Zoho rolls out major updates

Zoho has announced major updates to Zoho Workplace, a single software platform that brings together collaboration, productivity, and communications tools and integrates them into other business processes. 

Created around a business mail and cloud office suite, Zoho Workplace comprises nine integrated applications, built on a common data model and unified through search across a single dashboard, allowing users to solve business problems quickly and collaboratively. 

Productivity platforms from leading vendors today posture to bring about collaboration within teams, even though they are disconnected from other business apps and therefore lack any awareness of the underlying business issue being addressed. Thus, they are unable to establish critical context for business problems, and fail to provide continuity over the course of their resolution. 

“The nature of work has undeniably changed, and Workplace has grown to meet that change,” says Andrew Bourne, Zoho regional manager for Africa. “Businesses don’t want to solve a collaboration problem, they want 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 stands alone in having the vision and functionality to meet the broad business needs of today.” 

Thanks to its ability to provide these solutions, Zoho Workplace has seen rapid growth over the last quarter. It now supports 2-million organisations, with 15-million users located across more than 150 countries. More than 25% of new Zoho Workplace customers have made the decision to switch over from competitive offerings. 

Zoho provided the following information about updates to the platform: 

Contextual Communication 

• Mail (Business Mail) – Users can now make audio or video calls from within the app, edit document attachments in Zoho Writer, meet online with contacts, and access multiple email accounts from within Zoho Mail. ‌Mail includes a comprehensive control panel with eDiscovery, Backup and Recovery.  
• Cliq (Messaging) – 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. 
• Meeting (Conferencing) – Users can 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. 

 Continuity 

• Connect (Social Intranet) – Connect integrates with human resource information systems, including Zoho People. Zoho Connect users can moderate content and modules with fine-grained permissions and user policies and custom domain and SAML-based SSO. 
• Writer (Word Processing) – Users can convert documents to fillable forms, restrict comment visibility, gather document engagement insights, and enable a new AI-based writing assistant.  

Convenience 

• Show (Collaborative Presenting) – Show 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. 
• Sheet (Spreadsheet) – Users have 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.  
• WorkDrive (Cloud Document Management) – WorkDrive now features unified search and ‌TrueSync, which allows users to access files without worrying about hard drive space.  
• ShowTime (Online Training) – ShowTime supports branding and white-labelling. Users can set roles and privileges for their training team and gather training insights. 

Pricing and Availability 

Pricing starts at R45/user/month for the Standard version and R90/user/month for the Professional version. Additional details are available here.