Hshawjr – My Thoughts

I know that I have discussed Zoho almost ad naseum lately, but they are really winning me over! Read below and you will understand better what I mean.

Well this has been an interesting and frustrating last two days. Since my decision to use Zoho for/as my online Office Suite, I have been experiencing what I considered to be a pretty serious problem with not being able to access many of the Zoho programs while at work. There were times I could access Zoho programs and then times I couldn’t, finally I went to the system administrator to ask him to unblock Zoho, which he did. So I/we thought the issues were resolved, but then they began to intermittently happen again. This was especially frustrating because I had switched all of my Planner information over to Zoho Planner and I rely on my planner to keep up with the “multitude of things” going on between now and the end of the year.

This led to around 20 email exchanges between Arvind, Sathish, a few others from Zoho and myself, describing the issues, discussing possible solutions and relaying results back and forth. We had 3 different Zoho Meetings one lasting almost 40 minutes to try to resolve these issues.

Through this entire process Arvind and Sathish were fantastic! Their ideas, patience and willingness to keep trying were really refreshing. I keep hearing about and have personally experienced poor quality customer service elsewhere. But all of my dealings with Zoho have been extremely positive and they go the “extra” mile to work with you until the issue is fixed, resolved or at the very least identified for future work.

So what did the problem end up being? Zoho was working perfectly. My computer was working perfectly. The Filter at my school was working too well as usual, but not consistently, filtering content (including Zoho programs) even though it had been unblocked. I will have to print out my Planner lists at home and update them at home, so that I can stay organized. But this work-around is okay to me – as it is only for a short time.

The guys at Zoho and I have learned that if you work at a school or other educational entity – that conservatively blocks web sites that they may block Zoho Programs automatically, due to the chat and email modules (not to mention all the other modules shown below).

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This is unfortunate because I strongly believe students should be exposed to more than just Microsoft Word or Open Office, if for no other reason than to know that other platforms exist. They should be exposed to Google Docs, ThinkFree, Zoho Office and other Online Office products to make their own decisions regarding which office suite meets their personal needs, based upon their own experiences, not who has the best advertising or is used by others.

Based upon my personal experiences I will continue to use Microsoft Office products as my primary office suite (they are still the standard by which others are judged and most business and government offices are using their products). That being said Zoho Office Suite does the things that Office doesn’t do as well (making the online experience easy and integrating their applications (when using the Zoho Business module) to work together not as separate unrelated programs). I am still very impressed with the direction they are taking and the product they are providing to us. BUT USERS STILL HAVE TO REMEMBER THAT ZOHO PRODUCTS ARE STILL IN BETA and can expect some issues that will need to be resolved. Zoho works very hard to resolve these issues expeditiously.

No – I am not being paid or anything for these posts, hell I have even gotten any Zoho swag, so this is an independent and unsolicited description of what happened the past couple of days.

Again thank you to Arvind and Sathish, you did more than I expected and am glad we resolved the issues. Thank you for treating me as a human being – not a number.

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