Zoho Guides Online Productivity and Collaboration Market into 2008

Enhanced Zoho Suite Driven by Long-term Commitment to Customers and Technology Innovation

PLEASANTON, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Zoho continues to raise the bar in the online productivity and collaboration market with relentless upgrades and enhancements to its suite of online productivity and collaboration applications. Zoho’s dedication to helping people harness the advantages inherent to the Web — mobility, collaboration, productivity and cost-efficiencies — is the driving force behind the industry’s broadest, most feature-rich online suite.

“In our first year, we focused primarily on building the broadest suite of online applications for our customers,” said Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist. “We spent our second year broadening our suite further and started integrating these applications into a unified suite. Moving into 2008, we’re building out the depth of the suite, striving for feature parity with desktop suites because our customers have made it clear that the ‘good enough’ functionality of most online applications is not good enough for them.”

As people live and work online more than ever, their needs and expectations continue to mature. Now, users want online applications that offer the functionality available in offline word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and other traditional productivity applications. At the same time, users are also demanding collaborative applications unique to the online environment, e.g., wiki, chat, and desktop sharing.

Zoho has resolved to meet its customers’ needs on both fronts. Zoho is redefining the traditional productivity suite by enabling enhanced collaboration and mobility simply unavailable in offline suites. More, Zoho is setting the standard for these new, online productivity and collaboration suites by constantly upgrading its applications to meet its customers’ evolving demands.

“Google Docs is good, but another online office suite has been rolling out upgrade after upgrade this year, slowly, steadily, and consistently trouncing GDocs in the features department.” Gina Trapani, LifeHacker

“…Zoho has created a terrific product and continues to improve and enhance it at a pace that is far faster than anything coming out of Google or Microsoft.” Jason Hiner TechRepublic

Zoho Upgrades Roll On in 2008

To set the online productivity and collaboration standard, Zoho has already begun rolling out a steady stream of application upgrades, including the highlights below.

• Zoho Show 2.0 gains a rich, Ajax-based user interface to 50+ default themes; shapes and symbols support; extensive editing support for text, images, bullets, etc.; clip art support; Zoho Meeting and Zoho Chat integration; and many more.
• Zoho Writer offline support lets users read and write documents while online or offline. Pagination support, header/footer support, and spell checker in 43 languages have also been added.
• Zoho Sheet adds sidebar and batch operations, auto-fill, auto-suggest, duplicate sheet, multi-language support and several more features.
• Zoho Creator Mobile version gives users access to their private and shared Zoho Creator applications from their mobile phones and devices.
• Zoho Notebook adds linking support, including links back to content sources, a new hand tool, improved books navigation, scheme support, and more.

Zoho’s commitment to long-term, continuous improvement and advancements reflects the backing it receives as a member of the AdventNet family. Unlike companies built around an exit strategy, Zoho is a brand of AdventNet, a company with an execution strategy. Privately-funded AdventNet has been profitable for 11 years, with a successful track record that demonstrates it knows how to deliver software and execute against larger players. For AdventNet, Zoho is pursuing the long-term vision of empowering people to work online.

Disclosure, Consulting Pulse is an active user of Zoho technologies for its publications and productivity tools.

Boostrapping for Consultants

Starting a consultancy today is far easier than it has been in the past. Particularly with the incredible range of free or low cost tools that are available for managing business infrastructure, low cost marketing or PR.

Bootstrapping is the art of pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps, or the art of going it alone, with little to no funds, and hopefully making it.

Most of the skills associated with Bootstrapping revolve around guts, determination, the willingness to take risks, and being innovative.

But… there are a lot of tools out there that make parts of this a lot easier, and there is a well worn path by those who have gone before you to show you the way through some of the common problems.

5 Must Use Tools for Bootstrapping Consultants

1) LinkedIn - I am a big fan of this networking tool and I recommend it to anybody who needs to get their name out there. Answer questions, publicize your profile, get your name seen and make sure your details draw attention to what you are doing.

2) GoDaddy - Great, easy to use, cheap and has features that can have you with a published corporate presence website within the hour. Love it and use it a lot!

3) Google Apps – Another feature of the modern Internet that I would be lost without. I use Google Mail as my corporate email account and have linked it to my emails from my other websites and companies. I also use Google Pages a lot for holding files, the Calendar for scheduling between myself and others I work with, and this Blog is published via Blogger.

4) Zoho – This is where most of my blogs are written, and where most of my files are kept. I have found the word processor to be an excellent tool and as yet I have not had the need to use any of the additional items there. I also use this for writing my articles, and I am using it to hold the manuscript of my next book.

5) Salesforce.com – For those of you that read this blog regularly you will notice that I am a bit of a fan of this product and company. In fact, I own shares! I started using this when I was working as a Business Development Manager some years ago and found ti to be a fantastic view into how business software could/should be. Cheap, functional, intuitive and useful.

I use this still today where needed to manage my customer relationships, and to drive through the statistics needed for success in sales, regardless of what you are selling.

But even with these tools the only thing that will separate you from certain failure is your core idea, the value for it in the market place, and your ability to not give up and keep driving towards your goals.

Isn’t it strange how we can’t find a way, there seems to be no path to take… then we find a way! And we’re of to the next step in our careers!