office startup competing head on with both Microsoft and Google. On top of that, Zoho is from India and who ever heard of a product company from India? Indeed Zoho has only 10 people in America, yet it is winning really big enterprise accounts in head to head evaluations with both Goliaths. What's more, they have not taken a dime of external money - having bootstrapped it from the start.

The other year, when I first looked at Zoho, they were (to me) an upstart curiosity. Now they're a force to be taken seriously in the online apps space, thanks to leveraging open source in their work -- even while they face possible competition from, you guessed it, open source.

SRIDHAR VEMBU is a dangerous man. If he succeeds, a lot of people will lose a lot of money: software developers, consultants, shareholders and others. The chief executive of AdventNet does not have fraud in mind. Instead, he wants to remove what he calls the “value-pad” from corporate IT in general and business software in particular: all those millions of dollars he thinks are wasted on inefficient production structures, marketing and, not least, proprietary standards. “In the world of corporate IT”, he says, “the low-cost revolution is very much unfinished business.”

Zoho Invoice is highly flexible--so much so that you could spend 20 to 30 minutes or so to choose the options that suit your business. I particularly liked the selection of estimate and invoice templates designed for selling services or products, or to collect fixed price amounts, which are generally used for recurring bills. You may also design your own custom template, with sales tax rates you define. You can opt to skip most of the configuration steps until you create your first invoice. Zoho lets you select most invoicing options on the fly, as you create the bill. .....

Zoho continues to roll out its ever growing lineup of inexpensive (indeed, mostly free) online office software. Today’s addition is Zoho Docs, an application that allows you to access the text documents, spreadsheets and presentations created in Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show, respectively, through a single application.To be honest, my first thought on hearing the news was, “Holy crap, you couldn’t do that already?” So this is hardly an amazing breakthrough. It is an important move, though. First because, yes, it’s lame if you can’t access all of these documents in one 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.......With Zoho Share, Zoho does take things a step forward, though, by adding social elements and a friendlier user interface.

It’s not often I get excited by adoption numbers but the fact Zoho has passed the million user landmark represents an outstanding achievement and a cause for celebration.

Zoho, a software company started in 2005, has built applications that compete with Google and even Microsoft. The vendor believes it can stay in the game by having a quick development cycle that adds new features to their products faster than the big guys.

Zoho Sheet clearly has the best feature set -- at least for the moment -- and its integration of chat and publish functions shows why Web-based applications will be so important.
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Zoho Show's wide variety of templates and clip art makes it the most useful of the three apps, and its integration with Zoho Meeting gives you a new presentation tool you haven't had before.

Could Zoho be the primary personal productivity software for an enterprise? Possibly. If the organization we're talking about is a smallish, widely distributed group that needs to share information and collaborate, but doesn't want the expense of central collaboration services servers, then Zoho is perfect. It is good enough for many companies and can't be beat on its implementation of SaaS (software as a service) principles for the SMB market.

Zoho, maker of an online suite of collaborative and business productivity applications, has landed a six-month pilot partnership with Swisscom to deliver its products to the telecom's 300,000 business customers.
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Swisscom said in a statement that it chose Zoho because it provides a wide range of applications and has a solid engineering team.The Swisscom partnership follows Zoho's recent announcement that it had landed a distribution deal with the large Chinese online distributor Baihui

Zoho has enhanced its free online word processor with an equation editor for mathematics, export capability for the LaTeX document-preparation format used by mathematicians and scholars, and import capability for Google Docs.

Zoho, a unit of Pleasanton-based AdventNet Inc., says it added the features following requests from users, and noting that a significant portion of its users are students.

Zoho, which offers an online office productivity suite, said people with a Zoho account that uses a Google or Yahoo e-mail address would automatically be logged in to Zoho when they connect to the portal. People who don't associate their Google or Yahoo e-mail with their Zoho account can go to the site's services section and make the association.

Along with the new login feature, Zoho also made it possible to import Google or Yahoo contact lists to Zoho.

Online office suite Zoho rolled out yet more functionality this morning, allowing users to login using existing Google and Yahoo! accounts.

Zoho cites a recent Lifehacker poll with pushing it toward introducing these new features. The poll, simply titled "Google Apps or Zoho Suite?", found the majority of participants (42.5 percent) voting "Google, because I'm lazy and already had a Google account." Second place, at 21.2 percent was "Zoho, because I tried both and it's better."

One of the main complaints leveled at web-based alternatives to Microsoft Office is that they generally lack some of the more powerful features found in Office. While online office apps have the general use cases covered, they often lack the specialized tools. But Zoho is quickly changing that. The company recently announced an overhaul to Zoho Sheets with support for power user features like pivot tables and Visual Basic Scripting.

Zoho April 28 added support for Microsoft's Visual Basic Macros and Pivot Tables in Zoho Sheet, two of the 17 or so new features for its spreadsheet application. ... This means Sheet will let users import their existing speadsheets with Excel macros or create new ones, thanks to a new VBA Editor feature in Sheet.

Zoho doesn't get the amount of press that Google gets, but the Zoho suite of applications is quite good, and could easily be the only set of apps you need if (1) your requirements fall into those of the majority of business users and (2) you're pretty much always on line. ...

"... but in the end, Zoho's Head Coach pushes it into the Elite Eight in a decisive victory over Google"

Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition is designed to make it easier for medium to large organizations to implement Zoho CRM. Zoho is not shy about its goal: to steal away customers from Salesforce.com, which Zoho says it is doing successfully, with one or two customers leaving Salesforce.com for Zoho CRM daily

Zoho's strategy is fundamentally different to Salesforce.com. It has a 'we build it all' mentailty rather than the platform thinking that Salesforce. com espouses. This has meant that its 200+ developers are beavering away on different parts of the overall suite of applications rather than being focused on any particular module. This has allowed Zoho to come into the market with a steady stream offerings and not be dependent on partners to provide functionality.

Zoho has built an impressive set of cloud-based applications at a rapid pace. Following the enhancements to Zoho CRM, Zoho Sheet is slated to gain support for macros and pivot tables.

Zoho's brand-new Invoice service tries to solve some of that pain with an online system for creating, sending and tracking invoices.
After spending some time with it just now, I can see it being a decided improvement over my current spreadsheet and Word doc collection.

Zoho's invoicing app joins more than a dozen other Zoho productivity and business tools that are available for free or for low rates. Zoho's strategy seems to be to build critical mass early on, which is reminiscent of Google. And with its large set of online productivity tools, Zoho is also competing with Microsoft's set of collaborative tools.

As Google and Microsoft make lots of noise about online productivity software with Google Apps and Office Live, respectively, Zoho has quietly wowed legions of fans with its online word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications.

Zoho earned a reputation for innovation by adding online/offline functionality to some of its apps using Google Gears. That trick, in fact, makes Zoho “the most formidable competitor to Google’s own Google Apps suite,” according to PC World.

Zoho People, a freeware Web-based human-resources management tool, joins other free and fee-based offerings from Zoho, which compete with big-name applications such as Google Apps. Aimed at small and midsize businesses, Zoho's tools include CRM solutions and integrated word processing, presentation, meeting and project-management tools.

Zoho, the software-as-a-service productivity and collaboration alternative to Google Apps, has fashioned a human resource management application for SMBs that want to run their businesses online.

You may have heard of, but probably don't use, an online suite of office and productivity applications called Zoho. I know, I know – another Web 2.0 wonder application. ... Zoho is packed with so much innovation and surprising coolness, that I'm certain you'll find a better way to do at least some small thing you're already doing.

Zoho’s key demographic is small and medium businesses. The focus on this group is so great that Raju claims that Zoho’s ultimate goal is to “be the IT department for small and medium business.” Zoho’s products are designed for small and medium businesses, whereas Google’s are designed to be deployed by much larger entities. The different routes taken by the two companies could enable Zoho to triumph in their own demographic.

It's a brave company that tries to go head-to-head with Google, the Internet's most formidable presence. But that's where Zoho finds itself, as it battles for mind and market share for its online suite of office applications.

Zoho aims to provide the complete suite of online office and productivity applications for small to midsize businesses (SMBs). These apps are all designed to take advantage of the web with good collaborative features. You do not have to send emails with attachments to provide access to documents. You always see the latest version online and teams can make and see changes real time. Chat is integrated into all the apps so teams can discuss these changes.

One of the most impressive tools I have used on Zoho is the Notebook. It totally knocks Google Notebook on its butt. Zoho Notebook is the closest I've seen a web app replicate OneNote.

Zoho's been gussied up since I last looked at it for my InformationWeek article where Barbara Krasnoff and I compared and contrasted it with Google Docs. Among other things, they've added spellchecking in 43 different languages, the ability to export documents in Office 2007's OOXML format (if you use that), a pivot-table function for Zoho Sheet, a complete revamp for Zoho Show, and ways to create and execute macros.

SaaS alternatives to major applications, like Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Zoho, can squeeze into the browser on many mobile phones and small laptops.

The "big" Office workalikes, Google and Zoho, start with the basics: word processing, spread-sheets and presentations. Zoho has been far more ambitious in spinning out auxiliary applets and services that augment Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show, providing everything from data managers to web conferencing.

Zoho apps are also more fully featured and attractive than Google Docs ... You can save documents and spreadsheets in a number of formats beyond Office '03, including PDF and HTML. They can be posted in public folders on the Google or Zoho sites or easily published to your blog or website.

What would the office of the future be like? Perhaps something that can assist you to do your work where ever it may be? Now with Internet access everywhere, the conventional meaning of work by sitting only at office (or in one place) is changing. This major shift in lifestyle is helpfully being facilitated by a fresh approach in tools that enable one to get their job done anywhere.

Meet Zoho - The Office 2.0… or perhaps a cliched, but appropriate denotation - “The Office of tomorrow, today”.

“The best things in life are free” and so is Zoho. Zoho is an extremely mature, well-designed, and a fairly responsive product. Of course, it cannot replace Microsoft Office yet, but is certainly on the way to do so with growing offline support. For most people don’t really care about the bloated complexities that Microsoft Office has, Zoho will certainly fill in those gaps for free.

Zoho DB uses a spreadsheet-like interface for simple data manipulation and navigation, and allows drag-and-drop analysis and reporting, with SQL querying of a variety of database management systems. The initial release works with IBM’s DB2, Informix, Microsoft’s SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, Sybase and PostgreSQL, or any system that understands ANSI SQL.

Technology news has been abuzz lately with news of Web office applications launching from Google (www.google.com), Adobe (www.adobe.com), ThinkFree (www.thinkfree.com), and Zoho (www.zoho.com). Today’s Web office applications range from the lightweight Google Apps Professional Edition to fully featured Web office suites such as ThinkFree Premium and Zoho Business.

Jonathan Crow, director of marketing at ThinkFree, paints the current Web office suite market picture. “The adoption rate of Web office suites is opening up now as the huge giants are validating the space,” he says.

So you've spent a couple grand on a laptop. The next purchase you'll probably consider is the student version of Microsoft Office, at about $150. But if you have a fast Internet connection—and most colleges do—new Web-based Office-like suites let you do everything from your browser, usually free of charge.

The most fully developed of the three services I tried was Zoho (zoho.com), which offers Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet (a spreadsheet tool), and Zoho Show (its take on PowerPoint). I spent a few days in Zoho Writer and found it to be an excellent replacement for Word. Once you're finished with a document, you can save it not only in the Microsoft-compatible .doc format but also in other file formats, including Adobe Systems' .pdf. You can also perform other, more advanced tasks such as inserting tables and graphics. Storing documents online is a great hedge against a sudden crash, and it also makes them accessible from any browser on any PC.

“Cloud computing” is a new buzz word in the tech world. In essence it defines a type of software that exists on the web, instead of on your hard drive. This means that you can access your files wherever you are, so long as you have a web connection.

Zoho is a free online office suite in this mould. Simply register at the website (www.zoho.com) and create an account, then you can edit and access documents from anywhere. The word processor boasts ample fonts and formatting tools to make documents sparkle, and it can handle Microsoft Word documents sent from colleagues. The Zoho spreadsheet is equally adept, producing swish graphs for sales reports and presenting data cleanly. There is a selection of other tools for managing projects and hosting presentations, for example.

Forget learning Microsoft Access and Visual Basic: the newly-revamped Zoho Creator is an easy-to-use online database creation tool. Set up your database’s fields (like for an address book: Name, Address, City, State) and then build drag and drop custom entry forms with different input types like radio buttons, check boxes and dropdowns. Ambitious types can add custom logic to the application using the script builder, and the whole shebang can be added to your web site or blog (say, for a feedback form or survey).

Facebook users will have access to Zoho’s word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications – Writer, Sheet and Show – from within the Facebook interface.

The deal is the first time Facebook has offered its users access to productivity applications. Zoho has 12 other applications, such as Notebook (content collaboration) and Meeting (Web conferencing), that also could find their way into Facebook, according to Zoho officials.

Zoho went live with iZoho, which provides iPhone-optimized access to Zoho’s online office applications. iPhone users who visit www.izoho.com can view Zoho Writer documents, Zoho Sheet spreadsheets, and  Zoho Show presentations – and edit Zoho Writer documents – from the Safari browser.

Zoho anticipates that the iPhone – with its big screen, built in Wi-Fi, good usability, and full-fledged browser – will only improve the use of web applications on mobile devices.

Zoho meeting, an online service meant for sharing your desktop/conducting meetings online, is the latest collaboration tool tested by this author. After initiating an on-line conference via Zoho from your browser, you can invite others to join.

Unlike the existing desktop sharing programs, Zoho lets you share your desktop with multiple people with ease. One can find multiple uses of this innovative product. For instance, the service can be used to co-edit a document with colleagues from different locations. This product could also be used for product demonstration, customer support and the like.

Another notable feature of this service is the facility to embed a ‘meeting’ on your Blog for helping the visitors directly access it (of course, if it is live). A teacher could find several uses of this facility.

I had a chance for a one-on-one chat and demo with Raju Vegesna, Zoho's evangelist, while at Enterprise 2.0 this week; since I do face-to-face interviews with a paper notebook, however, it's taken me until the flight home from Boston to find time to transcribe my notes.

When Web surfers take notes, they really like to "take" them--an image from one site, a video clip from another, an entry from Wikipedia, and perhaps even a song or two. For that reason, the blogosphere is full of praise for a new program, Zoho Notebook, released in beta on May 22. In addition to inserting their own text, images, video, audio, spreadsheet data, and other bits of information into virtual notebook pages, users can simply cut and paste in clips from websites.

Zoho Office Suite was honored by PC World with a 100 Best Products of 2007 Award. The article is available now on PCWorld.com, and will also be featured in the July 2007 issue of PC World, which hits newsstands June 12.

For Zoho, the PC World award affirms an on-going commitment to give customers the best and broadest array of Web-based applications for collaborative business. From pioneering applications such as Zoho Notebook to cornerstones such as Zoho Writer and Zoho Spreadsheet, the company's success is based on devotion to its customers.

It's the classic David versus Goliath battle being played out in the 21st century. And it's no surprise that this battle is being fought on the Web. We are talking of the great race between Web behemoth Google and Zoho, the Chennai-based underdog, to launch a suite of online office applications.

However, Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet, the company behind Zoho services, doesn't see it as an all-out battle. ``That would imply that there can be only one winner, which I don't agree with. Business is not like sports in that respect. It is perfectly possible to have a profitable, growing business without `winning' the market in the sense of being number one,'' he told Business Line in an exclusive interview.

Even more exciting than Google's new offering is another online program called Zoho. Unlike Google Apps, Zoho has its own version of PowerPoint and can produce charts from spreadsheets; as of now. Zoho is additionally compatible with Microsoft Office and allows users to work in Office while offline and transfer work easily back and forth. Like Google, Zoho offers free and premium packages of its services.

What makes Zoho the winner is that it doesn't merely try to copy Microsoft Office functionality. It's Web-based, so you can collaborate with others on your documents, for example. But the functionality of even the base software beats Microsoft's offering in some areas; for creating HTML and graphics-heavy documents, for instance, it surpasses Word. This is the best and most comprehensive Web-based office suite you can find. Included are a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, and a database builder -- and plenty of other productivity applications are being added all the time.

Zoho is, like Google Apps, a Web-based productivity suite. The biggest difference between them will be obvious the first time you visit the Zoho home page. Unlike Apps and most other would-be Office killers, the Zoho suite has all of the applications you expect: a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation package, e-mail, and a calendar. There are also Zoho modules for databases and managing projects. And there are even tools with no counterpart in Microsoft Office, such as one for building wikis.

Zoho Notebook is an "online spiral notebook," letting users create pages that could include any sort of digital content, from text, audio, video or images. In addition, the system integrates with all of the other Zoho applications, so users can do their word processing within the notebook page framework.

Zoho, which sells Web applications, and Omnidrive, a Web storage platform vendor, have announced a technology partnership that provides users of the Omnidrive platform the ability to view, edit, share and publish office and other types of documents from directly within Omnidrive using Zoho products.

Zoho Writer features a hideable list of documents divided into sections for private, shared, and public documents, plus templates. Like Google Docs and ThinkFree, Zoho Writer can publish items directly to a blog and can save and import a range of text document formats, from Microsoft Word to HTML. With a plug-in for Microsoft Word, you can save from that application directly to your Zoho account.

Zoho Sheet’s clear icon-based controls, snappy response, intuitive keyboard navigation, graphs, and sharing options (which let you decide who can read particular worksheets in a document) make this an excellent tool for collaboration.

Zoho … has been making some advances in one of the most crucial areas for Web-based software, and that is the ability to synchronize online documents and offline documents. This week, the company launched several plugins for Microsoft Office products that effectively allow users to save their desktop files in folders on Zoho’s servers, where they can be retrieved and worked on from any PC with an Internet connection.

Zoho, one of a crop of companies making web-based productivity apps, has just released a plug-in for Office 2000, 2003 and 2007 that webilises Word and Excel, letting users save files to their Zoho accounts so they can still work on the web when away from their PCs.

The Best Web-Based Computer Applications For Small Business, Winner - Zoho Writer in Word Processors category Zoho Writer is in some ways superior to Microsoft Word, because it automatically creates an HTML version of your document on the fly and handles images better.

Zoho Writer can export files to many formats, including Word DOC files, Rich Text Format (RTF), text files, PDF, HTML, the Open Office SXW extension and OpenDocument’s ODT format

Zoho has released a whole range of services and one in particular has really impressed me: Zoho Creator a weblication that creates weblications. Zoho Creator is incredibly ambitious and there’s a lot more to the service that I just don’t have space to cover. If there was ever a poster child for the Web 2.0 world, this is it!

The Zoho service (http://www.zoho.com/) hosts a wide array of collaboration applications (both free and priced). Through several office applications, it is trying to gain some foothold in the highly competitive web-based office suite segment. The free product, web-based wordprocessor ZohoWriter (http://www.zohowriter.com/), developed for creating/sharing documents on-line, is one of its kind. It has almost all the features found on similar products (like Writely).

Another office-suite component worth a mention is the ZohoSheet, an on-line worksheet package. The product allows you to create/share spreadsheets in your browser. It supports facilities such as graph creation tool and mathematical functions like LCM, sum, log, sumsq (for sum of the squares of a set of numbers) and sqrt.