Manama: Zoho Corporation, a global technology company offering the most extensive suite of business software applications in the industry, announced Zoho Workplace—a single software platform that brings together collaboration, productivity, and communications tools and integrates them into other business processes.
Centered around a full-featured business mail and cloud office suite, Zoho Workplace includes nine tightly mingled applications, built on a common data model and unified through common search and AI across one dashboard, allowing customers to solve business problems quickly and collaboratively.
“The nature of work has undeniably changed, and Workplace has grown to meet that change,” said Hyther Nizam, President MEA, Zoho Corp.
“Businesses are not looking to solve a collaboration problem, they are looking to solve a custom invoicing problem or sales enablement problem or support problem. Collaboration platforms need to facilitate better business outcomes, not just improve productivity. Workplace, through pre-built integrations with powerful business apps and context and continuity across applications, devices, and departments, stands alone in having the vision and functionality to meet the broad business needs of today.”
According to a recent study, “54 per cent of enterprise-level employees (businesses with over 500 employees) found the applications they work with not intuitive and difficult to integrate.” Additionally, “40 per cent of the largest enterprise employees surveyed (businesses with over 4,000 employees) said their work can be chaotic, working with multiple technology platforms to do their job accordingly.”
The study, conducted jointly by Zoho and Beagle Research, shows that businesses want unified solutions that streamline complex processes like data migration, content creation, contextual collaboration and communication, and search. Existing solutions lack the comprehension and integration to satisfy this need. As a result, Zoho Workplace has seen rapid adoption in the last quarter, now supporting two million organizations, with 15 million users located across 150 plus countries. More than 25 per cent of new Zoho Workplace customers have made the decision to switch over from G Suite and Microsoft.
The new capabilities of Zoho Workplace include contextual communication, mainly business mail so users can make audio or video calls from within the app, edit document attachments in Zoho Writer, meet online with contacts, and access all email accounts from within Zoho Mail. The mail includes a comprehensive control panel with eDiscovery, Backup and Recovery. The app comes with mix ‘n’ match plans, flexible storage, and an extensive Integration platform, as well as S/MIME certificates, MFA, email rules, unusual login alerts, and custom spam controls.
This also features Cliq (Messaging) so that users can check in or check out and set custom statuses, collaborate with external stakeholders, connect with teams via group audio or video calls, and view message-read status. Cliq comes with module-level configuration and customization, role-based permissions and integration with EMM providers, as well as user-based availability reports.
The Zoho Meeting (Conferencing) will allow users to schedule recurring or one-off meetings and set multiple email reminders from web and mobile devices. Now supporting 16 languages, Meeting is integrated with Zoho Projects, Bookings, CRM, and others.
Zoho Connect (Social Intranet) integrates with human resource information systems, including Zoho People. Users can moderate content and modules with fine-grained permissions and user policies and custom domain and SAML-based SSO.
Zoho Show (Collaborative Presenting) is integrated with Atlassian, Unsplash, and Humaans, and features an organization-wide slide library and data linking, allowing users to connect live data to slides.
Zoho Sheet (Spreadsheet) will give users access to the latest functions for lookup and match and can visualize historic data with race charts, create drop-downs with predefined values, and link cell ranges using IMPORTRANGE. This enables users to track changes while collaborating, gain insights, maintain clean data, convert images to spreadsheets, and bring contextual data from both Zoho and non-Zoho applications.
Zoho WorkDrive (Cloud Document Management) now features unified search and TrueSync, which allows users to access files without worrying about hard drive space. WorkDrive is equipped with a comprehensive admin panel, customer reports to monitor team activity, and is integrated with Zoho Directory.
Zoho Writer (Word Processing) will help users convert documents to fillable forms, restrict comment visibility, gather document engagement insights, and enable a powerful AI-based writing assistant. Writer features template-driven automation and APIs, form-driven automation, and automatic signature and approvals.
Zoho ShowTime (Online Training) supports branding and white-labeling. Users can set roles and privileges for their training team and gather training insights.
Pricing of Zoho Workplace starts at USD3/user/month for the Standard version and USD6/user/month for the professional version.
Zoho Workplace ensures a level of confidentiality that no other vendors in the industry can guarantee. Zoho does not allow any third-party trackers to monitor usage behaviour and never sells any data to ad-based companies. Because Zoho owns and has built its entire technology stack, the company is able to offer the most secure experience to its 50 million users without any compromise on data privacy. Zoho Workplace users have the assurance that their data is confidential and protected, and only users themselves maintain ownership of that data.
