SaaS

I’ve always been into mindmaps since discovering them whilst studying for the Leaving. At the time I was reading Tony Buzans original book on the subject. I used them intermittently in University which stopped completely after graduating.

Lately I’ve been doing alot of work on business planning. In particular I’ve been following the Alex Osterwalder model for innovative business plans, thanks to Diane Roberts from xCellPartners (more on this model to come for those of you who may be unfamiliar).

After checking out at a number of Mind Mapping applicationd most of them running locally on the desktop I had more or less settled on Mindjet Mindmanager. I then came across another program called Mindmeister.com.

Straightaway things were promising, the look and feel of the site as well as the sign up process were similar to many current Web 2.0 applications. After signing up for the free version and logging in I was able to get cracking straightaway.

The main dashboard screen shows your latest mindmaps along with various configuration menus. From here you can start a new mindmap, edit existing ones as well as configure various options.

The user interface for creating mindmaps is extremely intuitive, for anyone who is familiar with the concepts of creating a mind map it’s a breeze.

One of the most impressive features is the ability to have multiple persons work on the same mindmap at the same time. I have tried this with my business partner where each of us on Skype had a brainstorming session and it worked extremely well.

MindMeister is also compatible with other Mind Mapping software so may be possible to migrate to it from another program.

Apart from the free version there are 3 price options for the Personal, Academic and Business. Like most good products you get all the features you need to get going and can decide to upgrade when your needs for certain features become important.

Finally my favourite feature is the ability to embed the code for your mindmap in your blog or website. You even have the choice to have the mindmap editable so visitors to your website/blog/wiki can add to it. Check this out below.

To edit this map click here and have a go.

I love good software and can’t recommend this product highly enough. whether you’ve never used mind maps or are looking for a new tool to using this fits the bill.

This week it became public that General Electric have decided to roll out Zoho Docs for it’s employees. There are circa 400,000 user desktops so its a pretty substantial  development in the world of online collaboration.

Apparently they got rid of Google Docs because of the intrusiveness of Google. Understandable really. Apparently this is a quote from an unnamed source in GE

A GE spokesperson who did not want to be identified said their decision was based around issues of personal and corporate privacy, functionality, support, features and Zoho won hands down. The spokesperson said the Google application was intrusive and the ads started to become a nuisance.

Interestingly Zoho have agreed to help GE setup their own instance of Zoho Docs on their internal servers. I really wonder what the implication is for future large rollouts. Will they all be hosted on the organisations servers or is this a once off?

Sridhar Vembu the CEO of AdventNet who are the creators of Zoho is profiled in this weeks (Sep 4th) Economist magazine.

The main thrust of the article on the disruption Zoho is causing to the IT market. “..his firm accounts for a drop in the $3.4 trillion ocean that Gartner, a consultancy, thinks companies will spend on IT this year”

The article gives a background to the history of how Zoho was built, the organisations lack of spend of marketing and focus on efficiency in their operations.

From today SaaSTek are officially country resellers of Zoho CRM and Zoho Creator products for Ireland.

This is a very exciting development for our company as we continue helping companies cut their technology costs and improve their business competitiveness. 

Many thanks to Ian Wenig (below), looking forward to working with ye guys.

Zoho from Daniel Brusilovsky on Vimeo
 

On Monday I was shown a demo by Harsh Avardhan of the new Zoho Creator 3.0.

Funnily enough Zoho have created their own cartoon to explain Zoho Creator which is very similar to what Google did for Chrome. Seemingly I was the first person to see it :) 

I’m only surprised that there are no posts about the announcement on the Zoho Blog yet.

For those of you unfamiliar with Zoho Creator it allows you to create Database Driven applications easily and cost-effectively without the need for expensive servers. The applications reside in the Zoho “cloud”.

There are two free packages for Personal and Business users allowing 5 applications and 200mb of free storage. After that price plans increase varying with nunber of applications that can be created and storage space.

Among the highlights of Harsha’ presentation for me were:

• The marketplace where developers/companies who have created apps can supply their work similar to AppExchange
• A new facility to post requests for applications that are delivered to all the Zoho Creator Developer community. This is a classic problem in software development, reinventing the wheel over and over and over and over again….
• There is increased ability to use HTML when designing forms

It’s obvous that Zoho are targetting applications for every concievable business sector and function being developed on the platform and not just 1 degree of seperation from CRM type systems.

We’re investigating migrating a number of applications to Zoho Creator which could prove very interesting.

A Zoho Creator demo shows a screencast of how the system works

This is a very impressive directory of current Office 2.0 productivity solutions out there. There’s a handy menu on the right to filter by application type.

The chap who put this directory together is called Ismael Ghalimi who is organising the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

This looks like a fascinating event, the opening Keynote speaker is David Allen ala Getting Things Done.

This is a great introduction to the Zoho product suite from Raju. Especially worthwhile for those who may be familiar with online office applications.

Raju from Zoho talking on FastCompany.tv

I’m more and more impressed with the Zoho products by the day. Using Zoho project instead of OpenProj.

The last few months I’ve been road testing the Zoho applications by using it for my own company’ day to day administration. Originally Zoho was best known for their meeting application software which was a great substitute for WebEx. Over the last year they’ve constantly added new useful apps and at this stage have almost anything that any SME business would need.

One of my personal favourites is Zoho Invoicing which is a quick and very smart way to generate estimates and invoices http://invoice.zoho.com/login/jsp/login.jsp).

Better still it integrates into Zoho CRM. Check out the complete range of tools at www.zoho.com.

I’m happy to recommend this to other companies so if you’re interested in learning more and possibly implementing some of the Zoho tools in your organisation contact me. It may even possible to negotiate a cut price rate for the first few clients