zoho

On the heels of Salesforce.com integrating with Google Apps, Zoho on Wednesday announced enhancements to its Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition, adding role-based security administration, SSL support, integration with Zoho's spreadsheet, custom fields, and other features.

The cost of the Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition is $25 per user per month, with the first three users free of charge. The Zoho CRM Professional Edition is $12 per user per month.

In a blog post this week, Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho parent company AdventNet, took issue with Salesforce's business model, noting that his competitor spends nearly eight times as … Read more

Only months before Saleforce.com and Google integrated their Web applications, Salesforce.com offered to buy Zoho, a direct competitor of Google Apps.

Sridhar Vembu, the CEO of Zoho parent company AdventNet, divulged that juicy nugget in a blog posting following the much-ballyhooed Google-Salesforce.com tie-up. Zoho makes Web-based productivity and business applications.

Vembu said that the proposed deal was never close to consummation, but it wasn't over the price tag.

He said that the Zoho and Salesforce.com business models are fundamentally at odds because Salesforce.com spends much more proportionately on marketing and sales. He also accused … Read more

Zoho is preparing to announce the public release of Zoho Invoice, yet another Web-based app in the company's growing suite of paid business-focused services. Lately we covered Zoho People, a robust app for managing HR tasks.

Zoho Invoice is a clean, straightforward, and flexible invoicing service. I gave it a quick spin and was creating estimates and invoices within minutes after entering in customer data and product lines (which also took only minutes). There is a good collection of attractive invoice templates for goods and services, or you can create your own.

It was easy to take an estimate … Read more

While Google receives lots of attention for its suite of Web applications, and Microsoft waits on the sidelines, Zoho continues to add new components to its Web suite.

The latest addition to the suite, which already includes modules for everything from documents and spreadsheets to CRM and wikis, is Zoho People, a human resource management application.

Zoho People, currently in beta, includes the usual HR functions for administrators and employees, with modules for organization, recruitment, forms, and checklists (work flow). In addition, Zoho Creator has been integrated within Zoho People, allowing users to customize the application.

Zoho People joins Zoho … Read more

Zoho has added a new module to its suite of business apps: a complete Web-based human resources system called Zoho People. Not being an HR professional I can't tell how well or poorly it compares with things like Taleo, but a quick run-through impressed me.

The app is, as all HR systems must be, a relational database of people, jobs, and departments, with complex rules on who can see what. In the Zoho case, there's also a self-service module so employees and managers can update certain records without going through HR. Zoho People also has some nice Web … Read more

As an extension of this morning's news about Google Gears making its way to mobile devices, online office suite Zoho is taking advantage of the new technology to give people a way to view Zoho Writer documents on their Windows mobile phones while away from a data connection. It's the type of situation that occurs frequently for commuters, and something that has historically given native software applications the leg up on their Web counterparts.

Users can view up to 20 of their latest Zoho Writer documents while connected, and view up to the last last five when in the Gears-enabled offline mode. According to CEO Raju Vegesna, an option to change how many documents you can load into the Gears cache is in the works. Also on tap is an offline editing mode to let you make changes or tweaks to your docs, although according to Vegesna more than 90 percent of users simply view documents on their mobile devices.

Zoho was one of the first adopters of Google's Gears technology, adding it to its Writer word processing service back in late November--something Google has still not done with its own Documents and Spreadsheets service, despite hints it was the next service to get the Gears treatment back in January.

Vegesna walks us through the process of installing Gears and accessing the mobile version of Zoho Writer in the video embedded after the break.

… Read more

One of our hits from 2007 was Google Gears, and our predictions for it was that many Web applications would begin to integrate it over the course of 2008. Already that prediction looks to be coming true, with what appears to be the first signs that Gears is coming to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. The discovery was made earlier this week by Google Blogoscoped's Tony Ruscoe. He was able to edit document names and star them, but not open or create any documents without getting sent to blank browser pages.

Ruscoe's not letting anyone in on how he … Read more

Over the next few days, Zoho will update its presentation app, Zoho Show, for all users. We've been covering the app since June 2006, when we called it "extremely basic." It has matured since then, and the new version, Zoho Show 2.0, is much more professional and useful. But I found that it still has some maddening limitations.

The interface has been improved and brought more into line with Zoho's other apps. And there's now a decent library of templates, most of which are pretty sharp and will make your presentations look professional, assuming … Read more

Dan Farber (Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Between the Lines blogger) and I have a new video show: Working Webware. Each episode, we're going to pick on one hapless Web CEO, interview him or her, and then analyze their prospects.

For our first show, we sat down with AdventNet's CEO Sridhar Vembu to find out about Zoho's office productivity suite and how the company plans to compete against Microsoft and Google. We analyzed the company's business model and argued about Zoho's chance for success in the emerging Web 2.0 office software market. Running … Read more