By Angela Gunn, Betanews
Zoho may never have the name recognition of a Google or even an OpenOffice, but the company's quest to provide a comprehensive, extraordinarily Web-friendly business application suite continues. Widgets are the latest addition to its stable.
The six Zoho Gadgets -- Docs, Mail, Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, and Planner -- are available for Facebook, iGoogle, and Orkut, as well as sites cognizant of OpenSocial XML (e.g., MySpace, Blogspot, Zoho or other wikis), and there's a generic embeddable version as well. The company says on its blog that more will come.
As the saying goes, it does exactly what it says on the can. I spent some time with gadgets for Docs, Calendar, and Planner loaded on my iGoogle page. They behaved well, with updates made through the gadget appearing instantly and accurately on Zoho. I was vaguely annoyed by the super-short lines for to-do items in Planner -- if you look at the screen shot, you'll notice that they're truncated at my somewhat narrow browser width. They look fine when the browser window is wider, but I do wish there was an option to see those list entries wrapped for us screen-estate-frugal types.
I chose iGoogle as my mail testing forum specifically to see if oAuth support worked correctly, meaning that simply logging into iGoogle (or Gmail) would suffice for logging onto Zoho and retrieving my information. It worked perfectly.
Similarly, adding the Zoho Calendar gadget to my Gmail screen was smooth and problem-free. Adding gadgets to Facebook is almost too simple; the gadget pops onscreen and appears in your Applications list with no further confirmation or action needed. Very smooth, unless you expected more... hubbub.
Like any system, if you use it regularly you're apt to find a number of how'd-I-live-without-this? uses for the ease of use Zoho Gadgets represents; if you're only lightly committed to Zoho's application suite, the usefulness of widgets to get at them will be diminished. (You don't see my Zoho Docs widget in that screen capture; I loaded it and it works well, but the most recent document is a month old. It makes me look lazy.)
The company plans to add additional gadgets corresponding to other Zoho applications, though no timetable has been announced.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009