One of the major lacune in Google Apps' otherwise rocking product offering is, it's customer support (read my blog entry comparing the service offering of Google Apps and Microsoft). Having served the consumer market for so long, its approach has always been that of "customer self service" – its thriving help forums and user communities, its extensive videos and other documentation.

But an important lesson is, people who pay money for something, want a good old human to swear at if something goes wrong. Well, not exactly swear, but they need the "human touch" – someone who can listen to their problems and suggest a solution at the earliest, because many Google Apps small business users just arent as tech savvy as me and you are.

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In its continuing strategy of integrating with solutions it competes with (remember its earlier integrations with SharePoint and Google Apps), Zoho has added "contextual information integration" with GMail. According to Zoho, "contextual integration" emphasizes the users data and context and not the application.

Earlier Zoho has demosntrated this model with integration between its different modules, but this is the first time it is offering contextual integration with a third party app. This was made possible after Google announced Contextual Gadgets for Gmail enabling third party applications to integrate into an email message in Gmail.

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