Customizing your Zoho Wiki has now become a bit easier. Let’s see what the improved version of the Customization tab under Settings offers.

1. You can Enable or Disable the Bottom Panel
2. In addition to specifying whether you want the Side Panel to the right or the left, there’s a newly added option to not have it displayed
3. The modules or elements in the Side Panel can now be drag and dropped in any order you like. And you can add your own elements using the Add element -> Custom Page Box option. Say, a gapingvoid widget or a RSS feed.
4. The Top and Bottom panels can be customized to have your own logo, heading, footer etc.
5. And the option to specify your own CSS is retained

This is just the first round of changes as regards wiki customization. More to come. If you want any specific customization options or features in Zoho Wiki, do please leave your comments.

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Last month, when we talked about Conversational View in Zoho Mail, some of you asked us to avoid showing the subject in every thread for the conversation view. It looked like this.

Based on your feedback, we now removed the subject line in the thread showing just the content in each thread.

Thank you for your feedback and we hope you like this better.

This is one of the advantages of the SaaS model - the feedback cycle is shortened. We roll out something, you let us know what’s good or bad, and we fix/enhance it. All this takes few days or weeks. Imagine this loop for an installed product…

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One of the most trenchant criticisms of Zoho is the integration (or the lack thereof!) across various applications. A good recent example is a comment by Phil Hodgen in Paul Greenberg’s blog:

Zoho’s greatest failing for me is that they are splintered all over creation with little integration between what they offer. My suggestion is to stop churning out new products and features and instead put all of those great engineers to use in knitting the pieces into one cohesive whole.

Let me acknowledge this criticism overall, but let me also state that there is a lot of integration work taking place under the hood. Just off the top of my head, a couple of recent examples: a) the “Share” link in Zoho Writer/Sheet/Show now sport a common way of sharing, with contacts fetched from your common Zoho address book, which is also used in Zoho Mail b)  Zoho Docs pulls together your documents, spreadsheets, presentations with a convenient viewer for read-only purposes, so just for the sake of browsing your documents, you don’t have to load the editor c) Zoho Docs then integrated under the hood with Zoho Share. There are many more integration projects going on.

What is interesting about each of these developments is a) they take a fair amount of work, often measured in several months of development for a team b) they don’t make news, sometimes not even a blog post from us. So there is a “news bias” -  you may hear about Zoho only when we release (ahem, “churn out”) a new product, but there are a lot of incremental, integration oriented updates we make that you never hear about - but you will notice when you use the product!

Now coming to the substance of the criticism, which we acknowledge, let me explain our product management philosophy, summarized by the phrase “depth first”. As an example, we intentionally prioritized having a world-class stand-alone CRM offering ahead of integrating that CRM offering with the rest of the Zoho suite. If we had reversed the priorities, we would have shallow products integrated with each other, but individually no product would be really satisfying. Doing integration before a product matures is like getting married too young - your spouse may find you growing up to be someone totally different than the one they married.

Now, there is a subtler, deeper criticism:  “What if you visualize the product differently, as an integrated whole, than as the sum of its parts?” This is a great point - if we had all along visualized Zoho as an integrated whole, would we get a completely different result than our “depth first” strategy of developing individual products and then integrating them?

That idea, realizing an integrated whole, is a remarkable seductress, take it from he who knows!  But, alas she ultimately leads us to the Turing tar-pit. To quote Raganwald:

What is the Turing tar-pit? It’s the place where a program has become so powerful, so general, that the effort to configure it to solve a specific problem matches or exceeds the effort to start over and write a program that solves the specific problem.

I suffer from a tendancy to go swimming in tar. I start out trying to solve a specific problem. I become frustrated with the obvious deficiencies of the tools, and before I know it I’m sketching out ideas for platforms, frameworks, and architectures to solve a whole class of similar problems.

That’s why we solve specific problems first, then stitch them together, imperfectly at first, getting better with experience, to form a coherent whole.

Crucially, we keep those specific solutions as direct entry points to Zoho, usable in their isolation. Yes, there are tantalizing possibilities of CRM & Mail together, but we have to recognize and respect the choices customers make. If we tried to force a Zoho CRM customer to use Zoho Mail, we would just lose a lot of customers. So we have to perform the integration in a way that leaves those choices open to the customer - be it Outlook or Thunderbird or GMail, to quote the most common choices. Keeping these direct entry points also permits third parties to integrate just the specific component of Zoho they want in to their solution.

Here is a case where the right thing to do by technology is also the right thing to do for the customers. And as we go about the messy business of integration, we seek your patience!

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We added a new feature to Zoho DB & Reports - Embedding Interactive Charts in your website/blog.

I am not sure about you, but I love the charts in Zoho DB & Reports. Its not just the ease of chart creation, but the ability to drill down to view the data behind the chart and the visual highlight on a mouse-over etc are very useful. These interactive charts can be viewed inside Zoho DB, but when you embed these charts in web pages, blogs etc, the interactivity is lost. Check out our Olympics Dashboard or iPhone Reports for example where the charts are not completely interactive.

Our recent update changes this. You can now embed Zoho DB & Report’s interactive charts in webpages, blogs etc. The commonwealth dashboard now shows the interactive charts in action. Here is an embedded interactive chart from our 2008 Olympics Database.

Tip: Move your mouse on the label on the right to see the highlight. Click on the data points to see underlying data.

Embedding an interactive chart is very easy. Select the chart you want to embed and select ‘Embed in Website/Blog’ option under the Publish option. In the dialog, the default option is ‘Embed as Interactive Chart’. Copy and Paste the given code in your website/blog and you’ll see an interactive chart like the one above. You can also let users change the type of chart embedded by enabling the Toolbar option in the embed dialog. If you enable this option, the same chart will look like this with options to change the chart type.

Tip: The chart icons on the Toolbar changes the chart type and the ‘Other Charts’ button has more Chart options.

We hope you’ll find this feature useful. Please share your feedback.

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Our favorite Nobel-laureate has written a new NY Times column Depression Economics Returns. It is worth understanding this because a) Krugman’s thinking is solidly mainstream in economics - don’t confuse his partisan politics with his mainstream economics b) it is very likely the government is going to go along with some version of the Krugman program. I pick Krugman to critique because he happens to write clearly, and because of his elevated profile with the Nobel prize, particularly in the new political dispensation.

Let’s start with:

We are already, however, well into the realm of what I call depression economics. By that I mean a state of affairs like that of the 1930s in which the usual tools of economic policy — above all, the Federal Reserve’s ability to pump up the economy by cutting interest rates — have lost all traction. When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly.

An economic layman might find it a bit puzzling that the recipe for getting out of economic trouble is the same as the one you use to get in trouble in the first place: abandon virtue, caution and prudence. It is just as well that Krugmanomics doesn’t deal in questions of root cause: when the police arrive to break up the party that got totally out of control, they should inform the revelers that the cure for massive hangover is government supplied 120-proof liquor.

Now what happens if the current episode of abandoning virtue, caution and prudence, not to be confused with the previous episode that got us into the present predicament, leads to fresh new trouble down the road? Well, we will just raise interest rates - seriously, you didn’t expect they would hand out Nobel prizes when you can’t handle such trivial questions in economics, did you?

Finally, in normal times modesty and prudence in policy goals are good things. Under current conditions, however, it’s much better to err on the side of doing too much than on the side of doing too little. The risk, if the stimulus plan turns out to be more than needed, is that the economy might overheat, leading to inflation — but the Federal Reserve can always head off that threat by raising interest rates. On the other hand, if the stimulus plan is too small there’s nothing the Fed can do to make up for the shortfall. So when depression economics prevails, prudence is folly.

In November of 2002, Bernanke’s biggest concern was how to prevent deflation, which arose from the bursting bubble of the late 1990s. The exact sequence of events that Krugman prescribes - first a massive credit & government spending binge, followed by inflation, followed by an increase in interest rates - happened between 2002-2006. Well, at least the Professor is consistent. Except that, we are at the long term horizon from the view point of policy in 2003, so by Keynesian logic, we should all be dead now.

To leave no one in any doubt, in this blog post, Krugman elaborates on what kind of actions the government should take now:

What’s the answer? Huge fiscal stimulus, to fill the hole. More aggressive GSE lending. Maybe a “pre-commitment” by the Fed to keep rates low for an extended period — that’s a more genteel version of my “credibly promise to be irresponsible.” And maybe large-scale purchases of risky assets.

More aggressive GSE lending! Really? Like interest-only option ARM mortgages for 110% of assessed value to anyone who can fog a mirror? Pre-commitment to keep interest rates low for an indefinite period? Oh wait …

So what is the exit strategy for Krugman? When it would finally become prudent for the government to abandon imprudence? If we pile on even more debt to cure the problem of too much debt, what happens when that bigger-pile-of-debt starts to crumble?

Here is a prediction of my own: the Nobel prize in 2008 will be seen in hindsight as a moment of bankruptcy, the intellectual bankruptcy of mainstream economic thinking.

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Holly L. Hanson is the COO of Techström, a business coaching and solutions company. Holly partners with Jeffrey Watts to work with their clients in developing the right solution for them. Holly wrote in to tell us about how Techström is using Zoho Projects.

Techström has over 25 years of experience in business coaching, strategy development and software implementation. We manage many different types of projects at once - marketing, planning, direct mail campaigns, software implementation, equipment purchases and CEO training. In the past, we tried to manage projects through Microsoft Project and Projixx. Microsoft Project was too cumbersome. It took longer to build the project specs than it did to do the project. Projixx had less set-up time but lacked the multiple levels of functionality we needed.

Recently, for one of our consulting clients, we reviewed several project management software. As we reviewed Basecamp, Projixx, Google Business with add-ons, we could see Zoho had the superior product. The client we were reviewing this product for had multiple offices nationally and internationally. With Zoho Projects, each of their team members can have their version in their language and the client chose to go with Zoho. Since this decision, we have turned 2 more clients on to Zoho and we will continue to recommend it to our clients as an excellent hosted solution. Over all, we have approximately 25 users across 3 companies with 3-10 projects at each location.

With Zoho Projects, we could create templates for the different types of projects saving time and creating a workflow for our process. This assists us much as we add more people to a project. Having a hosted solution also helps. We no longer need to purchase software or back-up software as it is all handled through Zoho.

Our business is about collaboration and creating systems that run smoothly. Zoho Projects facilitates the collaboration and keeps the conversations going. We use the forum function much as we continue to develop our communication in Projects.

Our company uses the Tasks and Milestones to create our project plans and keep our team on track. Being able to share files and upload the supporting documentation for each project has improved communication on projects tremendously and has kept our team organized. When we first looked at Zoho Projects, we were thinking of it as an internal tool. We are now inviting clients and contractors to view and collaborate on projects within the Zoho system.

We have been so impressed with Zoho Projects that we have created a Zoho Business account and are continuing to advise our clients to switch to the Zoho platform for all of their business needs.

If you are using Zoho Projects, do let us know how you are using it.

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Unexpected things do happen at the most odd of times and I guess in life we have to handle all these unexpected situations.

One such thing happened to one of the Zoho Creator user - Alan Bradford, last week. His wife was hit by a driver when she was traveling back home from the gym. The driver was DRUNK!. Luckily she was not hurt. But the car has got hit very badly and Alan says that the repair works would cost $13,000 dollars.

You might think what this has to do with Zoho.

Since there were no broken bones, and everybody (surprisingly) had insurance, we decided to try to get through this on our own. While I was on hold with the insurance company the next morning, I logged into my Zoho Creator account and built an application for us to manage all the details related to the accident. It took me about an hour to build it. You can demo and download my Accident Tracker application in the Creator Marketplace

However, this action of Alan perfectly mirrors the aspect of his strong personality. Alan, our best wishes are with you and your wife. Hope she recovers out of this emotional trauma soon.

Alan Bradford has blogged about this incident in detail here.

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We get this query very often - to clarify where exactly to put different info in Zoho CRM. The query usually comes from users migrating from other CRM systems as terminologies differ or users new to using a CRM app. Let me try to explain some of the modules (tabs) - Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Potentials - in simple terms.

Leads : Suppose you have a free product that you offer for download at your website. And during installation you ask for the user’s details to be filled in. Or, you have a whitepaper on your website and you ask your readers to fill in details before accessing it. Or, you attend a tradeshow and collect info from people visiting your booth. Such collected user information belongs to Leads. Your sales guys typically call or email these Leads and see if they are interested in buying your services or products.

Contacts : Let’s say you followed up on a Lead and have made a sale. Now, you have a happy customer who you will be interacting with on a regular basis. You move her from Leads to Contacts.

Accounts : Accounts is where you put the company information of all your customers. You typically have one or more Contacts associated with an Account.

Potentials : This module helps you track the value of sales potential pipeline. A Potential is associated with a Contact and an Account. Suppose you have Contacts A and B in a customer Account C. And you are discussing sales of goods worth $2,000 with A and $4,500 with B. Your Potential sales pipeline for Account C is worth $6,500 then.

The above is just one simple interpretation of how to use the various modules in Zoho CRM. Zoho CRM allows extensible customization. You can rename the tabs to suit the industry/business you are in. And you can even add custom fields in each module.

As a blogger, I use Zoho CRM extensively. But my use is limited to having everyone in my Contacts list. For a full take on how a typical business is using Zoho CRM, please follow the excellent series of posts being written by Adam Stone of D-Tools. And if you are looking at using Zoho CRM, have a ton of info to be moved from another CRM or from a csv/xls file, please email us and we’ll be glad to help you migrate.

For those of you who are already heavy users of Zoho CRM - it would be great if you can share your best practices of how you are using the above modules in Zoho CRM in the comments.

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Do you spend more time following up customers for payments?  Do you have customers who have disputed an invoice or payment?  Have you frantically tried to consolidate the transactions for a particular customer?

If the answer to any of the above question is yes, you would have definitely felt the need for customer transaction summary (customer statements).  Not surprisingly this is one of the most requested features in Zoho Invoice and we are happy to heed to the request.  Yes, we have added support for “Customer Statements” in Zoho Invoice.

What is a customer statement?

Customer statement is a summary of all transactions for a particular customer during a specific period.  It lists the invoices that were sent and the payments that were received along with their associated details.  Shown below is a sample customer statement-

How to generate a customer statement?

Generating a customer statement in Zoho Invoice is very easy-

1. Go to the “Customers” tab.
2. Click on the “Statement of Account” icon in the “Actions” column of the customer for whom you want to generate the statement.
3. Statement will be generated for the current month and you will be taken to the “Customer Statement” page where you have options to change the statement period, export (as PDF), print and e-mail the statement.

You also have the option to generate the statement from customer’s detail page and from the “Balances report” under “Customer Reports” in the “Reports” tab.

Give this feature a try and feel free to share your comments with us.

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Today, we are adding a new section to our website - Zoho Status - which displays the health of all Zoho Applications. You can visit http://status.zoho.com to see if our applications are running and responding fine. The site provides you availability & response times for the past week along with downtime, if any.

Zoho applications are monitored from six different locations - Seattle, New Jersey, Singapore, London, Germany & Australia - and the response times for each location are displayed in the status page for each Zoho application.

This is the first version of the roll out and as with other Zoho Applications, we will continue to roll out enhancements.

Site24×7 Enterprise

So, where does Zoho Status come from? Well, it is our Site24×7 application that you may not have noticed from the Utilities section of our website that is quietly serving the needs of thousands of paid customers.

We also have an announcement for Site24×7 today. We are launching the Enterprise version of Site 24×7 with more functionality. Apart from monitoring websites and applications, this version adds more funcitonality like Defining SLAs & track their compliance for applications, Enterprise class reports & many more. Here is a comparison between different versions in Site24×7.

You might wonder where the management expertise comes from. It comes from our parent company AdventNet and its ManageEngine business unit that is doing an awesome job with an impressive list of useful applications for monitoring, management and other areas, serving the needs of IT Departments. We borrowed that monitoring technology for Site24×7. Infact, we use most of the products from ManageEngine to closely monitor, analyze, secure the Zoho data centers. We hope to borrow lot more code from them going forward :).

Coming back to Zoho Status, this is one case where we hope you wont have a need to get to this page. This initiative is yet another step to being more open and transparent with our users.

If you’d like to setup similar status screens for your applications/wesbite, head over to Site24×7 and get started with a free account.

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