Zoho rolls out updates for Workplace to make collaborations less chaotic

Chennai based software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Zoho has rolled out updates for Zoho Workplace, its software platform that combines collaboration, productivity and communication tools. 

These updates include new tools in the areas of contextual communication, social intranet and a host of new convenience upgrades such as collaborative presenting and cloud document management, according to a statement. 

Zoho said that its Workplace solution currently supports 2 million organisations, with 15 million users in over 150 countries. 

According to a recent joint study by Zoho and Beagle Research, 54% of enterprise-level employees (businesses with over 500 employees) said the applications they work with are not intuitive.  Also, some 40% of the largest enterprise employees (businesses with over 4,000 employees) said their work can be chaotic, with employees working with multiple technology platforms to complete their job.

Zoho says businesses are looking for unified solutions that can help them deal with tasks such as data migration, content creation, contextual collaboration and communication. According to the company, its Workplaces platform addresses this requirement.

“The nature of work has undeniably changed, and Workplace has grown to meet that change,” Sridhar Vembu, Zoho’s CEO and co-founder said. 

In terms of better contextual communication, users will now be able to make audio or video calls from within the app, as well as edit document attachments, and access email within Zoho Writer. Some of the features include unusual login alerts, custom spam controls as well as backup and recovery options. 

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For conferencing, users can schedule one-off meetings. Zoho said its platform now supports 16 languages and is also integrated with Zoho Projects, bookings, CRM (customer relationship management tools) and others. 

For the human resource (HR) teams, Zoho has announced connect, which integrates with Zoho People and other HR systems to allow them to moderate content, modules and grant permissions as well as define user policies.

Zoho Show --collaborative presentation tool-- has been integrated with other collaborative tools such as Atlassian, Unsplash and Humaans, and now comes integrated with data linking, which allows users to connect live data to slides. 

In Zoho spreadsheet, users have access to latest functions to visualise historic data with race charts, create drop downs with predefined values, and track changes while collaborating with both Zoho and non-zoho applications.

The WorkDrive cloud documentation tool will now feature a unified search option, and will be equipped with a comprehensive admin panel, customer reports to monitor team activity, and integration with Zoho directory. 

Also read: Zoho offers free doc scanner after govt bans Chinese app

Other upgrades include converting documents to fillable forms, restricting comment visibility, and an AI based writing assistant for Zoho Writer, and branding and white-labeling capabilities with Zoho Showtime, an online training tool.