Portal for Entrepreneurs: Not Quite There

Entrepreneur.com and Zoho have gotten together (with sponsorship from Visa) to launch Entrepreneur Assist, a new portal page that tries to combine a number of useful functions for those with an entrepreneurial bent. The site tries to combine Entrepreneur’s business knowledge with Zoho’s online office suite in a set of tabbed applications, which they call “a collection of free business planning and productivity tools designed with entrepreneurs in mind.” Here’s what you get for your free signup:

• My Documents provides Zoho’s standard suite of online document creation and management tools.
• My Bookmarks is a bookmark organizer with folders and tagging.
• My Planner is an embedded version of Zoho’s calendar software, with appointments, tasks, and notes.
• Forms and Templates provides a selection of canned business forms and business plans that can be previewed or pulled into the documents section so that you can customize them.
• Library has a small selection of entrepreneurial books that you can download as PDF files.

While the idea of a dedicated portal page for entrepreneurs has some appeal, the execution at this point is pretty uneven. For instance, while the bookmark organizer is integrated with pages on Entrepreneur.com’s own site, there’s no wider browser integration, so that adding pages from anywhere else requires cutting and pasting URLs; this makes it less convenient that alternatives such as del.icio.us. Whatever process they used to import the business forms and templates to Zoho’s format didn’t do a very good job, so you’ll be faced with proofreading and cleanup before you can use any of them in your budding business. The library lets you read a book’s table of contents online, but to get any further you need to download the whole thing to your local hard drive.

So, although the price of “free” is attractive, the strongest bits here are the rewrapped Zoho applications – which begs the question of why one shouldn’t just go to the Zoho site to use them, if that’s what you’re interested in. If Entrepreneur really wants to capture some eyeballs and dwell time with this site, they’re going to have to work harder to add value and features that can’t be found elsewhere.

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