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. → Read More

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.

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. → Read More

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. Zoho already does this with Zoho Apps, as does Google which has long bundled its Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation apps into Google Docs. With Zoho Share, Zoho does take things a step forward, though, by adding social elements and a friendlier user interface. 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). http://www.viddler.com/player/86ec1f66/ → Read More

Office productivity suite Zoho removed the need to create an account to use their services today – you can now log in to any of their products using a Google or Yahoo account. Sign in is completed via Yahoo’s and Google’s authentication APIs. 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. CrunchBase Information Zoho Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

Zoho keeps pushing the limits of what online productivity apps can do, It was the first to use Google Gears to create an offline version of Zoho Writer last year, for instance. And now it is adding macros and pivot tables to its online spreadsheet, Zoho Sheet. (Once again, it is way ahead of Google, which indicated last December it would not add those advanced features any time this year). 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: http://www.viddler.com/player/cbcf35a4/ CrunchBase Information Zoho Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

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. CrunchBase Information Zoho Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

Zoho continues to launch a new product every month or two. Next up is a way for businesses to send electronic invoices. It joins a suite of sixteen other business-focused applications, including a full “Office” suite (online clones for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.). Most of their applications are free or significantly less expensive than competitors. 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. CrunchBase Information Zoho Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More