Yesterday evening I arrived in Chennai, where I was met by Arvind. We chatted on the way to the hotel: an extraordinarily comfortable place called GRT Grand. This morning I got a car from the hotel to the AdventNet headquarters where Zoho are based.

Broadly speaking, there were three topics that I wanted to explore today. Firstly I wanted to talk to the Zoho Writer developers to see if they really intend to implement the changes that I have suggested. I wanted to explain why I thought they were important, if I needed to; and to lobby for their inclusion. Secondly, I wanted to see what was in store for the other Zoho services that we are using, and find out if there are anymore that we should be using. Finally, I wanted to find answers to some of the questions that I have been asked in Finland about Zoho: will it last, can we trust it, why should we prefer it to Google, and so on.

The question of Zoho’s mission, and its overall plans for the future, was the topic that we addressed first. When I arrived at about 9.40 there were only a few people there, and so Arvind and I had a tea and a chat. Everyone at Zoho works flexible hours, and 9.00 is apparently not a very popular starting time. Having been driven through Chennai’s rush hour I could understand why.

Zoho’s mission

Arvind and I had a general discussion about Zoho, during which we were joined by Ranjith Kumor, the leader of the Writer team. They both underlined what I had read elsewhere, and filled in the gaps. AdventNet has a fifteen year track record as a profitable enterprise-level software company, whose expertise is in Java, php and SQL. Zoho was begun in the autumn of 2005 with the long term aim of establishing a world-class Indian software company operating on Web 2.0 principles. AdventNet has more than 600 employees of whom approximately 120 work for Zoho.

The idea of creating an Indian software company of global importance that is famous for what it does, not for being Indian, is at the heart of Zoho’s mission, and two things follow from this. Zoho is not for sale, and nor will it be. The idea of creating something in order to sell it to Yahoo strikes people here as amusingly ridiculous. Secondly, Zoho will be around for a long time, since the long term goal is much more important to the CEO than short term profit. The accepted idea in the building is that when the idea of software as services takes off, and it becomes usual for companies and individuals to store their data in the cloud, there will not be one clear winner.

“It is not a matter of whether Google wins, or we win,” I was told several times during the day. “The market will be big enough to support a number of successful companies. If Google has 50 million users, and we have 5 million users, so what? Five million users is more than enough to sustain a very successful business.” What matters is inter-operability. The companies that will lose will be those who use proprietary data formats, and try to lock their customers into their services by not letting them take their data anywhere else. To this end, Zoho is standardising its output, using open formats; and is creating APIs that can be used in many different ways.

The APIs are as open as possible because the developers want to be surprised by how people take up the services and use them. This was a recurring theme with each of the teams that I spoke to. When I asked why Zoho Notebook had seemed unfinished when it was first released I was told that it was because the development team had no real idea what it was for. “Finishing” Notebook depended heavily on discovering what people were actually going to do with it.

The reason that this approach works is the speed at which the development teams work to implement changes. A much-upgraded version of Notebook, that met all the initial suggestions and complaints, was released less than four weeks after the initial launch.

This was probably the only thing that I felt I had not fully understood by the end of the day. Where other people measure development cycles in months Zoho seem to measure them in days; and they do this in one of the most relaxed, least stressed environments I have seen. The clue, I think, is that the knowledge and techniques that they learn is transferable to a unusual extent, because everything that they do is based on an approach that has been fine-tuned during the first twelve years of AdventNet’s growth.

Zoho Writer and distributed publishing

Ranjith and I spent a couple of hours talking about the html that Writer outputs, and why it would be better if it was valid xhtml with no inline styling. Ranjith agreed with the principle, and so most of the discussion concerned the best way that it could be implemented. As I had suspected he felt that there were, for the moment, two distinct user groups: those who were working increasingly online, and for whoom documents were more and more things that were emailed and viewed on-screen; and those people who wanted a traditional word processor with the benefits of online document storage. The latter group, of course, have no interest in what is going on behaind the scenes, or why their document looks the way it does. They simply want to be able to control the look of it, and print it out, in the way that they have always done.

Arvind and Ranjith both regarded the idea of distributed publishing as interesting, and as an example of users coming up with ideas that they could not have thought of themselves. Ranjith laid out an approximte road map, showing how the various elements we had been discussing would be implemented in stages, beginning with making certain that both browsers create documents with propely tagged paragraphs. He estimated that the final changes, which would remove all inline styling and make the html fragment that is published completely valid, will be completed by the start of the fourth quarter.

Ranjith explained about their plans to introduce a method for annotating documents. Not only will this strengthen the collaborative aspects of Writer, it will also enable teachers to comment on student essays online. This is particularly important for me because it demolishes one of the final arguments for insisting that student essays are printed out and handed in in paper form.

Finally Ranjith discussed his plans to create a synchronised offline version of Writer. This, he explained, would be very simple if Writer did not permit shared editing of documents, but becomes very complicated when it has to be possible for several people to take the document offline and modify it in potentially incompatible ways, and then all try to synchronise it with the old online version. He outlined two entirely different approaches to dealing with this, with subtly different implications for group work-flow.

Lunchtime in Chennai

After promising not to talk about these plans here, Ranjith grabbed two co-workers and took me for a long and interesting lunch. We went to a restaurant called gioRgio that ought not to have worked, but actaully did.

The menu has a story on the front, detailing the story of gioRgio, a “modern Marco Polo” who has travelled the world looking for the finest dishes from every country. Inside, every choice has a flag next to it, showing its country of origin. In Europe a menu like this would scream “theme restaurant”, with the clear implication that all the effort had gone into the menu, and almost none into the actual food.

In this case, however, the food was uniformly excellent. I started with a hot and sour soup that was better than any that I have had in a restaurant in Helsinki. We then had chicken tandoori, dosa, vegatable masala, and various other things. It took us about two and a half hours to eat out way through this, while talking the whole time about Zoho’s future plans.

One thing that I learned, which I can report, is that there is a long term plan to make every aspect of every Zoho service usable by every other service, in a way that is transparent to the user; and to link al of these with a chat window that spans all the services.

The Zoho teams

When we arrived back I went on a tour of all the other development teams. Each team has between four and six people, and by the time I left Zoho at about 21.30 I had met most members of most of the teams. I had also had a long and pleasant chat with Mister S. Sivanandam, the vice president of AdventNet.

I began by meeting the teams whose services Jutta and I already use.

The Wiki team are currently concentrating on improving the multi-user functionality, and looking at the possibility of adding pages from one wiki to another, making it possible to build meta-wikis from pages that already exist elsewhere. (Imagine making several wiki-based recipe books, such as Food of France, Food of India, and so on. If you could make meta-wikis then it would be possible to create wiki samplers such as 25 Easy Recipes, or Dinners in Less than 30 Minutes, by simply linking to the relevant recipes in the existing wikis.)

The Sheet team are engaged in a process of general service-wide upgrades. I also beagn to realise the kinds of logical difficulties that they face in trying to make anything web-based (and thus html-based) imitate the behaviour of Excel. We spent some time discussing the deceptively difficult problem raised by the fact that Excel (and OpenOffice) allow you to type into an empty cell and appear to type over the adjoining empty cells without merging them. This can only be simulated in html, and there is no completely satisfactory way of simulating it.

I was able to propose (what I considered) improvements to Writer because I understood, in principle at least, how they could be implemented. The longer I considered the spreadsheet problem the more I realised that I did not even know where I would start, if I had to solve it myself.

The Notebook team are improving the ways in which different elements can be shared, or excluded from being shared. As I sat watching a demonstration I realised that what they are doing raises the possibility of making a single notebook, targeted to two different groups. A Web Foundations notebook, for example, could contain two sets of diagrams, breaking down the elements in a page of html: a simply annotated diagram aimed at general students and a diagram with much more detailed annotations aimed at interactive media students. Depending which group a student belonged to, they would see one or the other set of diagrams.

I then went to look at a variety of the other services: the ones that I suspected that I should know more about.

Zoho Creator is a database builder that I had been meaning to look at when I had the time. I am glad I didn’t because seeing it demonstrated was much better. While I was watching, and especially while I was watching the in-built scripting language Deluge being used, I realised that this was a very powerful teaching tool – something that I might not have realised anywhere near as quickly if I had just experimented with Creator for a few moments.

Creator is optimised for use by people who have no prior understanding of database creation. It is ideal for creating forms that can be embedded on other web pages for users to fil in, and then sorted and analysed on Creator. Deluge is optimised for dealing with automating the processes of sorting and analysiing, without requiring the user to understand how the database is structured behind the scenes.

This precisely matches the need of many of our students to learn what something is for by first using it to solve a concrete problem, and then stepping back to look at how it works, and the principles that lay beneath it. It allows students to make a simple feedback form, for example; embed it on their own web page; tabulate the responses; and then step back and begin to look at what is really going on.

I shall definitely be using this in the coming year.

Zoho Mail is in private beta; and possibly wrongly named, since it is not really a mail program at all. It is also a calendar, a contacts book, a to-do list, as well as a way of calling up any other Zoho service, or indeed any other web page. Think of something like a My Yahoo page with the power of Outlook, and the ability to share everything with members of a named group.

Mail is therefore a complete PIM suite that is designed to facilitate group use. I can set a meeting time and date with al other members of my group, and have Mail check to see whether anyone’s calendar shows a conflict. I can set it to email the recipients automatically, as well as enter the meeting on their calendars. I can then do al the integrated groupware work that you would expect to flow from this: tracking whether other team members’ tasks have been completed or not, and so on.

Even better, everything is taggable using the same system as in Writer, in which tags can be designated as virtual folders.

Much was made during the day of Zoho eating their own dog food, and this private beta is one good example of that. The test consists, in the main, of the fact that everyone at Zoho uses Mail to organise their working life. Any bugs therefore surface in the form of missed meetings or undelivered mail. New features are ruthlessly tested because all 120 members of Zoho rapidly integrate them into their daily routines; and any missing or badly designed features are soon spotted in the same way.

At the end of the day I saw a demo of Zoho Meeting, which completely finished me off, and sent me home with my head reeling. This is a service that allows me to share my desktop with one or more people. In a forthcoming version it will allow us to draw non-destructively, whiteboard-style, on each others’ desktops. It also links seamlessly with Zoho Show, to allow for the remote presentation of Powerpoint-style slideshows.

This provides a way to diagnose student problems at a distance, or to provide instant responses to problems in the form of one to one coaching. It also provides a whole lot of other possibilities, when it is used as part of an integrated video conferencing system.

Educational Zoho

In addition to all this activity there are two further aspects of Zoho. Firstly there is the question of how it recruits its employees. Because higher education is expensive in India not every family can afford to send their children to university. The Zoho team provide a small but important solution to this. All employees can recommend a young person they know – a relative, a child of a neighbour or friend – whose family cannot afford to send them to higher education. These young eople are given aptitude tests and, if they pass, they are taken into an in-house academy where they spend a year learning to program in Java and php, and to create and maintain MySQL databases.

If they complete the training successfully they are automatically employed by Zoho, although the training is such that they can also seek employment elsewhere.

The second educational aspect of Zoho’s work stems from the fact that the CEO has a child with autism, which resulted in his desire to establish a web site containing educational games that would help autistic children learn at their own pace and in a way they are comfortable with. This site, Jambav.com, has proved so popular that it has now been extended into a general educational resource for all parents and children.

It contains a large and growing library of games, many of which will be familiar to anyone who has spent time with a young child looking for games on the net. What sets them apart, however, is the fact that they can be customised in many ways. The images in the memory game can be replaced with uploaded images that are familiar to the child, for example.

One of the games, a cartoon strip maker, has now grown into its own separate site, Toondoo. This launched about six months ago and is now starting to prove popular with adults as well as children.

I intend to road test both of these with the girls when we get back to Helsinki, and I shall write more about them later.

Conclusion

I was very glad I decided that Chennai was near enough to Goa to make the journey worthwhile. To have decided otherwise would simply have been stupid.

I had a wonderful day with a group of very open and friendly people. It was entertaining and very productive. Most importantly, perhaps, I feel that I now have answers for any sceptical enquiries that I might receive in Helsinki when I suggest that the Media department should commit itself to Zoho as a way of immersing students in Web 2.0 while they perform day-to-day tasks. I could only have got these answers by meeting people face to face, and talking honestly with them.

Our students – all of them, not just the interactive media students – need to understand Web 2.0, and other likely elements of the future media environment; and I am now completely convinced that using Zoho is a powerful way of embedding Web 2.0 in their daily lives.

Zoho is built upon very solid foundations, and its cultural mission means that is is not going to go away anytime soon. We therefore have every reason to use it, and no reason not to.