Zoho Corporation, a global technology company offering the most extensive suite of business software applications in the industry, today 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, to allow customers 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. This results in failure to capture critical context and nuances of business problems, eventually missing out on providing continuity over the course of the user’s work. .
Zoho Workplace provides a unified platform with multi-faceted communications like email, messaging, audio and video conferencing; a cloud office suite with shared file storage; common team and collaboration paradigms built into each of the products; and AI, search, and other services that span right across the entire suite. People work better and more effectively than they ever did.
“The nature of work has undeniably changed, and Workplace has grown to meet that change,” said Gibu Mathew, Vice President, and GM, Asia Pacific Zoho Corp. “Businesses are not looking to solve a collaboration problem, they are looking to solve a business pain point like 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 joint study by Zoho and Beagle Research, “54 percent of enterprise-level employees (businesses with more than 500 employees) found the applications they work with not intuitive and difficult to integrate.” Additionally, “40 percent of the largest enterprise employees surveyed (businesses with more than 4,000 employees) said their work can be chaotic, working with multiple technology platforms to do their job accordingly.” The study 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 business need.
“We needed an integrated solution for easier access, one that was easy to understand, and affordable too. Zoho seemed to be a good fit.” said Renee Tan, the Founder and Head of Business Development Hashtaqs Pte Ltd. “The choice also came at the right time, with the pandemic restricting everyone to our homes. But with Workplace, we felt well equipped, and were able to embrace the WFH culture, and not dread it. We have better visibility into the team’s work and as a team we’re able to communicate our ideas better to our clients.
New Capabilities of Zoho Workplace
The vision that drives innovation in Zoho Workplace is enabling custom workflows, deepening business context within communication tools, allowing security and privacy within apps to be customized to facilitate audit and control, and driving automation through AI that works across products.
Contextual Communication
• 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 all email accounts from within Zoho Mail. 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.
• Cliq – The business chat platform allows users to check in and out, set custom statuses, collaborate with external stakeholders, connect with teams via group audio or video calls, and view message-read status.
• Meeting – 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 – The social intranet platform integrates with human resource information systems, Zoho People. Zoho Connect users can moderate content and modules with fine-grained permissions and user policies and custom domain and SAML-based SSO.
Convenience
• Show – The online presentation software now features an organization-wide slide library and data linking, allowing users to connect live data to slides.
• Sheet – 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 even convert images to spreadsheets.
• WorkDrive – The file storage system, Zoho WorkDrive 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.
• Writer – Users can convert documents to fillable forms, restrict comment visibility, gather document engagement insights, and enable a powerful AI-based writing assistant. Zoho Writer features template-driven automation and APIs, form-driven automation, and automatic signature and approvals.
• ShowTime – ShowTime supports branding and white-labeling. Users can set roles and privileges for their training team and gather training insights.
Pricing and Availability
Pricing starts at USD $3/user/month for the Standard version and USD $6/user/month for the Professional version. Additional details are available here.
Zoho Privacy Pledge
Zoho also ensures a level of confidentiality that no other vendors in this space can guarantee. Zoho does not allow any third-party trackers to monitor usage behavior on its cloud services, 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 BackToWork users have the assurance that their data is confidential and protected, and only users themselves maintain ownership of that data.
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