Zoho today announced that it is inviting open source projects to use Zoho Discussions, the company’s online forums and community software, at no charge. Providing free use of its application for online customer support and innovation forums is the company’s way of giving back to the open source community. The Zoho invitation does not have an expiration date, and open source projects can take advantage of the offer by visiting http://www.zoho.com/discussions/open-source.html.

“We use many open source components in Zoho Apps,” said Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist. “As open source advocates, we want to contribute to the community, and making Zoho Discussions freely available to open source projects is our way of fostering that community and saying ‘thank you.’”

Zoho Contributes to Community

The free Zoho Discussions offer being extended to open source projects is distinct from the free version of Zoho Discussions that the company offers to individuals and organizations. For open source projects, Zoho will tailor the level of service appropriate to the project’s size and needs. In addition to support for multiple forums, moderators, gigabytes of attachments, and other features, Zoho will offer free migration and customization services on a case-by-case basis. Forum visitors will be able to participate by using their Zoho username/password as well as Google, Google Apps, and Yahoo! credentials.

One of the first open source projects to take advantage of the Zoho offer is the JavaScript library, jQuery. Not happy with its existing solution for engaging with its community, jQuery evaluated several vendor solutions before settling on Zoho Discussions to power its online forums at forum.jquery.com.

Prior to Zoho Discussions, jQuery used mailing lists and Google Groups to interact with its users. As part of its free offer, Zoho migrated all the data and users from the jQuery mailing lists and Google Groups into Zoho Discussions. Similarly, Zoho is customizing Zoho Discussions for free, giving the forums the same look and feel as the rest of the jQuery site.

John Resig, creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library, blogged about the transition from Google Groups to Zoho Discussions. Here’s an excerpt:

“When looking for a new area to have discussions, we looked at a wide variety of solutions with a few major requirements: It had to be capable of handling both regular discussions and the now-ubiquitous question & answers that occur. Additionally, we wanted something that lowered the barrier to asking a question — something that anyone would be able to use (thus it had to have a good web interface).

“We also wanted a solution that would have a low maintenance threshold for the team. This would mean either using a hosted solution in which the team we were working with was very accommodating or using a solution that we host ourselves that was trivially easy to use and had a good community of developers.

“We ended up analyzing countless solutions but in the end we chose to go with Zoho Discussions. A combination of decisions drove us to this decision:

• Zoho Discussions seamlessly integrates both regular, forum-style, discussions and Q&A. Additionally, all the moderation and administration tools are designed around building and managing a slick workflow for answering questions and concerns.
• The Discussions team at Zoho have been incredibly accommodating They are not only providing all the hosting for free but going out of their way to fix concerns and integrate our full Google Groups back history. We’ve been working very closely with them, and they’ve fixed, or are fixing, every issue that we’ve brought forward.”

For more information on Zoho, please visit www.zoho.com. To get breaking Zoho news, visit and subscribe to the RSS feed at http://blogs.zoho.com, and follow the company on Twitter at @zoho.

Additional Resources

Zoho website: http://www.zoho.com/

Zoho news releases: http://www.zoho.com/in-the-news.html

Zoho product videos: http://www.zoho.com/product_videos.html

Zoho general videos: http://www.zoho.com/videos.html

Zoho blogs: http://blogs.zoho.com

Zoho on Twitter: http://twitter.com/zoho

Zoho Facebook Fan Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Zoho/231460215383

About Zoho

Zoho is a comprehensive suite of award-winning online productivity, collaboration and business applications for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as consumers. Over two million users rely on Zoho for their Business, Productivity & Collaboration needs and actively connect via Forums and Blogs. To date, Zoho has launched 21 different applications which include several online office applications such as Writer, Sheet, Show, and Mail along with a host of business applications ranging from CRM to Projects, Invoice and Meeting. These applications are offered directly via Zoho.com or through hundreds of partners in the Zoho Alliance Partner Program. Zoho has received numerous awards, including a 2009 Webware 100 Award and an InfoWorld 2009 Technology of the Year Award. For more information about Zoho, please visit http://www.zoho.com/.

Zoho is a division of ZOHO Corp., a privately-held and profitable company, which also provides IT Management Software (ManageEngine) and a Network Management Suite (WebNMS). With headquarters in Pleasanton, CA and offices in Austin, New Jersey, London, Tokyo and Beijing, ZOHO Corp. serves the technology needs of more than 40,000 customers worldwide. For more information about ZOHO Corp., please visit http://www.zohocorp.com/.

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Tags: Zoho, Zoho Discussions, jQuery, Google Groups, online forums, on-line business applications, cloud, customer support, intranet