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. Centred 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.

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.

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 the products; and AI, search, and other services that span right across the entire suite. People work better and more effectively than they ever have.

“The nature of work has undeniably transformed, and Workplace has grown to meet that change,” said Sridhar Iyengar, Managing Director, Zoho Europe. “Businesses are not looking to solve a collaboration problem – more a custom invoicing, sales enablement 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, has the vision and functionality to meet the broad business needs of today. For today’s business, offering these tools vastly improves employee experience, which in turn enables a superior customer experience. Without a sophisticated digital workspace, this is now impossible.”

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. As a result, Zoho Workplace has seen rapid adoption in the last quarter, now supporting 2 million organisations, with 15 million users located across more than 150 countries. More than 25 percent of new Zoho Workplace customers have made the decision to switch over from G Suite and Microsoft.

“The necessity of a digital workplace designed for how people work is essential for not just productivity but effectiveness and experience in how work is completed.”, said Mark Smith, CEO and Chief Research Officer at Ventana Research. “Zoho Workplace brings simplicity and sophistication to communication and collaboration, all in a single suite not found anywhere else in the industry.”

“Thanks to Zoho and the Workplace tools, we have been able to close 12 per cent more business, as well as grow services with our largest client exponentially going into the new fiscal quarter and beyond,” said Marc Fishman, Director of Sales and Marketing for ONE Business Solutions. “Suffice it to say, the collaboration tools streamlined communication for our entire team, which includes senior team leads operating remotely. This has been crucial to our recent success in navigating the forever shifting and chaotic B2B space.”

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 customised to facilitate audit and control, and driving automation through AI that works across products.

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 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 (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 customisation, 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 powerful AI-based writing assistant. Writer features template-driven automation and APIs, form-driven automation, and automatic signature and approvals.

Convenience

• Show (Collaborative Presenting) – Show is integrated with ‌Atlassian, Unsplash, and Humaans, and features an organisation-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 visualise historic data with race charts, create drop-downs with predefined values, and link cell ranges using IMPORTRANGE. Sheet 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.
• WorkDrive (Cloud Document Management) – 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.

• ShowTime (Online Training) – 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 £2.40/user/month for the Standard version and £4.80/user/month for the Professional version. Additional details are available here.

Zoho Privacy Pledge

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 behavior 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.

About Zoho

With 45+ apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools, Zoho Corporation is one of the world’s most prolific software companies.

Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 9,000 employees. Zoho is headquartered in Austin, Texas with international headquarters in Chennai, India. Additional offices are in the United States, India, Japan, China, Singapore, Mexico, Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Arab Emirates.

Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. More than 50 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho every day to run their businesses, including Zoho itself.