If it wasn’t for the 2:00 am scare that Google Apps gave me the other day, I would have probably never come across the wonderful services that zoho.com offers!
It all started when I started emailing people in the book industry all over india for our new e-commerce site, thewisdomcart.com. Ofcourse, google was gracious enough to think that I was spamming, and it blocked my mehul@thewisdomcart account, 2 am in the night!!
I frantically emailed google to unblock my account, and at the same time, started looking for alternatives to host “@thewisdomcart.com” mail somewhere else. I came across a lot of paid alternatives, but not wanting to spend money unless necessary, I searched a little more, and then came across this site: www.zoho.com
What zoho.com has to offer is probably one of the best blessings small business owners can get.
Not only it allows you to host your mails (free for up to 10 users), but it even offers a host of services which makes it a SaaS provider, and probably one of the best ones out there right now.
Well, some of the services like Docs, Mail, Presentation, Sheets are already offered by Google etc., but some of the services are rather uncommon.
Zoho.com offers CRM application(s) (Customer Relationship Management), Invoicing tools for free* (*for certain number of users/account).
It goes a step further and creates a marketplace, where custom applications can be developed to match your needs.
Though I haven’t used that app so far, it even offers services to compare candidates, conduct online tests, polls and what not…
To sum up all of this in just one line, Zoho.com offers most of the tools that one might need in handling all the aspects of business ( from lead development, to billing, and from document creation and presentations, to hosting yourdomain.com mail address…). What’s more awesome is that it allows you to easily create aliases for an email address, thus enabling you to handle several different email addresses without the hassle of setting up forwarding etc….
So why exactly did I write this post?
- First and foremost, SaaS is an integral part of cloud computing, an exciting web 2.0 technology that will completely change how things are done.
- Secondly, Online apps like Docs (compared to MS Word), Sheets (compared to MS Excel), Presentation (compared to MS Powerpoint) are only becoming better and better with time. It might be a good time for Microsoft to revise their strategy for MS Office, and stop charging 100s of dollars for MS Office!! ( seriously……..)
- It might help a lot of us out there looking for some awesome services at no extra cost!
- Just wanted to take a minute and thank Zoho.com, for taking SaaS to a whole new level….! Seriously, thank you!
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Mehul Jain
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