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ZOHO has demonstrated some very effective and easy to use data merging. They have also released a ZOHO Writer extension for Chrome that is awesome. The problem with "merge" is that, while full featured, the only usable data source is ZOHO CRM. Not good, but zCRM does fully integrate with ZOHO eMail, which enables the full two way transparent integration with zCRM. Easier to do than explain. Real Estate example excerpt: Zoho is smart, allowing you to integrate Gmail: The best of both worlds is available, because Zoho had the foresight to allow you to use Gmail and integrate your emails with the Zoho CRM system. Once you've set it up, you use Gmail the way you've always used it. I get to continue using all of the things I love about Gmail. But, every email, in or out of Gmail, attaches itself to the appropriate contact in the Zoho CRM system. When I send or receive an email in Gmail that is to or from one of my Zoho contacts or leads, the email automatically is picked up by Zoho and becomes a part of that contact/prospect's record, even though I never opened Zoho. If you've wondered about backing up Gmail, let Zoho do it: A bonus benefit in using Zoho mail is that you can set it up to receive all of your Gmail, sent and received, as well. It's a ready-made backup for your Gmail. So, if CRM isn't something you want to do with Zoho, at least set up the free email to copy all of your Gmail. And, if you're still using Outlook...why? The Internet is Improving Our Business at a Lower Cost: Here we have two free email systems that give you amazing flexibility and backup. Then the Zoho CRM system, with the email module installed, is only $15/month. You can do mass marketing emails, auto-responders, and take in new contacts and prospects with Web forms. Once you tie Gmail and Zoho together, your email and CRM will be top-notch, at a very low cost. Though you may wish for one, there isn't a reasonably priced "does it all" solution out there. This is an

Collaborate and Edit documents with Zoho, Store and Manage in Microsoft® SharePoint®. Zoho is onto something here. The video is well worth the watching. Anthony Ha of Venture Beat ahd this to say: "As online office software tries to move into big corporations, it's starting to work more closely with entrenched solutions - which often means technology built by Microsoft. In the latest example, Zoho just announced plans to offer its collaboration services as an add-on for SharePoint, Microsoft's server and software for collaboration and document management." "Basically, that means you can use Zoho Office as the interface for collaborative editing of documents, while the documents themselves sit safely on the SharePoint server, behind the corporate firewall. The add-on brings a more web-like interface to SharePoint; rather than having to check documents in and out as they work on them, multiple users can jump into a document and edit it at once, and also send instant messages back-and-forth within their application using Zoho Chat." "This is a smart way to get Zoho into companies that wouldn't consider making the full jump into online office applications, but want to experiment with these kinds of tools without sacrificing security or throwing away existing hardware. The financial investment is small, too - a 30-day trial period, followed by $2 per user per month if companies pay for a year, or $3 per user per month if companies pay by month."

Neil McAllister provides an in-depth no-holds-barred comparison of Google, Zoho and Micorsoft Web Office Productivity Apps.  It's not pretty, but spot on honest.  Some of the short comings are that Neil overly focuses on document fidelity, but is comparatively light on the productivity environment/platform problems of embedded business logic.  These document aspects are represented by internal application and platform specific components such as OLE, scripting, macros, formulas, security settings, data bindings, media/graphics, applications specific settings, workflow logic, and other ecosystem entanglements so common to MSOffice compound "in-process" business documents.   Sadly, Neil also misses the larger issue that Microsoft is moving the legacy MSOffice Productivity Environment to a MS-Web center.   excerpt:  A spreadsheet in your browser? A word processor on the Web? These days, SaaS (software as a service) is all the rage, and the success of Web-based upstarts like Salesforce.com has sent vendors searching for ever more categories of software to bring online. If you believe Google, virtually all software will be Web-based soon -- and as if to prove it, Google now offers a complete suite of office productivity applications that run in your browser. Google isn't the only one. A number of competitors are readying Web-based office suites of their own -- most prominently Zoho, but even Microsoft is getting in on the act. In addition to the typical features of desktop productivity suites, each offering promises greater integration with the Web, including collaboration and publishing features not available with traditional apps.

Fascinating conversation between Douglas Crockford and Jeremy Geelan. The issue is that XSS - the Cross Site Scripting capabilities of HTML. and "the painful gap" in the HTML5 specification of the itnerface between JavaScript and the browser. I had to use the Evernote Clearly Chrome extension to read this page. Microsoft is running a huge JavaScript advertisement/pointer that totally blocks the page with no way of closing or escaping. Incredible. Clearly was able to knock it out though. Nicely done! The HTML5-XSS problem is very important, especially if your someone like me that sees the HTML+ format (HTML5-CSS3-JSON-JavaScript-SVG/Canvas) as the undisputed Cloud Productivity Platform "compound document" model. The XSS discussion goes right to the heart of matter of creating an HTML compound document in much the same way that a MSOffice Productivity Compound Document worked. The XSS mimics the functionality of of embedded compound document components such as OLE, DDE, ODBC and Scripting. Crack open any client/server business document and it will be found to be loaded with these embeded components. It seems to me that any one of the Cloud Productivity Platform contenders could solve the HTML-XSS problem. I'm thinking Google Apps, Zoho, SalesForce.com, RackSpace and Amazon - with gApps and Zoho clearly leading the charge. Also let me add that RSS and XMP (Jabber), while not normally mentioned with JSON, ought to be considered. Twitter uses RSS to transport and connect data. Jabber is of course a long time favorite of mine. excerpt: The fundamental mistake in HTML5 was one of prioritization. It should have tackled the browser's most important problem first. Once the platform was secured, then shiny new features could be carefully added. There is much that is attractive about HTML5. But ultimately the thing that made the browser into a credible application delivery system was JavaScript, the ultimate workaround tool. There is a painful gap

Notification of this article also appeared in the Diigo Document Wars Group..... WebODF...   An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the and elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is for better desktop integration, and an ODFKit implementation. This means that WebODF is an easy way to add ODF support to almost any application, be it in HTML, Gtk, or QML. KO GmbH has received funding from NLnet to improve the current WebODF prototype and see how far the idea goes. Interested readers can try the online demo

Moving the Point of Assembly Kudos to Zoho. Their efforts remind me of the early days of the Microsoft Productivity Environment where core MSOffice editors expanded their reach through DDE, OLE, rich copy/paste, data binding, merged content and data, VBA scripting and the infamous recorder, and a developer API that meshed platform and productivity apps so deeply into end user information that the binding of business processes to the MOPE is proving near impossible to break. Even for years after the fact. A business ecosystem for client/server was born back in the early 90's, with Microsoft continuing on to own entirely the client side of the equation.

In this interview with Microsoft's Chris Capossela, he admits that OOXML is not an interoperable format - that using OOXML will result in a loss of productivity.   excerpt: "The collaboration experience end users are going to have with Office 2010 and the Web applications in the browser and Office on the phone is far superior to anything out there, whether it's from Google or anybody else. And the increase in costs to do what they're suggesting and the decrease in productivity that's going to result is something that customers will see, and then they'll choose Microsoft. The best example of that is just sharing a document. Just taking an Office document that was built in the rich client that has a piece of smart art and a watermark or a header or a footer, and then when I share that with you and you open it in the Office Web app, it looks absolutely identical to what I created. When you make edits to it and save it and I open it back up, I see exactly the edits you made and all the stuff I had in there originally. If you do that exact same thing with Google or Zoho or OpenOffice, you lose stuff. And that means loss of productivity."

Bingo!  Took five years, but finally someone gets it: excerpt:  Great question. After 10 years, OpenOffice hasn't had much traction in the enterprise - supported by under 10% of firms, and today it's facing more competition from online apps from Google and Zoho. I'm not counting OpenOffice completely out yet, however, since IBM has been making good progress on features with Symphony and Oracle is positioning OpenOffice for the web, desktop and mobile - a first. But barriers to OpenOffice and Web-based tools persist, and not just on a feature/function basis. Common barriers include: Third-party integration requirements. Some applications only work with Office. For example, one financial services firm I spoke with was forced to retain Office because its employees needed to work with Fiserv, a proprietary data center that is very Microsoft centric. "What was working pretty well was karate chopped." Another firm rolled out OpenOffice.org to 7,00 users and had to revert back 5,00 of them when they discovered one of the main apps they work with only supported Microsoft. User acceptance. Many firms say that they can overcome pretty much all of the technical issues but face challenges around user acceptance. One firm I spoke with went so far as to "customize" their OpenOffice solution with a Microsoft logo and told employees it was a version of Office. The implementation went smoothly. Others have said that they have met resistance from business users who didn't want Office taken off their desktop. Other strategies include providing OpenOffice to only new employees and to transition through attrition. But this can cause compatibility issues. Lack of seamless interoperability with Office. Just like third-party apps may only work with Office, many collaborative activities force use of particular versions of Office. Today's Web-based and OpenOffice solutions do not provide seamless round tripping between Office and their applications. Corel, with its

Über technologist Michael Hickens writes about the recent Cisco announcement that they intend on competing with Google, Zoho and MOSS in the cloud collaboration space. I left a lengthy comment on this page, trying to come to grips with the meaning of this challenge. I titled my comment, "Cisco Office? Maybe they should consider Feng Office-in-the-Cloud". Good luck Conrado. Go get them. Interestingly, Jason Harrop and i met Ms. Alex Hadden-Boyd, director of marketing for the collaboration software group at Cisco. She was kind enough to refer me directly to David Knight, the technology director of Cisco's WebEX Conferencing initiative. Alex is quoted in a CNet article at: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10276549-92.html Cisco is striving to redefine itself as a vendor connecting inner and outer clouds, thus reasserting its relevance in the context of a fluid Web-driven IT world increasingly dominated by the likes of Google, Salesforce, Oracle and IBM. It also hopes to parlay its legacy of infrastructure expertise into a reassuring presence, particularly for veteran IT administrators struggling to balance their in-house infrastructures against the cost-savings and potential efficiencies of cloud computing.

Another great review for Conrado. Summary: OpenGoo is an open source web/Cloud office where all resources and aspects of contact and project management are linked. This includes eMail, calendar, task, schedules, time lines, notes, documents, workgroups and data. Great stuff. OpenGoo and hosted sister Feng Office are the first Web Office systems to challenge the entire Microsoft Office productivity environment. Very polished, great performance. Excellent use of URI's to replace Win32-OLE functionality. Lacks direct collaboration of Zoho and gDOCS. Could easily make up for that and more with the incorporation of Wave computing (Google). I'm wondering when Conrado will take on the vertical market categories; like Real Estate - Finance? I also think OpenGoo and Feng Office have reached the point where governments would be interested. Instead of replacing existing MSOffice desktops, migrate the project/contact management stuff to OpenGoo, and shut down the upgrade treadmill. Get into the Cloud. I suspect also that Conrado is looking carefully at Wave Computing, and the chellenge of incorporating Wave into OpenGoo.

excellent comparison between Amazon S3 champion, DropBox, and Rackspace champion JungleDisk.  DropBox kicks ass.  Again.  Amazing. The stages of Cloud Document / Content Management Stack: ......... Backup-restore ........... backup-restore-store .............. backup-store-share ......... sync-share-store ............. sync-share-store-collaborate   (wikiWORD-SPoint) ......... Visual Document Portfolio DropBox has moved the industry to the sync-share-store level.  Collaboration remains a mystery to most, relying on Google Docs or Zoho (Rackspace). Google Cloud Connect can match DropBox for ease and reliability at the sync-share-store level.  MS-Live/Azure/SkyDrive however fails miserably at this level. The problem with Google Collaboration is that it breaks the Native Documents when converting to the Google collaboration format.  GCC (Google Cloud Connect) does store the original Native document, but does not keep track of revisions to the native!  Advantage DropBox! DropBox however does not have collaboration. The Visual Document Portfolio model is a design that saves the Native document to a Cloud Folder, and the system provides all visual representations on demand from that Native.  A Visual representation would be PDF, SVG (fixed), HTML (flow), ePUB or an HTML5 immersive visual representation packaged as a webzine.

Comments on the latest SVN article mulling the effects of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's anti trust ruling and proposed break up of Microsoft. comment: "Chinese Wall" Ummm, there was a Chinese Wall between Microsoft Os and the MS Applciations layer. At least that's what Chairman Bill promised developers at a 1990 OS/2-Windows Conference I attended. It was a developers luncheon, hosted by Microsoft, with Chairman Bill speaking to about 40 developers with applications designed to run on the then soon to be released Windows 3.0. In his remarks, the Chairman described his vision of commoditizing the personal computer market through an open hardware-reference platform on the one side of the Windows OS, and provisioning an open application developers layer on the other using open and totally transparent API's. Of course the question came up concerning the obvious advantage Microsoft applications would have. Chairman Bill answered the question by describing the Chinese Wall that existed between Microsoft's OS and Apps develop departments. He promised that OS API's would be developed privately and separate from the Apps department, and publicly disclosed to ALL developers at the same time. Oh yeah. There was lots of anti IBM - evil empire stuff too :) Of course we now know this was a line of crap. Microsoft Apps was discovered to have been using undocumented and secret Window API's. http://goo.gl/0UGe8. Microsoft Apps had a distinct advantage over the competition, and eventually the entire Windows Productivity Platform became dependent on the MSOffice core. The company I worked for back then, Pyramid Data, had the first Contact Management application for Windows; PowerLeads. Every Friday night we would release bug fixes and improvements using Wildcat BBS. By Monday morning we would be slammed with calls from users complaining that they had downloaded the Friday night patch, and now some other application would not load or function properly. Eventually we tracked th