Over the past few months we played around with a number of online collaboration suites. We were searching for a way to organize everything and have a central dashboard to keep track of projects, tasks, and timelines for multiple users.
Some of the tools we tried were Jotspot, PBwiki, Zoho, and Basecamp.
As much as Michael Arrington gets excited about Zoho (they’re a TechCrunch sponsor), I just don’t get it. They have Zoho Office, which comes in a hosted and a self-install version. Then there are subsets of office as well as a whole slew of “services” some of which are part of office, some of which are separate but can be integrated. Here’s a list of what Zoho offers:
Zoho Chat
Zoho Planner
Zoho Creator
Zoho CRM
Zoho Projects
Zoho Writer
Zoho Sheet
Zoho Show
Zoho Wiki
Zoho Notebook
Zoho Virtual Office
Zoho Challenge
Zoho Polls
Zoho was kind enough to extend us a beta invite, but after spending hours on trying to figure out the system, we gave up. Zoho (in its current state anyway) has massive usability issues. The systems are complex and capable, but very user-unfriendly. We spent hours to try to figure out where the different services were and how the modules fit together (and how they could even be enabled). We tried to add team members and give them permissions, but at one point even our own account was locked out from making admin changes.
Zoho is just a mess overall. I don’t get the hype (other than them paying for it).
We ended up settling with Basecamp, which is pretty decent, but there’s still a lot of room to grow in the online collaboration space. Maybe Google will make Jotspot into a real contender, but I really want someone else to do it. Google gets usability more than any other company, but I’m just getting sick of feeding the Google beast.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Markus:
Sorry about the confusion you were having on Zoho. If you have 15 minutes, I’d love to talk to you and explain the big picture. Please let me know.
Don’t worry, Google will not achieve it’s goal of world domination, as long as Yahoo! is around to keep The Beast in check :-)
Markus,
Thank you for taking the time to evaluate Zoho, and I am sorry to let you down. Let me try to provide some explanation. Our first goal in Zoho is to provide discrete, individual applications that are powerful in and of themselves. As an example, Zoho Writer aims to be a full featured word processor, Zoho Sheet, a powerful spreadsheet, Zoho Projects an online project management application and so on. We have enabled collabaratioin within each application, but other than single sign-on across (most) Zoho applications, collaboration across applications is still very much work in progress. We expect to make some announcements in that respect soon.
The reason we have taken this approach is to take a discrete problem (say, online presentation) and solve it well. This way, a user who needs an online presentation tool can use Zoho Show, and get real value out of it, and not have to worry about mastering all the other stuff there. We want very much a best-of-breed approach to it, rather than an all-or-nothing deal.
Your need is kind of orthogoal to it: you are looking for a “team portal” where everything is in one place. Zoho Projects would partially meet that need, but to be honest, it is not well integrated with other Zoho applications (that integration is coming soon). You can compare Zoho Projects against Basecamp and decide for yourself how we stack up.
Finally, I assure you that we are constantly improving the individual Zoho applications, making them more consistent in terms of user experience, and working on presenting a unified view.
Once again, thank you for taking the time.
Regards,
Sridhar Vembu
Thanks for writing about this. I think the name, Virtual office, caused the confusion. Currently Virtual office is a Messaging & Collaboration software with major focus on Email, Calendering & Documents. Other services are not fully integrated inside Virtual office. We are working on it & you will see them integrated soon.
For your requirements, please look at Zoho Projects ( http://www.zohoprojects.com ).
I feel every single word of this post, down to the last paragraph and sentence. Also decided to move to Basecamp just a few hours ago. Also sick of feeding the Google cookie monster. Their latest purchases make me feel a little ill, not to mention driving around these parts in that street view car. Talk about a conglomerate of bought companies, though. People forget it’s not really Google, it’s just Keyhole + Writely + Blogger ++… combined with a savvy and spendy legal team to handle assimilation.
Zoho needs a new interface design team and they could take a massive market share (hint to 3 commenters here: just because people have worked there for a while doesn’t make them good for you; I’m sure your programmers must be good to have churned out so much, but the interface is downright unfriendly for a newcomer; no matter what you say we will feel that way until it changes).
Basecamp won me back after years out the fold with this newsletter only last night: http://37assets.s3.amazonaws.com/newsletters/basecamp/2009-01-21.html — more specifically, what it linked to at http://basecamphq.com/extras since I already use FreshBooks and some of the other apps look bitchin’.