Increasing productivity with the Zoho stack

A while back, I wrote about the applications that help me go about my business. Since then, I’ve been testing the different apps in the Zoho stack and have slowly (but surely)  started canceling many of the products and services in favor of Zoho, not only because they are less expensive, but also because they’re better. Granted, in these times of uncertainty any savings are most welcome.

Here’s the list:

1. Virtual Presentations. I stopped using Gotomeeting and started using Zoho Meeting. There is nothing wrong with Gotomeeting, however I found myself giving virtual presentations to just one person at a time, which can be done for free and just as easily with Zoho Meeting.  Benefit: Savings of $50/month.
2. Mail. Outlook is now (as of this week) legacy software for me. I’m done waiting for Outlook to fix a data file that wasn’t closed properly (according to Outlook) and taking 45 seconds to open (on a Laptop with 2gb or Ram, but also with Vista). Zoho Mail is better than Outlook (and Gmail too). Plenty of cool features including the Quick Reply, Offline work, view emails as conversations or in sequential order and many others.  I’m actually enjoying using Email again. Benefit: No more headaches!
3. Team Collaboration.  I was a Groove (unpaid) evangelist and partner from 2003 until now and it was really fun to work with Ray Ozzie’s team while Groove was an independent company. However, since MS acquired Groove Networks, things have changed radically (for one, our mapping product was rendered obsolete when they shut down their APIs for in-process tools). I now use Huddle which takes advantage of the Zoho Remote API when I need to share information (Discussions, Files, Whiteboards) in workspaces. Otherwise, I use the sharing features available in Writer, Sheet and Show to collaborate with my virtual team. Benefits: Easier to use, no need to have Groove installed on every machine, cross-platform and browser-based, and better synchronous collaboration (e.g. documenting editing).
4. CRM. I found the Zoho CRM a bit overkill for what I do, but not so the Zoho Creator CRM app showcased in the Marketplace, which I can modify further to fit my specific needs. Benefits: Customizable and smaller.
5. Dashboard. Zoho Business helps me keep track tasks, calendar entries, links and notes. Benefits: Easy access to everything I need.

And here’s what I’d need to research further for:

1.  Invoicing. Change from Quickbooks Online to Zoho Invoice. I don’t have an issue with Quickbooks, but if I can save $25/month I currently pay, then I’ll move to Zoho Invoice.
2. CMS for my website. I would like to investigate Zoho Wiki as an option, but feel that there isn’t enough information about doing this. The examples provided look good and serve my purposes (web site, application documentation) - I just need to explore this further.

I have managed to change my software to Zoho (services), without having to give my credit card once and  now have a more productive environment than I did before; all while saving money and lots of headaches (priceless). I hope Zoho continues to provide these services for free for small businesses but I wouldn’t have any trouble paying a monthly fee for their stack, if this weren’t the case.

Of course, there is still a wish list; in effect, the availability of deluge scripting and/or Zoho Creator features in other apps would be quite handy.

Introducing ZCrIS

Zoho Creator Information Services (ZCrIS) is an experimental mail filter intended for Zoho Creator applications that need read/write access to various external web services.

As a trivial example of ZCrIS’ possible uses I’ve created a simple zip code checker for the United States. It’s a public ZC application; a quick look at how it’s put together plus a reminder from ZC Quicktip #1 posted at the end of October should give you some idea of how it’s working.

In essence a Zoho Creator application sends email to ZCrIS@landofzohocreator.com and indirectly reads from or writes to one or more external web services. ZCrIS receives the email your application sends, does your bidding, and sends the response data right back to your application, you guessed it, over email.

Documentation and more plugins will surface if there’s enough interest. Source code for ZCrIS itself is available at googlecode.com.

Please report any bugs and of course feel free to repurpose the basic ZCrIS code for your own particular needs.

Incidentally, for our own purposes we’re going to be using ZCrIS to post some real estate content up to Oodle in the next installment of our BuggyRocket series.

(ZCrIS’ pneumatic message cylinder was rendered at buttongenerator.com)

ZC Quicktip #1: Learn any Form’s Email Address

Every form in Zoho Creator has its own email address but if you don’t know where to look, finding it can be a little tricky. This 40 second screencast shows you right where it is:

Send Email to a Zoho Creator Form

In case you can’t or don’t want to view the video, the steps are basically:

1. Open up your application
2. Open up the form whose email address you want to learn
3. Click on the More Actions menu
4. Click Import Data
5. Select the By Email tab
6. Copy the email address that appears next to the text, “3. Email the filled data to: “

Discussion

This only works for forms that you yourself create in your own account but once you have the address you can publish it somewhere or share it with other people who may want to use the form in this way.

If the form your working with belongs to an application you’ve designated as Private, only users with whom you’ve shared the application can send email to the form, and only if they send it from the same personal email address they use in Zoho Creator.

If someone without permission to use a private application tries to email one of its forms, they will get a response email explaining that they don’t have permission.

Break a Body to Pieces

Goal:

Send a plain text (no HTML) email containing a multi-line message body.

Ideas:

The only way that seems to work for breaking up plain text email bodies across multiple lines in Zoho Creator is to use a Deluge textarea (Multi Line Drag and Drop) field as the argument for the sendmail() Message: field. The example application demonstrates this technique.

Blabber:

The issues has been raised before and a variation of it will work for HTML-based email messages, but in general this can be a remarkably frustrating task without the textarea approach in your toolkit.

Attempting to inline the string directly into the Message: field will result in the escaped newlines (”\n”) appearing as part of the string while attempting to use a regular text field will only give you the string up to the point of the first “\n” that appears.

Related Links:

Mulitselect data in emails

ZC Weirdness (potential bugs in the system):

None!