At last Google (aka Search giant) has decided to make the search in Google Apps more convenient. We can't say that until now it was bad, but if you wanted to find an email - you had to open GMail, if you wanted to find a document - you opened Google Docs, etc. Thus, to get a full view about any client or task you had to collect data from various sources. Now GMail has added a new feature called Google Apps Search that allows to the search for documents from Google Docs and pages from Google Sites right inside your inbox (you can activate this feature in the GMail Labs). Unfortunately, this search does not include results from Google Calendar and Google Notebook. Unlike Google, Zoho was more fundamental in online office search. Early this summer it released Zoho Search, which is a separate service (like google.com) that can search in all major Zoho apps. As you can see, Zoho prefers to create new services, and Google is positioning GMail, as the primary user interface for all Google Apps applications.

The online project management and project collaboration service Zoho Projects becomes interesting for software companies, as it gets quite functional bug tracker. It allows you to add bugs, assign owners, collaborate on bugs and control their statuses. There are flexible options for email-notifications of various actions in the system. You can set the individual processes and rules for the automation of certain operations - for example, when issue status changed, it can automatically be assigned to another owner (for example, to tester) and change its priority. Unfortunately, the bug tracker is included only in the most expensive Zoho Projects subscription plan ($ 699 per year for 30 GB and unlimited number of users). But for these money you get the most featured online project management system on the market, which includes: project plan, calendar, tasks, file sharing, forum, chat, wiki, time tracker, billing, bug tracker, reports. In addition, Zoho Projects is seamlessly integrates with other Zoho services and Google Apps.

Today, Zoho updated its Zoho Calendar and released it out of beta. And Zoho's chief evangelist, Raju Vegesna, called this service the best online calendar in the market. Given that he is a modest person, and Zoho never promoted its products with loud statements, perhaps, this is true. At least, this service is no worse than Google Calendar, simply because it's a complete clone of Google Calendar. Zoho Calendar allows to create multiple calendars, share them (with different access levels), set reminders (by email, RSS), send invitations, embed public calendars on your site / blog. It has a plugin for Outlook (for synchronization), mobile version and supports offline access with Google Gears. Calendars can be synchronized with external services via ICAL protocol. And of course, Zoho Calendar is tightly integrated to other Zoho services (CRM, Projects, Planner, Mail, Chat).

Although Zoho is positioned as a SaaS vendor for small business, it doesn't forget about the enterprise customers. The new features in Zoho Wiki 2.0 primarily target large companies. First of all, that are workspaces, which are useful for creating separate wikis for company departments. Each workspace has its own administration panel, security settings and appearance (customizable at CSS level). The access control system (which is also actual for large companies) was dramatically improved. Now you can set the detailed access rights at page, workspace or wiki level for employees, user groups, domains or customers.

We have become accustomed to the fact that Zoho is mainly a step ahead of Google Apps. But today's Zoho new feature is especially insulting for Google. It is Zoho, but not the search giant, who is first to deploy the unified search in the online office. Zoho Search indexes data from Zoho Mail, Docs, Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook, Discussions, Contacts and allows you to find all the contextual results for any request from those sources. The search results can be filtered by application or date range. Found emails and documents can be opened directly on the search portal, without opening the appropriate service. Besides. directly in the search results you do different actions - for instance, reply to an email. Meanwhile Zoho Search works only as a separate service (with an interface very similar to google.com). But soon the universal search box will appear in all the suite apps.

This week, Microsoft filed a lawsuit against Salesforce, blaming the SaaS company in violating 9 patents. These patents are not about CRM functionality (it would be strange, because Salesforce CRM appeared earlier than Microsoft CRM was developed), but about basic software technologies. For example, here is the technology of displaying web-page with embedded menu: "A request for a web page is received from a web browser In response to the request, a web page and an applet associated with the web page are packaged for transmission to the web browser. The web page and the applet are then transmitted to and downloaded by the web browser. When the web page is displayed and the applet is executed by the web browser, the applet creates and manages an embedded menu in the displayed web page under control of the applet . This embedded menu provides a user of the web browser with a plurality of links through one action in the displayed web page." Perhaps having this patent, Microsoft could close any SaaS vendor, but they have chosen Salesforce, their main competitor on CRM market.

Zoho (as usuall very quietly) launched the new service Zoho Assist - the solution for remote customer support (primarily useful for software vendors). Of course, it's not the revolutionary service for Zoho because long ago they developed Zoho Meeting - the web-conferencing tool. And Zoho Assist is built on top of it. It works like this: support technician creates an online session and invites customer (via email). The customer clicks on the link in the mail, opens the session in the browser and (in one click) installs the small plugin for remote control. Then the technician can demonstrate his own desktop to customer or remotely control his computer.

Perhaps the main purpose of all enterprise social tools that are now widely deployed in business applications, is to create a Team environment at work. When employees know more about each other, they are more interested in working together and achieving common goals. And where can you find out more about a person? Most likely, in the external social network (like Facebook), he (or she) would express himself better than in the intranet profile. So, why not use Facebook as an internal social network? Today it has become especially easy for Zoho users. Zoho has added support for Facebook Connect and enabled logging in their applications using Facebook account.

Zoho released version 2.0 of its online invoicing service Zoho Invoice. One of the major updates is the appearance of Expenses module, so now the service can be used as an online accounting app for service companies. Of course, it lacks legal compliance, but it's a great solution for estimating, tracking time, money expenses and revenues. In addition, the latest release includes a beautiful design, multi-user access to the company account (for collaboration) and an open API, that enables to integrate Zoho Invoice with other applications. Thanks to the tighter integration with Zoho Mail you can link email history which tracks your email exchanges with your clients to the invoice.

As you know, Google Apps has no specialized project management solution, and this is very disappointing, as there are many other useful utilities for online workgroups there. However, there are three tools that can be used to solve this problem. And the first of them is Google Sites. You can use Google Sites to manage one large project, or create a site for each small project in it (there are even some templates for project sites). Since Google Sites is, in fact, a wiki, you can easily work with the project documentation there. In addition, Google Sites allows you to embed group calendar (Google Calendar), task list (Google Tasks) and documents from Google Docs. All these elements are very useful for project management, but of course, task collaboration in this solution - is the weakness.

Zoho's Chief Evangelist, Raju Vegesna, in a brief interview to CloudAve shared his vision of Zoho strategy and the nearest plans of this SaaS provider. Of course, the most interesting is how Raju sees Zoho in future on the market where it competes with Google, Microsoft and Salesforce. In his opinion, Zoho will remain an independent company and will become the leading provider for small business. He even suggeted the term SMB 2.0 (opposed to Enterprise 2.0). The clear positioning Zoho on small business will enable them to compete with IT giants, that are primarily targeting large clients. After all, affordable price, suitable functionality and positive feedback from other users matter more for small business than the big vendor name. That's why Zoho, instead of spending millions on advertising, sales army and partner network, invests all the resources to the software development.

Still, Google should think about buying Zoho. And not in order to get rid of the competitor or to utilize Zoho services, but to attract this Indian developers team that can create 10 updates, while Google's team is working on one. For example, today in Zoho integrated Google Docs into its online services. No you can upload documents from Google Docs to Zoho Docs, attach documents from Google Docs to the records in Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects, view them in the Zoho editors and send Google documents in Zoho Mail emails. Why Google has not still implemented the ability to attach their documents to emails in GMail, and pages in Google Sites - it's not clear. Why Zoho integrates Zoho Docs, though its own document editors are even better - it's quite reasonable.

The opportunity to engage world's best talents (regardless of their geographic location) in business - is the primary mission of SaaS and Cloud Computing technologies. That's why the release of Zoho Recruit and LinkedIn open platform is quite important. Zoho Recruit - is a new online service for recruitment agencies and HR-departments that automates their recruiting processes. It helps to track job openings, resumes (candidates), contacts, search for candidates, puplish jobs openings on the site, send invitations, schedule interviews and log the communication with candidates. But perhaps the main Zoho Recruit feature is the parser that can extract resumes from email, folders on your computer, job search portals, social networks, search results in Google, and than parse the basic data and put it into the database. By the way, Zoho developers decided not to create  this functionality from scratch, but to integrate the world-best solution - Resume Grabber.

Zoho continues to integrate its products with competitors. At that time the online project management service, Zoho Projects, was integrated with Google Apps. And it makes sense, as Google Apps don't provide own project and task management tools. So what has been done? First, customers can now login to Zoho Projects with the same username and password they use for Google Apps. Second, from now users can link their documents from Goolge Docs to the projects inside Zoho Projects (its interesting that Google still doesn't provide similar function in GMail and Google Sites, where it could be useful).

Zoho unveiled its anniversary (twentieth) service. It is Zoho Discussions - a solution for company forum. Zoho recommends to use this tool as a customer support forum, but you can also setup access rules and use it as an intranet forum for internal collaboration. Unlike the popular forum engines (phpbb, vbulletin), Zoho Discussion provides less features, but the functions that are important for customer support are quite powerful. Besides the solution setup (on your own domain) and administration is much more easier than in case with common forum CMS. The best way to see Zoho Discussions in action is to visit Zoho support forum, that uses the same platform.

All we know Zoho, as a provider of SaaS applications. But  it appears that they also supply all these services as an in-house solution for large enterprises (more than 10000 users). I.e. Zoho Suite can be installed in the corporate data center behind the firewall. Besides the hight security level this solution enables enterprise IT easily integrate Zoho Apps with other business applications. But the price tag is too high. And even not because of Zoho Suite costs, but because an enterprise needs to create a copy of Zoho cloud infrastructure (at least one server per one service).