What is Cloud Computing

The cloud computing revolution is real: it’s on the front page of theAustralian Financial Review this morning. But is it really “a radical new business model that purports to slash technology costs by up to 80%”?

What is cloud computing?

Every business bigger than one person needs somewhere to store its data and run its business applications and communications, including email. A generation of businesses has installed a server — or many servers in a data centre — and hired specialist IT staff to run it.

With cloud computing, you instead rent capacity in a provider’s data centre, and connect over the internet. The provider’s staff install, maintain and upgrade hardware and software as required. Typically you’ll rent a service, such as data storage or email or accounting, rather than ‘a server’ as such, and pay $X per user or $Y per business per month.

Why is it called cloud computing?

Network diagrams have traditionally used a cloud symbol to denote ‘the internet’ or, before that, the telephone network outside the customer’s zone of responsibility.

What services are on offer?

You name it. Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Windows Hotmail are email in the cloud. In the lucrative business productivity market, Google Docs and Google Apps compete directly with Microsoft Office and Exchange — the latter now ‘in the cloud’ as Microsoft Online Services.

Accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), project management, email marketing, spam and virus filtering, data storage, ecommerce, online publishing, audio and video streaming, general databases — all available in the cloud.

Why use cloud computing?

Potentially cloud services are cheaper and more flexible. Because they’re internet-based, you can access them from anywhere — often including mobile devices.

Most servers and internet links lie idle most of the time. Cloud providers host many businesses on a pool of hardware, sharing the cost of servers, electricity, data links, backup systems, IT staff and even real estate. A cloud provider can quickly add extra capacity or scale it back again when you need it. Capital expenditure on servers and up-front software licenses, and the unpredictable costs of dealing with emergencies, are replaced by a predictable operational cost.

Can it really cut IT costs by 80%?

That’s hype. Hardware and internet costs are dropping, sure, but supporting end users is still a significant cost. Moving to the cloud removes the cost of maintaining your own systems, but you still need to configure the generic cloud-based service to match your business’ unique needs, train your staff and help them find lost spreadsheets.

Is there a downside?

You become dependent on your cloud providers. If there’s no easy way to extract your data in a usable format, your business success is now intertwined with theirs. There may also be legal and privacy issues: will your data become subject to the privacy and data retention laws of another country; will you still be compliant with your industry requirements in Australia?

Is it secure?

Big cloud providers like Microsoft and Google have some of the best security staff on the planet. Their backup procedures are likely to be better than yours too. (Where are your business data backups right now?) However big cloud providers do represent an attractive target to hackers — if they can break in.

Is cloud computing “radically new”?

Not everyone thinks it’s that big a change. It’s more evolution than revolution. “Cloud computing is not only the future of computing, it is the present, and the entire past of computing is all cloud,” saidLarry Ellison, founder of Oracle Corporation and the world’s sixth richest man, in a passionately entertaining rant last year. “It’s not water vapour. All it is is a computer attached to a network. What are you talking about? I mean, what do you think Google runs on?” As Ellison points out, CRM provider Salesforce.com has been running more than a decade.

In many ways cloud computing is indeed just the current buzzword for what has also been called utility computing, grid computing, software as a service (SaaS), IBM’s ‘On Demand’ branded services, the application service provider (ASP) model, or even good ol’ mainframe timesharing.

Where is Australia in all this?

Some big companies have committed to cloud computing, including the Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, Visy and Komatsu. The Royal Australian College of General Practice will provide GPs with cloud-based e-health applications by this time next year. Even the Department of Defence’s CIO is advocating the cloud.

On the supply side, Telstra is investing heavily to become a player — they’re providing the RACGP’s services. Saasu and Campaign Monitor are Australian success stories in cloud-based accounting and email marketing respectively.

Cloud computing does require solid internet links, however. Australia’s relatively expensive broadband infrastructure may have held back adoption. The NBN will presumably fix this.

Zoho Projects Now Integrated With Google Apps

Web-based productivity suite Zoho has continued to integrate its products with Google in order to make it easier to use Gmail and Zoho apps simultaneously. Last summer, Zoho, a web-based software suite that includes document, project and invoicing management tools, integrated Google and Yahoo sign-ins, allowing users to sign into Zoho using a Google or Yahoo account. And over the summer, Zoho is launched sign-in integration with Google Apps, letting users login to Zoho using their Google Apps credentials. Today, Zoho’s project collaboration product, Zoho Projects, will become an extended application to Google Apps.

Zoho Projects is a team collaboration and project management application that allows teams to plan, track and collaborate on everyday activities and big projects with external customers. With the new integration, Google Apps users can login to Zoho Projects using their Google Apps sign-in info. Users can then upload their documents from Google Docs to Zoho Projects directly. Any tasks, meetings or activities in Zoho Project will automatically bee updated in Google Calendar. And Zoho Projects gadgets can be embedded within Gmail, iGoogle and any other OpenSocial compatible sites.

The integration comes on the heels of the initial roll out of Google’s own all-in-one, futuristic collaboration tool, Google Wave. But despite facing competition from the big guns like Microsoft and Google, Zoho continues to remain as a player in the document management space thanks to continuous innovations and iterations to its products. It’s almost reminiscent of Salesforce.com’s strategy.

In fact, because of this highly competitive landscape, integrations are vital to the software’s success as an application suite. Recently, Zoho launched integration with Microsoft Sharepoint as well as with Microsoft Access. Zoho’s project management application, Zoho Projects 2.0, also added the capability to import existing projects from MS Project, Microsoft’s project management desktop software. And Zoho also launched a forum tool, called Zoho Discussions. It looks like the startup’s strategy is paying off—Zoho has been able to accumulate 2 million users in just 4 years.

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SaaS battlegrounds: Salesforce v Zoho

When Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff put on his jocular performance for the analysts and press at Dreamforce yesterday, I’m sure he didn’t expect little ol’ Zoho to come bite him in the pants. That’s exactly what’s happened.

According to Venture Beat’s Anthony Ha:

Salesforce.com’s strategy can be boiled down to one word, according to chief executive Marc Benioff — love. Of course, Benioff was being a little tongue-in-cheek…

As with its other offerings, Microsoft’s new cloud-computing application platform, Windows Azure, is all about tying people into Microsoft products and services, Benioff said. Salesforce, on the other hand, is much more about being open and cooperative, both in its customer relationship management (CRM) services, and inForce.com, its platform for business applications. Salesforce is interested in connecting multiple clouds, platforms and devices — witness today’s announcement that Force.com will integrate with the Facebook platform and Amazon Web Services, or Salesforce’s integration of Google Apps earlier this year.

Comparing Microsoft and Salesforce, Benioff said: “They hate everybody and we love everybody, and that’s pretty much the difference. We even love Microsoft. … This is our core strategy, love.”

Rough translation: we’re good guys (ergo trust me) and Microsoft are bad guys (ergo don’t trust them. Sounds sweet until you understand the game of hardball Benioff plays when faced with anything he sees as a competitive threat. Benioff’s message certainly raised hackles with Sridhar Vembu, Zoho’s CEO. In a blog post today, Vembu recounts how Benioff tried to strong arm Zoho into giving up on its CRM development:

Benioff told me he could not permit us to play on the AppExchange as things stood, but he would be happy to acquire us. We had several rounds of meetings on this,  finally I told him I really don’t see any cultural compatibility between the companies. He changed tack and repeatedly tried to get us to discontinue Zoho CRM, in return we would get to play on AppExchange. I was furious because both Benioff and his team clearly knew we had a CRM offering going into this engagement, and if they had this as a pre-condition for us to integrate into AppExchange, we would never have put in the resources we did.

Since then, Salesforce has repeatedly tried to block customers from migrating to Zoho CRM, by telling them (falsely) that they cannot take their data out of Salesforce until their contract duration is over. We have emails from customers recounting this.

This is not a new story but one I have heard Vembu recall on a number of occasions. Vembu then goes on to assert that while Google represents a potentially much bigger competitive threat, Zoho has experienced no difficulty in getting engineering assistance from Google. What’s going on here?

Readers need to understand that Benioff comes from Oracle, a company famed for playing hardball as epitomized by its CEO, Larry Ellison. Oracle has a knack of turning out hard nosed, often successful Silicon Valley execs that are super competitive. Benioff is another in a long line of execs that include Tom Siebel (Siebel Systems), Craig Conway (PeopleSoft) and Zach Nelson (NetSuite.)

These companies understand one thing - winning is all about lock in and with the Force.com, Salesforce.com is no different any of its predecessors. Benioff as near admitted as much when he said to Ha that:

When an audience member pressed Benioff on his touted openness, Benioff emphasized that he’s talking about cooperation with other companies, not open source, per se. He also acknowledged that Force.com has its closed aspects, namely the fact that if you build an application on Force.com, you can connect it to other platforms, but you can’t fully move it to another cloud.

Ergo once you’re on Salesforce.com’s cloud for business critical applications, you are in no different a position than if your code was tied to SAP’s ABAP. You can’t move without significant retooling. This runs contrary to many people’s expectations about what ‘cloud computing’ is all about; openness, flexibility and the ability to on and off-ramp as requirements demand. That may not apply so easily for transaction based systems and that is what Salesforce.com is counting upon.

Is Zoho alone? Is it a case of the yappy dog going after the farmyard pitbull because it isn’t getting its share of scraps? Hardly. If GE successfully completes its evaluation of Zoho Office, then Zoho will have scored one of the biggest, if not THE biggest saas applications deals to date. Something that must stick in Benioff’s throat but which ironically will have been won from Google.

On the Silicon Valley grapevine, I have heard of other cases where Benioff has tried to strong arm technology vendors, only to be sent away with his tail between his legs. Of course in the Valley, there is always an element of hubris, but every now and again, these stories bubble up.

As Salesforce.com gets bigger and it attracts more developers to its Force.com platform, we can expect more yapping and reminders about however much Benioff may declare his love, he is really acting like every other enterprise vendor that has gone before: locking you in while smiling benignly. In the long term, that also means higher cost as the captor squeezes as much out of its prisoners as possible.

Zoho steps up its contextual search game

Zoho on Tuesday rolled out a search feature for its business apps that allow users to aggregate data across a company.

The so-called “actionable search” consolidates a bevy of search boxes specific to each Zoho application—Zoho Mail, Docs, Writer, Sheet etc. Zoho said in a blog post that its results are designed to show the interworking of the business apps and gives you context on relationships between the data on a single page.

As for the actionable part, Zoho said that each result allows a user to open an application from within search results. For instance, an email app doesn’t have to launch to reply to a missive in a search result.

Zoho’s new search is another incremental feature designed to better compete with rivals ranging from Google to Microsoft. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu said in a recent interview that the company was staking its claimon contextual relevance between its various applications.

The Zoho universal search box will be integrated into all Zoho Apps.

Latest Enhancements in Zoho Recruit Applicant Tracking System

Zoho Recruit - Applicant Tracking System - continues to provide its users with significant enhancements since its launch. These enhancements have come about as a result of listening to our users' - that is you, dear readers - recommendations. And we attribute Zoho Recruit's big success to our users' suggestions. Following are the some of the latest user requested improvements in Zoho Recruit.

Multi-Select Pick List Field in Customization
Multi-Select Pick List has long been one of our most requested features. Zoho Recruit now provides the multi-select pick list field, which enables selecting multiple values while creating and editing records. For instance, your organization may be offering an opportunity for candidates with different skill sets, and some of your candidates may have multiple skills. In this case you can use the multi-select pick list (instead of the single pick list option) and this helps the candidates to choose multiple skills in which they are qualified.

Spanish, Korean and Portuguese Languages Support
Zoho Recruit - Applicant Tracking System is accessed around the world and many of our users speak languages other than English. Spanish, Korean and Portuguese are the latest languages to be support by Zoho Recruit's UI.

Rich Text Editor for Composing Email Messages
With mail inside Zoho Recruit, you can not only send plain text emails or messages containing attachments but can now send Rich Text formatted emails with the ability to change the colors, font, font size, text alignments, insert images and links, etc.

Earlier my email messages were simple.

Now my email messages in Zoho Recruit are a lot more stylish.

File Formats Supported by Zoho

A Zoho user wanted to know this info recently - all the file formats supported by Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show. We came up with a Zoho Sheet containing the relevant info, which is embedded below. Hope this will be of help to all Zoho users.

Zoho Wiki scores heavily by being the de facto team collaboration tool within Zoho. Various groups like usability engineers, developers, QA across different teams in Zoho have implemented Zoho Wiki for sharing the design docs, reviewing the feature sets, storing the release plans and even documenting best coding practices. Technical writers use Zoho Wiki for writing our help manuals. Marketing team tracks the marketing efforts in a Wiki. Our resellers and partners across the globe, collaborate with us via wiki. In fact, Zoho's intranet runs on Zoho Wiki.

It is quite surprising to note how varied the implementations are. All this is possible, mainly because

• Zoho Wiki is flexible enough to mold itself and cater to the diverse needs within an organization.
• Each team gets its own space within the company with separate admin controls. Team Workspaces within the organization wiki allows collaboration with internal groups as well as third parties like resellers and partners.
• Enterprise level security - You can set different permissions for different groups of users.
• Easy implementation - it takes just a few minutes to set up a wiki and start working.
• Very Intuitive - Right from HR to Finance to Sales, all employees can easily adapt to this business wiki.

We have launched a new Product Video that will help you see if Zoho Wiki can be the answer to your company's quest for an Affordable Enterprise Wiki. Have a look and let us know your thoughts. Also, keep us posted on how you use Zoho Wiki within your organization.

New in Zoho CRM: Mail merge in the cloud with Zoho Writer integration

We've said before that going forward, you should expect a lot more integration across all of our products. We are working hard on doing just that, so Zoho products become more useful for our users. Today we are ready with another one of these integrations: Zoho CRM integrated with Zoho Writer.

A CRM product and an online word processor? Yes. See... until now, if you wanted to do a traditional mail-merge (the kind that goes in the mail), you were only able to do it with a desktop application such as Microsoft Word or Open Office. But with Zoho CRM and Zoho Writer now you can do that entirely on the web. Last year we introduced the Zoho CRM Plug-in for Microsoft Office, and since then many customers asked us via e-mail and our forums: why can't I do that with Zoho Writer? Well, now you can!

Mail merge requires you to have access to the "data" fields (those fields that you want to replace with unique values from your CRM database on the final output). You of course also have access to this list of fields from within the Zoho Writer interface when you are creating a mail merge template:

(Before you run to try this within Zoho Writer - no... you won't find it there, you need to access this from within Zoho CRM.)

The Zoho Writer Add-on for Zoho CRM is is available today for all of our Professional and Enterprise edition customers. Find more information about how to do your crm mail-merge entirely easily and with no install or configuration required.

New in Zoho Invoice: Import/Export of Expenses

Expense tracking is a topic which will be of interest to every one of our users . Saving up on expenses is the key to a successful business. Ain't that true?

To begin with, we'll tell you what expense tracking in Zoho Invoice is all about and then we'll fill you in on all what you need to know about our brand new addition,  the option to import/export expenses. 

First the basics. By using the expense tracking feature you can, 

• Keep track of your billable and non-billable expenses
• Invoice your customers for the billable expenses
• Record the payments received as reimbursements  
• Generate reports on your expenses

So it's a no-brainer that every expense counts, every dollar spent if reimbursed goes into your profit numbers. With Zoho Invoice, you spend only where you ought to. Here's a little visual on how getting the dough for every little expense made a big difference to a Zoho Invoice customer.

Now that you are well oriented on the expense tracking feature, it's time to know how you can record expenses on the go and get them imported into Zoho Invoice or how you can get the expenses recorded on any other system imported into Zoho Invoice. 

The new addition to expense tracking is the option to Import/Export expenses. You can now import your expenses from any other application into Zoho Invoice easily. Get your expenses on a CSV or TSV file and three simple steps later, your expenses will be imported. Here's how it works,       

1. Select the file to be imported 
2. Map the fields from your import file.  
3. Get a preview of your import statistics and begin importing

   

As easy as it can get. Isn't it? On that note..... spend, record and raise your profits.

And as we always say, don't forget to voice out your suggestions, comments and of course your love for Zoho Invoice.  Until we cue in another interesting tweak to Zoho Invoice, happy invoicing!

Zoho Invoice & Zoho Creator Helpdesk integrate with Google Apps

When Google launched its G Apps Marketplace, Zoho was one of the chosen few launch partners. We presented our integration of Zoho CRM andZoho Projects with Google using GData API and were chosen to be one of the featured applications in the newly launched marketplace. Pleased by the response that we got from the G Apps users, we decided to take it further and integrate some of our other business applications with Google.

Today, we have two new applications integrated with Google Apps - Zoho Invoice & Zoho Creator Helpdesk.

Zoho Invoice
Zoho Invoice is a full featured online invoicing application. Earlier this year, we revamped the app with a new look and great set of new features. All these features, including the option to send invoices through postal mail, are now available to Google Apps users.

Zoho Invoice is now available in Google Apps Marketplace under Accounts & Finance category. Once Zoho Invoice is added to Google Apps, you can provide access to select users from your Google Apps account. Zoho Invoice also has the ability to import contacts from Google Contacts allowing you to send invoices/estimates to your Google Apps contacts. An Open Social gadget for Zoho Invoice is also available to be contextually included in apps like Gmail, iGoogle & Google Sites.

Zoho Creator Helpdesk
Zoho Creator Helpdesk is a Helpdesk and Customer Support Software fully integrated with Google Apps. Zoho Creator Helpdesk is a fully featured, web-based help desk software that lets Google App users to manage all their support requests coming in from email, support website or web forms

Here are some of the key highlights of the app.

• Trouble Ticket Management
  Your customers can create trouble tickets via web form or through an e-mail. Zoho Creator Helpdesk automates request routing, defines your SLA compliance, enables SLA escalations and gives a consolidated report view of what's happening with your help desk. 
• Asset Management
  Zoho Creator Helpdesk has an integrated Asset Management solution along with the help desk functions. With the integrated Asset Management, Zoho Creator Helpdesk provides you with an accurate inventory of all the hardware, software assets in your organization
• Knowledge Base
  A web-based searchable knowledge base system helps in reducing the turn around time for the request resolution. The Knowledge Base acts as a knowledge sharing medium, increases support productivity and assists in effective knowledge management.
• Reporting
  Zoho Creator Helpdesk provides extensive reports on Priority, Status, Technician and Deadline of Support requests
• Fully Customizable - Path breaking and First time ever
  Zoho Creator Helpdesk is probably the first Helpdesk software that lets you customize Helpdesk forms, fields, reports and look and feel to suit specific needs of your organization. You don't have to write any code or hire a tech-guy, you can customize it all by yourself using easy to use drag-and-drop interface

You can

• Create  UNLIMITED number of Forms to collect information
• Add UNLIMITED number of Fields (Eg: Name, Email, Phone Number.....)
• Rearrange the order of the fields and rename with ease
• Create Reports - View your data as a List, Calendar, Summary or as a Chart
• Change the look and feel of your Helpdesk app. Choose from different sets of layout and the color themes

Pricing & Availability
Both Zoho Invoice & Zoho Creator Helpdesk are priced affordably. You can create up to 5 invoices for free per month in Zoho Invoice. Paid plans start at $8/month. Additional information is available here.

Zoho Creator Helpdesk is available for free for up to 2 technicians. The pricing for 3 technicians starts at $15/month. For yearly and half-yearly subscriptions, discounts are available. Additional details are available here.

You can get started by installing our apps from Google Apps Marketplace.

ps: We would like to thank the Google team for their continued cooperation and support.

A Guide to Installing Magento on 1and1 Shared Hosting.

Hopefully you are aware that there limitations when using a sharedhosting provider, often implemented to allow the provider to keep the server secure. Luckily with 1and1 we are able to work around this and allow Magento access to PHP 5.2 (Please note this guide is just for using with 1and1’s shared hosting solutions). Enjoy!

Getting Started

• Setup your MySQL database

1. Navigate to your 1and1 Administration tab in your 1and1 control panel
2. Using the 1and1 MySQL Administration page click New Database, start a fresh one just for Magento
3. Make sure its set to use MySQL version 5.0, fill in YOUR details as shown below

• Download the latest Magento installation package (full release, not installer)-> http://www.magentocommerce.com/download (at time of writing its version 1.4.0.1)
• Upload this to your server (yes, upload the Magento zipped folder)
• In your 1and1 control panel navigate to your web space explorer and right click on the .zip file you just uploaded and extract it. You are able to move/rename the folder if you need to.
• Now you need to go back to your favourite FTP program and CHMOD the following files and folders to 777

1. magento/var/.htaccess (file)
2. magento/app/etc (folder)
3. magento/var (folder)
4. magento/media (folder)

• Download the .htaccess file found in the root directory of your Magento install.
• Edit the file, removing the comments from:

############################################
## this line is specific for 1and1 hosting

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

############################################

• This allows you to use PHP 5.0
• You will also need to un-comment “#RewriteBase /magento/” and edit it if you changed the location of your install
• Re-upload the .htaccess file
• Make sure the MySQL database is READY, this is shown in the 1and1 control panel under MySQL Administration
• Now you can begin the install goto http://www.you_domain.com/magento/index.php/install
• From here you just need to add the details requested by the installation program, copying and pasting from the 1and1 control panel as needed
• To enter the adming section of magento just point your browser to http://www.you_domain.com/magento/index.php/admin (or whatever you alter admin to in the installation)

I hope you have found this 1and1 Magento setup guide useful, its been put together by myself after having issues setting up Magento on my shared 1and1 account. Info has been taken from a number of installation guides from the net and reworded by myself.