Office Archive

Last year online office provider Zoho partnered with Baihui and entered the Chinese market and they also partnered with Swisscom in Europe. Last week Zoho announced a new distribution deal with NTT in Japan. The Zoho distribution is part of a bigger effort by NTT to create a cloud environment. The cloud platform is named “Setten”, the Japanese word for “contact point” or “interface.”

NTT notes regarding the new Setten offering, “The platform will provide operating systems, storage and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, including AdventNet K.K.’s Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Mail and NTT Resonant’s Business goo.”

Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna explains how the cloud portion will work for Zoho’s apps, “Interesting part to notice in this case is that the Zoho Applications are not served from Zoho’s data centers in US. Instead, Zoho applications are deployed in NTT Com’s data centers. Zoho provides frequent updates to these applications.”

The Setten release will start small with 15 Japanese companies and will expand over time.

Online office suite provider Zoho has announced the launch of Zoho Mobile today. Zoho Mobile works on the iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android and Symbian S60 devices. The supported Zoho applications include Mail, Writer, Calendar, Sheet, Show and Creator.

Zoho notes regarding the launch, “we are announcing the unified mobile initiative that integrates Zoho Application under a consistent user interface.” The apps are also available in Japanese with more languages coming soon.

The Zoho Mobile apps appear to be free to download and use. Frankly I think Zoho could have charged for mobile access to help offset the development costs.

Earlier this month Zoho launched Zoho Gadgets and easy connections to Google AppEngine.

Office suite provider Zoho is announcing the launch of Zoho Marketplace this morning. The Zoho Marketplace brings together Zoho users and Zoho application developers and allows users to install applications that will aid in user effectiveness. The marketplace is similar to other developer offerings by Facebook, MySpace and OpenSocial.

Applications are built in Zoho Creator and the company notes that to-date over 100,000 applications have been built using the platform. Developers decide whether to charge a fee for their applications or provide them for free.

What makes the Zoho Marketplace interesting is that as a Zoho customer you can place a request for an application. My guess is that any application request will see action from developers on the Zoho network. Check out all of our Zoho coverage including why we think they are a great fit for IBM.

Here’s a cute overview of how the Zoho Marketplace works:

The online office market continues to heat up. Everyone wants a piece of the Microsoft Office pie from Zoho to Google to SlideShare along with hundreds of other startups. SlideRocket is a Powerpoint replacement and is moving into public beta today.

SlideRocket launched in private beta in March and you can check out initial reviews on Techcrunch and ZDNet. SlideRocket offers free and paid versions of their presentation application. Phil Wainewright notes regarding an additional component to their business model:

One innovative extra that will help SlideRocket make money is its plan to offer a marketplace of data and asset services for paid use in presentations — for example, market sizing data and other material from analyst firms, or stock images from photo libraries. It’s the sort of money-making add-on that Microsoft ought to have done long ago with PowerPoint — it’s the classic ’software plus services’ play.

As startups continue to realize that there’s money in them hills – those hills being small to enterprise businesses, we will slowly see a shift to useful utilities instead of yet another social network.

Office suite provider Zoho is announcing the launch of recordable macros in their Zoho Sheet application today. Basically creating a macro is as easy as clicking the start button, completing the actions you desire, and then clicking the stop button. Zoho then creates the Visual Basic code which you can pick up and modify as you like. The macro can then be applied to other spreadsheets.

Here’s a video overview showing how to create a macro in Zoho Sheet:

In a chat with Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna, he said outside of Microsoft Excel, Zoho Sheet is the only product to auto-generate Visual Basic code based on user actions. Earlier this year Zoho Sheet added support for pivot tables. And check out our interview with Raju to learn more about Zoho.

Project management software provider Wrike has announced the launch of their enterprise version today. The biggest update in this new version is the ability to reschedule tasks easily by using task dependencies. This allows you to change a top task and all sub-tasks will follow suit. If you’ve worked with project management software, rescheduling can be a real pain.

Wrike’s enterprise version offers exporting and importing options into Microsoft Office applications. Wrike is priced at $15 per user with unlimited projects.

While Wrike compares themselves to Microsoft Office, I’d suggest a more accurate comparison is with other SaaS/hosted project management tools including Zoho Projects. Zoho Projects is capped at $80/month for unlimited projects and unlimited users. With Zoho offering a full office suite of tools, my initial take is based on looking at the suite and pricing, Zoho seems like a better choice. Though both tools offer robust solutions that appear more attractive than Microsoft Project.

Office suite provider Zoho has signed a 6-month trial partnership with Swiss telco provider Swisscom. The partnership will bring Zoho products Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook and Meeting to a custom version of the Zoho Business suite. The tools will be available within the Swisscom Teamnet portal. Swisscom currently has over 300,000 business customers.

Zoho reports that their userbase is 50% US, 25% European and 25% in the rest of the world. This past April, Zoho partnered with Badhui in China. Back in March, the Telegraph newspaper out of the U.K. voted Zoho as one of the 101 websites they couldn’t live without.