A bug surfaced during development of a group-oriented search feature allowed me to view Zoho documents created by other people that were not intentionally shared with me.
Zoho fixed the bug on Sunday, after I reported it, and said its impact was limited. Still, as a user, it made me think twice about putting private documents online.
On Sunday morning, I went up to my Zoho Writer page and searched on "soccer." The results included two of my documents, but also seven others created by people I didn't know.
I reported the incident to a Zoho technology evangelist, who swiftly escalated the issue to the company's engineering team. After a few correspondences, the Zoho team identified the bug and fixed it.
The reason I saw documents that were not shared with me is because Zoho is adding a feature to search on shared documents.
The system had one bug under a specific scenario, according to company engineers. The index had been running only for a few hours, but Zoho stopped it to do another round of quality assurance testing, I was told.
To Zoho's credit, its people apologized and clearly recognized the seriousness of the bug. The problem came up because of a situation that's not likely to come up often. But it does give me pause. Did somebody else stumble upon my documents?
Overall, I enjoy having Web-based documents, even when the product is in beta test version, as Zoho Writer is. But the incident raises questions of privacy and underscores the importance of trust between a consumer and Web service provider.
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 Salesforce.com of being a lousy partner.
Talk of an acquisition grew from an effort to integrate Zoho with Salesforce.com applications through its development platform. But Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff decided to pull the plug, Vembu recounts:
We invested in R&D to make the integration work, and we were about a week from launch, when Marc Benioff decided to pull the plug. He invited me for discussions. He offered repeatedly to acquire Zoho outright, which we rejected. I told him there is absolutely no fit between our companies, particularly with his business model (as noted above) and our business model. I told him there is just no cultural fit between our companies and such an acquisition would be miserable for both parties. Finally, he offered to let us integrate Zoho into AppExchange, provided we pull the plug on Zoho CRM. We told him that kind of pre-condition is totally unacceptable, and it also completely negates his claims of openness of their platform. Needless to say, we never did agree on the issue, and we dropped the integration effort.
By contrast, working with Google--its primary competitor--over Google Gears has gone well, Vembu said.
Meanwhile, Salesforce.com has done with Google precisely what it appears to have set out doing with Zoho--close product integration.
It's easy to discount Vembu's comments as sour grapes. After all, it's Google, not Zoho, that now has better access to Salesforce.com customers.
But his comments shed light into how business does, or doesn't, get done among software-as-a-service companies as they compete to build the most vibrant partner ecosystems on their platforms.
Monday morning, Zoho, the online productivity suite, announced full offline functionality for its Zoho Writer product. Zoho had previously released partial offline functionality for Writer earlier this year, but you could only read the documents and not edit them. What good is that? Luckily, as a little post-Thanksgiving gift, we now have full offline editing, utilizing Google Gears (download Google Gears for Windows or Mac from CNET Download.com).
The offline functionality here couldn't be any easier. If you need to go offline, just hit the "Go Offline" button at the top, give Zoho permission to use Google Gears, and you are ready to go. If you make any edits to the documents offline, when you get Internet access again, you just hit the "Go Online" link and there you are! Everything is automatically synced back to Zoho's servers, and you are good to go.
I have used the offline functionality, built on Google Gears, for Google Reader on many occasions, so I am not one bit surprised at how well it works with Zoho. Google has built a killer platform for offline Web applications. Zoho is leading the way right now, offering offline functionality for its word processor, even before Google Apps does. Zoho currently offers 14 online productivity services, so maybe it's time for Microsoft to start taking note.
via VentureBeat
Zoho this morning launched yet another office productivity app in its online suite: Zoho DB, a full online database.
It's an impressive application, full of the features that users of databases like Access are accustomed to. You can create complex relational databases made up of several tables of information, and then query the data using visual query builders. The tool also supports SQL queries.
If you've been using a spreadsheet (like Excel) as a database, as most of the world does, the learning curve for a real database like Zoho DB will be painful. Zoho DB lets you start out with a single spreadsheet-like table and add in database features from there, which is a help, but a tutorial and more help text would be welcome.
Zoho DB tables look like spreadsheets, but the app is a full database that supports database-like features such as SQL queries.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Zoho DB is a fully Web-based application, and it shows in the best ways. Every report or graph or table view that you create in Zoho DB gets its own static URL and embed code. Zoho DB can be used to create powerful applications that can then be embedded in Web sites for real-time data collection or display. It's the kind of thing you just cannot do with an offline app.
I did run into a few snags in trying out the application, though. While it lets you kickstart a database by importing spreadsheet data, you can't actually import an Excel file. You have to convert it to CSV format or cut-and-paste the data, which limits the richness of the data you can transfer. Also, Zoho has another great app, Zoho Creator, a Wufoo competitor for building rich data input forms. I couldn't find out how to get Creator data into DB, which was maddening. I would expect Zoho to integrate Creator and DB shortly.
Insert standard "Microsoft and Google are falling behind" paragraph here.
See also: DabbleDB.
Other coverage of Zoho DB is on: TechCrunch, ReadWrite Web, Mashable, and Center Networks.
Today at the Office 2.0 Conference, Zoho (more coverage) is announcing the new, paid business edition of its Web applications suite. Companies will be able to get user administration, company branding, and domain mapping (just like Google Apps for My domain), backup, pooled storage, and telephone support. When the product launches in October, it will cost about $40 per year per user.
Zoho Business Edition gives companies administrative controls for its users.
(Credit: Zoho)Zoho will continue to have a free version, Zoho Personal, but some applications that are currently in it, like Zoho CRM, will move out of Personal and only be available in the Business edition. Other applications will become limited: Zoho Meeting, in the personal edition, will allow only five meetings a month.
This is a necessary step for Zoho. The company needs to make money from its ambitious suite, and businesses are more likely to pay than Ma and Pa Home User. It will take the company some time to gain the trust of business before they will run their mission-critical office applications on it, but Zoho has a decent suite of applications and this move represents a real business opportunity.
A suite for the education market will follow later this year.
Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu will be on my panel about new business platforms at 9 a.m. Friday.
Web application suite provider Zoho is one of the first companies to take advantage of Google Gears, a browser plug-in that enables people to run Web applications offline.
Zoho on Tuesday announced that its online word processor, Zoho Writer, has added a "Go Offline" button by integrating with Google Gears. The company said it will add offline access to more of its Web application suite and contribute to the Google Gears open-source project.
Zoho Writer adds a Go Offline button using Google Gears.
In the first incarnation, Zoho Writer's offline capabilities are limited. People can view up to 15 documents when they're not connected to the Internet. In the coming weeks, Zoho will enable people to make edits before going back online.
Not having access to Web applications and data when people are offline has long been one of the biggest knocks against online applications.
Google Gears, which is still in beta, is a plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer that installs a small database to store data locally. When people go back online, that data is updated.
Developers need to rework their applications to take advantage of Gears. When it announced Google Gears in May, Google said its RSS reader, Google Reader, could work offline with Gears.
Google Gears isn't the only route to offline Web applications. AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), formerly called Apollo, is another plug-in that enables people to run Web applications as if they were desktop applications. AIR is now in beta and a version 1.0 is due in the first quarter next year.
ThinkFree, another Web office suite, started offering offline access in a premium version earlier this year.
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