Community Driven Features @ Zoho Challenge

The number of users using Zoho Challenge heavily has been steadily increasing. With that increased use, we have also been receiving valuable feedback. All Zoho products have evolved significantly owing to feedback and feature requests by active customers. It is an internalized concept @ Zoho to give high priority for requests from the "field" as they solve "real" problems that exist today, sometimes, even over other carefully evaluated features planned by our product management teams.

And Zoho Challenge is no exception. For more than a month now, the engineering team has been busy implementing features that were requested by our customers. I thought of consolidating all those we have rolled out so far and what we have lined up for the next week or so.

Now you can embed in your site tests that a candidate can take, and then have them take the test right there as well - all the time without leaving your website. Embedding tests is available across all of our paid plans.

All test invitation emails have a convenient iCal attachment that will be auto-recognized / imported into several calendering systems including Zoho Calendar and Google Calendar and also Outlook / Notes like email software. This will help candidates set up test reminders in their calendering system.

Almost everyone who gives Zoho Challenge a try has used the Fill-in-the-blanks question type. Until recently, those had to be manually evaluated. Sometimes this caused a slow down of the entire evaluation process. We're happy to report that now we can also evaluate fill-in-the-blanks questions. Of course, we deal with upper/lower-case and white-spaces so as to not disqualify correct answers. To cater to complex cases, all fill-in-the-blanks questions can always be manually evaluated and the auto generated score over-ridden. Same applies for descriptive questions too. We are constantly working on improving our evaluation logic to include keyword patterns etc.

Many customers are now putting a larger volume of questions into their question banks. With so many questions around, it is important to be able to search and locate them as quickly as possible. We introduce full-text-search for our questions a while ago, but we also encourage our users to tag all their questions. For example, a full text search would not know whether a question is "Hard" of whether "What year was Napoleon Bonaparte born?" refers to a "History" question. Initially, tags were only used when defining rules in the random question generator. Now, you can also easily see all the questions related to a particular tag.

The test results page has been improved to make the results more readable. Sort order and improved export features are coming shortly.

And... we have also thrown in a far more powerful feature into Zoho Challenge. That will have to wait for a post of its own =)

Dhan

ps. Napoleon was born on August 15th, 1769. Did you get that right? :)