Thursday, June 27, 2013

How to decide if syncing Zoho Creator to GAPPS is a good business move?

Sometimes if you have built your basic communications operation around Google Interface it seems like a natural blend to incorporate you Zoho Creator application right into the heart of GAPPS. Think again!!!

There are 3 major points of interaction between Zoho Creator & GAPPS. The access, the data & the sharing. After living the frustration of a client of mine first hand and a month long of testing its functionality and performance we can confidently conclude the following.

First, there is no problem visible to the human eye that suggests there is something wrong with "accessing" Zoho Creator via GAPPS. Once installed in your GAPPS account you will see a link to Zoho Creator under the More...menu if you click it...it will open the application smoothly and everyone is happy.

Second in line is: the "Data" that you can access inside Zoho Creator from GAPPS. There seems to be intermittent issues. For example.- if you have a field inside your forms to select users from GAPPS the options may magically disappear temporarily and after reloading & reloading they may reappear back.  If you are not a hard core user of your application you may be able to live with reloading and waiting every time this occurs, but if you run your daily operations in Zoho Creator this is an annoying losing time = money nightmare.

And last but not least the "Sharing". This is the most important of all!! Within Creator you have the ability to share your Forms and Views with individual GAPPS users or with Groups. If you select nothing but individual users everything seems to perform as expected, however if you select a Group within GAPPS the performance on your Zoho Creator application will slowdown 5 fold average. 


So unless Zoho or Google comes with a solution around Sharing Groups of users within an application resist the temptation to simplify sharing or suffer  a loss of 5x fold in performance. Your call.

For more details review this Zoho Forum note with more information regarding this possible performance issue related to GAPPS integration.