Zoho Joins Google Apps Marketplace
by Bill Ives
Google’s recently launched its online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services. The Google Apps Marketplace makes it easier for more than two million Google Apps customers to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services. By integrating with user account and application data stored in Google Apps, these cloud applications provide a simpler user experience that can increase business efficiency and reduce administrative overhead.
Now Zoho recently announced it has added Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects to the Google Apps Marketplace.™ These are two of their most popular offerings. Zoho had previously integrated their apps with Google at the log-in level with single sign-on. Now, they are taking their integrations deepe using the enhanced APIs for Google Apps.
Users gain a variety of benefits from the integration of the Zoho applications with Google Apps. For all Zoho applications, the integration lets users automatically sign in to the Zoho applications with their existing Google Apps credentials. In addition, Zoho Business applications are listed in Google’s universal navigation, and Zoho application gadgets can be embedded in relevant Google applications, such as Gmail™, iGoogle™ and Google Sites™.
With Zoho CRM users can view Gmail emails in Zoho CRM contextually, so all Gmail emails exchanged with a Zoho CRM contact can be viewed. Users can also import contacts from Google Apps to Zoho CRM, view Zoho CRM calendar events in Google Calendar, and more.
With Zoho Projects users can view Zoho Project calendar events in Google Calendar and attach Google Docs™ files to Zoho Projects.
Here is an interesting post, It Is Not About Our App, It Is About the User’s Data and Context, by Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu that discusses their integrate with Google Apps. He writes that an important emerging theme in cloud applications is the one-browser-tab approach to design. In this case there is contextual integration of information across applications, so that whatever app the user happens to be in, relevant information is pulled from other apps and displayed it in the right context. This is a good move.
