Zoho Vs. Google Docs

My faith in Zoho is renewed ten-fold. Here's a quick time line that should explain why everyone should be using Zoho for online computing.

10:00am - I log in to Zoho to find that events on my calendar have disappeared. Frustrated, I submit a complaint using the feedback link at the top of the page, and then begin writing a negative blog post about the incident.

11:30am - I get an email from Bharath stating the problem had been corrected and apologizing for the inconvenience.

11:32am - Raju Vegesna leaves a blog comment also apologizing.

12:32pm - Sasikumar Shumar leaves a blog post explaining the error and assuring that the problem was fixed.

2:50pm - @arvindnatarajan apologizes via Twitter and says that my blog will help them resolve any future problems with Zoho on the Eee PC.

I don't know about you, but I consider that pretty impressive customer support. I doubt you'd get the same response from the folks at Google Docs.

In Need of A Zoho Support Group

Day 1

Now that I'm well rested from a week off with the wife and kids, I'm ready to jump into my cloud experiment. Even though I posted the intro last week, we're going to call today day 1 since no school meant no need for cloud computing.

Things have gotten off to a rough start. To take full advantage of everything Zoho offers, I decided to throw away (well, hide behind a cabinet) my desk blotter calendar and use the app bundled as part of the Zoho Personal suite.

My first impression of Zoho Calendar was that it did not seem unlike other programs I've used in the past (most notably Sunbird). The small Eee screen didn't affect things much, but I did have to move the Xandros task bar to add/edit events. After transferring all my important dates from the blotter to Zoho, I figured I was all set.

When I logged in an hour later, all of my hard work had mysteriously vanished. I could add new events to my calendar, but all the previous were gone. I clicked on the Zoho desktop tab and then back to the calendar, and got a nonsensical error message. Hmm.


Assuming I did something wrong, I went to the Zoho Forums (a link conveniently located at the top of the page) in search of advice. I guess I had just grow accustomed to the incredible Eee PC help on EeeUser.com, because I was dumbfounded to find hardly any topic threads with more than one post. Indeed, there were several other Zoho users who voiced concerns over disappearing calendar events, but none of their posts contained any answers. The best I could find was one user who stated that Zoho only worked well with Internet Explorer/Exploder on a Windows machine. It read in part:

"I am using Ubuntu 8.10 with Opera 9.63 as well as Firefox 3.0.5, and I am unable to add events to the calendar. If I click on Create Event and put in minimal information, the event is created. However, when I start modifying the Start/End Dates, Repeat, etc in the Create Event dialog, nothing seems to happen and no events are created on the calendar."

Could Zoho be just as glitchy with Xandros Linux as it is with Ubuntu?

I'm still excited about the possibilities of using Zoho on my Asus Eee PC, but it's clear that diving headfirst into this pond may not be a good idea. What's just under the surface is yet to be discovered.