Download Squad

When it comes to the online office app market, Zoho absolutely kills the competition in terms of its offerings. To me, the product that most outshines the competition is Zoho Creator. I love the forms in Google Docs, but Zoho Creator is far more robust. With Zoho Creator, you can basically very easily create a database driven web app using drag and drop form elements and support for functions and scripting (if the scripting stuff is too complicated, you can just create a standard form that will store data in a spreadsheet/database). With enough time and skill, you can do some pretty amazing things with Zoho Creator.

Thus, it's not that surprising that Zoho has launched a marketplace where users can offer up and download user-created Zoho apps. The Zoho Marketplace, which offers both free and paid apps (though I haven't been able to even find any pay apps), offers users the ability to take advantage of pre-written apps and integrate it into their workflow. Everything is hosted on Zoho, so you don't have to worry about compatibility or viruses.

Users can even request a specific application and get a response from the development community. If you want to sell or offer up your own Zoho apps in the Marketplace, listing is free.

To go along with the new Marketplace, Zoho also rolled out version 3.0 of the Zoho Creator. I've been playing around with Zoho Creator in the last couple of days, because I need to automate a data collection process, and am really impressed and excited by the changes. You can now create custom HTML pages that are actually part of the app itself, and embed forms and widgets and other elements into those pages. You can also now use something called Stateless Forms, which basically means you can use the Zoho Creator tools, but not have the data store in Zoho. So if you have your own database system already set-up, you can just use Zoho to collect and export the information.

I started playing around with Creator after I hit a wall in what Google Docs would let me do. Not only did I solve my orignal problem, I now have all kinds of ideas for future stuff, now that I know what Zoho Creator can do.

Zoho Creator 3 and the Zoho Marketplace are available now. Free business and personal accounts are available for Zoho, and paid monthly subscriptions for more storage space, the ability to create more applications and support more users are also available.