Zoknow - News

Zoho's scale problem - a multinational mess

Wed, 01 May 2024 17:54:54 +1000

I am a fervent Zoho advocate. I jumped head first into our Zoho One implementation with the desire to go as deep into the Zoho ecosystem as is possible, with the ultimate ambition of having the most integrated and seamless experience possible. I even started this website to document and share my experiences.

However, even before I signed up to Zoho One, I knew there was a problem. Zoho told me that they would sort it. I paid for Enterprise Support because they told me they would sort it.

Not only have they not sorted it. They have profited from not sorting it.

Right now, the sad reality of Zoho is that if you have ambitions to operate beyond a single border, then Zoho One is going to break down.

I understand Zoho's multiple data centre model, whereby your data centres sit on servers local to your company. Particularly in India, where we have a subsidiary and the majority of our staff are located, there are a bunch of regulations surrounding the onshoring of data and laws quite specific to India.

When it comes to products like Zoho's FInancial Suite this multiple DC model makes sense.

However, for things like your productivity software you don't want to have one account in India for your India team, and one account in Australia for your Australian team.

So when we took up our Zoho subscription we had two choices. Have two Zoho One subscriptions, one for each country and that would let us have access to two sets of Financial suites, Backstage and everywhere else where local currency support was important. However, it would mean we couldn't sit on the same Cliq server or email server. Every time we shared documents we'd get a warning about sharing beyond our account, etc.

Cliq is so critical for us being able to communicate beyond borders, it wasn't a sacrifice I was willing to make.

We would have even been happy to do have a single instance if we could have chosen the data centre for each. For example, we run our India finances and accounts on Books, but use Xero in Australia so I don't need two instances. But I do need an Australian instance of Billings and I can't have Australian Billings and Indian Books under the one Zoho account.

We went back and forth for months on the best way to resolve this, and we even eventually got two organisations on two different default currencies. Technically, we finally sorted it out.

Except I didn't think it fair that I had to pay for the second instance of Billings. It's not a huge amount of money, but why should I have to pay for this second subscription to work around Zoho's limitations. I was offered a 10 per cent discount. I refused it as insulting. If you're going to rip me off, you can have the extra $5 a month.

Ordinarily, this would have me packing my bags. However, it was a massive bet to give up Hubspot and Google for Zoho, and not easily reversible. So I'm kind of stuck.

But if you have subsidiaries in more than one country, be warned that Zoho One is just a world of pain. Even if you plan to have subsidiaries in more than one country, it's not worth jumping in until Zoho sort this mess out.

Projects 8 is a MASSIVE change but is dangerous

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 09:47:36 +1100

Zoho last week announced the latest version of Project 8.0 and it's a much-needed and potentially transformative update to the product.

The biggest new feature of the product is what you might call a Sheets view. Zoho can now present data in an editable spreadsheet-like view that has become popular in products like Monday, Clickup and Smartsheet.

The reason that style of view has become so popular and contributed to huge growth experienced by those products is ease-of-use. Just like any user can start hacking away at a spreadsheet to make it fit for purpose, the sheet view in Projects makes the product far easier to customise.

Instead of going into settings to do things like creating custom fields, customising status lists or pick views, it can all be done from within the sheet.

I'd personally been putting off customising a project for one of our teams and once I had access to Sheets I was able to make all the required changes in minutes. More so, I feel confident that the team will now be able to make the changes themselves going forward.

However, I can imagine not everyone is going to love this. One of the distinguishing features of Zoho Projects, is the level of control it enables an organisation to put in place. Blueprints and the many customisation options allow a company with disciplined project management practices in place, to keep users within a set of guard-rails.

It's worth noting that the new Sheet view is actually named List view, and it completely replacing the old plain and classic views. As a former Click Up user, the Sheet view feels very natural to me, but I imagine that long-time Zoho Projects users are going to find this jarring and have no ability to view their data in the way they used to.

Essentially Zoho has gone all-in on the sheet view. You now control your automations, view Gannt charts and more from with the view and this same UX is employed across both desktop and mobile. The sheet views has been appplied across the entire product as well, so it doesn't matter it you're looking at your tasks, projects, issues or even timesheets, they are all presented within this same UX.

What is not entirely clear is how the old world and new worlds combine. For example, if you have users creating custom fields all over the place, how are those associated with various blueprints and layouts. What's more it is not clear at all whether any changes you make to the sheet your viewing impacts everybody's view or just your own.

So for the example, I described above, I created custom status types for the team's project and have now realised those changes have been made across all projects. All of the products I described above that use these sheet views, treat each product very distinctly. Zoho needs to warn a user if they are editing something that is going to impact other projects and other users.

Imagine if you let a whole bunch of users go on this, and they make the same assumptions as I did. That could cause complete chaos with a company's project structures because users don't realise their making changes that impact more than just the view they are editing.

We're going to continue digging into Projects 8.0 and will share more of our experiences soon. However, right now, know that this update is going to make your end-users very happy, but if you have strict project management disciplines in place already, you're really going to want to understand how these sheets work before thrusting this version onto long-time users.

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Zoknow run 100% Zoho - even Sites!

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 00:51:36 +1100

I'm not going to pretend that Zoho Sites is the best platform for Zoknow to be launched upon. I'd even gone to the trouble of setting up the site on Wordpress.

However, at the last minute I re-thought that decision and figured that wouldn't really be in the spirit of this site, not to use Zoho's platform.

Unfortunately, I think I'm already regretting it.

However, now that I've gone done that path, I'm going to make sure that everything to do with this site is performed with one of Zoho's application, unless there is no option.

Zoho One is unparalled in terms of the breadth of the software that a company gets to employ. However, we all know that some Zoho applications are better than others.

I think it's fair to say that Sites is a fair way behind its direct competitors, Wix and Squarespace. That's a shame because every company's website is the centre piece of their sales and marketing, and not running your website on Zoho misses a bunch of opportunities for useful integrations with Zoho's marketing suite.

However, as a blogging/media platform, Sites is even more unwieldy. The fact that Zoho's own website and blogs don't run on Sites is testament to that. and there is no blog/news template that you can start with to get you up and running quickly like there are for other types of sites.

I have already hit a plethora of problems trying to get this site to look and behave the way I want it to. For example, I can create Authors but there is no option for profile pictures, bios, or contact links.

Anyhow, I've made this commitment to run on Sites now. Zoho has really been taking most of its applications to next-level of late, so here's hoping there's some big improvements in store for the Sites product as well.

Zohos drop big marketing upgrade

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 23:02:01 +1100

Zoho last week announced a major change to its marketing offering with the launch of Marketing Automation 2.0.

Marketing Automation brings the majority of its marketing tools together under one platform. Lead management, omni-channel campaign tools, landing pages and pop-ups, journey builders, planning and asset management are all built into what is pretty close to being an all-in-tool for marketers.

It seems likely this tool will pretty much replace Zoho's existing marketing tools, like the original marketing automation tool and also campaigns. Indeed if you have CRM integrated with Campaigns right now you'll have to disable that integration to start using the new Marketing Automation platform.

That is likely to require a significant rethink of how Zoho sells and packages its marketing tools. One would imagine given that Campaigns is part of this solution that is will be deprecated and that will impact its bundles like the marketing suite and CRMPlus. Zoho did suggest at its recent Zoholics event in India that all of the company's marketing tools are going to be integrated in into CRMPlus.

The core of the new Marketing Automation platform is a new lead management module. Zoho has simply called it Contacts, and it integrates tightly with both your leads and contacts from Zoho CRM.

The various marketing tools all integrate tightly into this contacts management platform, pulling in leads from email campaigns, landing pages, pop-ups, social, SMS and more.

The customer journey build lets you then automate lead nurturing across all of these channels and finally there is an enhanced website analytics capability to bring it all together.

The suite borrows some of the capabilities of Page Sense but there doesn't get capabilities like heat maps or session recording so it's not quite a one-stop shop. Surveys aren't part of the engagement tools, either.

Marketing Automation 2.0 is a really compelling product and a definite step forward for Zoho's offering to marketers, which has probably been the laggard in the company's bundles.

Welcome to Zoknow: Independent news and views about Zoho

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 23:49:00 +1100

When you buy into the Zoho ecoystem of apps, it's really a big decision, particularly in you are a Zoho One customer.

That's what my company has just done. I've been watching Zoho's progress as a technology journalist, technology implementor and business leader for more than two decades now. And every time I evaluated Zoho software, it just seemed to fall short of what ever best-in-class product I was looking for.

However, more recently I started evaluating Zoho's software again, and each product had improved significantly from my prior evaluations. More so, the integrations are really coming together and as a business owner who has had immense frustrations trying to get the various parts of my software stack to talk to each, this was a really compelling proposition.

So we're going Zoho One.

However, once I made that decision I found I became pretty much addicted to every update I could possibly find about Zoho. I gorged on Zenatta Consulting's Youtube channel but there just wasn't enough content floating around to satisfy my thirst for Zoho knowledge.

So what else is a long-time technology journalist to do, but start a Zoho website?

I mentioned I've followed Zoho for a long time. In the midst of the Web 2.0 boom in the early 2000's, I wrote a blog on the new generation of Web 2.0 based software that became quite popular. I was writing just as Zoho was coming to be, and bringing its Writer and other online productivity applications to market. I even exchanged a few messages with Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu.

I also feel an affinity with the way Zoho has been run. Like Zoho, I've bootstrapped my company for the past couple of decades. And where Sridhar has a passion for bringing opportunity to regional India, I've always run my business from my local area in the outer suburbs of Sydney, where there aren't a lot of opportunities to work in tech or media companies.

So I decided to start Zoknow. The idea of the site is that we want to help you be "in the know" about everything Zoho.

I truly think Zoho is on the precipice of exploding. There is nothing in the software sector like Zoho One, and as I said previously, it's software is now maturing quickly where it is in line with best-in-class products. But no other vendor can offer the breadth and level of integration that Zoho does, not even Microsoft.

However, Zoknow will be fiercely independent. I'm just a Zoho customer. I'm not selling Zoho products or services so my views will be honest and forthright. I want Zoho's software to be better, because I've pretty much bet my business on the Zoho One application suite.

At this point, I'm going to let the site evolve organically. I don't know how often I'll post or what exactly I'm going to post. I imagine it will be a mix of news, opinions and product reviews and analysis. But I have a long history of creating websites that are heavy on community, so if I find the energy to keep this going long-term that's where I'd like to take it.

I hope you come to find Zoknow a useful resource.