May 14th, 2008
Zoho's Googley login raises interesting questions
This morning’s announcement that Zoho Writer now supports login via Google and Yahoo! ID’s is not of itself a big deal. Or is it? First up the details:
- If users already have a Zoho Account with their Google or Yahoo! email address, they’ll be logged into their Zoho account automatically
- If users don’t have a Zoho account with their Google or Yahoo! email address, they can simply login and use Zoho Services with their Google or Yahoo! credentials
- Users can also import contacts from each of these accounts to Zoho directly from the contacts section @ http://accounts.zoho.com
Google doesn’t make it easy for people wanting to use Zoho because each time you wish to use your Google ID, it requires an extra click to ‘grant access.’
Zoho says that in a Lifehacker poll, users prefer Zoho services. Zoho is trying to reduce the friction for users of other services who might wish to give Zoho a spin. No problems so far. But Ouriel Ohayon who writes TechCrunch France raised a fascinating question on Twitter:
is there a way to import all google docs to zoho at once?
Ouriel and I had a short Twitter exchange on this during which I suggested some sort of OPML - he quipped GPML - but there is a serious point in question here. Google Docs users might well wish to mass export documents to Zoho. Today there is no way to do that except by a manual import from a GDocs public URL. Yet it seems like an obvious function that Zoho should be investigating. My sense is that if it can overcome that barrier, then Zoho adoption will accelerate.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
