Zoho Completes Milestone of 50 Million Users Worldwide

Zoho, the provider of a comprehensive suite of business software applications, announces the achievement of a historic milestone for the company: 50 million business users. This news comes at a time when Zoho is growing considerably. The company now has 10 data centres around the globe, which support more than 45 different applications that help businesses located in more than 180 countries.  

Zoho has also rearchitected its content collaboration platform from the ground up, optimizing it for teams and businesses. WorkDrive now provides the underlying document management across all Zoho business applications, allowing for unified search, single storage, contextual integration, as well as many other vertically integrated capabilities. Businesses seek to go beyond storage today and need enterprise-grade solutions in areas like multi-level security, compliance, and audit control. The unit of work is no longer the individual, but the team. Sharing and collaboration must be implicit in workflows and business processes, rather than be patched onto solutions that originated as consumer and single-person models. WorkDrive is integrated into the platform, services, and applications layers of the Zoho technology stack and incorporates capabilities like virus detection, encryption, image processing, and other AI tools in the proper business context.

 "A content collaboration platform must understand the context of the documents it stores. A proposal may turn into a sales contract and then into a service level agreement. In this case, the customer engagement went from prospecting to sales to service management. By understanding the connections between these documents—hence their underlying context—a content collaboration platform can connect and engage the relevant people," said Sridhar Vembu, Zoho's CEO. "WorkDrive creates a common, unified file system across all business processes, so the business context is easier to understand and preserve, making the system significantly more valuable to the customer. This unique type of a solution can only come from a vendor who also offers the business applications."

 Zoho is also announcing its revamped Workplace suite of productivity applications, which includes Cliq, Notebook, Connect, Writer, Sheet, Show, Showtime, Mail, Meeting, and WorkDrive. Among other new capabilities, Workplace now features an integrated app dashboard that houses customizable widgets that display information from each of the nine apps included in the suite. Here are some of the key features of WorkDrive and the revamped Workplace suite: 

WorkDrive for Better Team Management and Collaboration

·         WorkDrive comes with a built-in Zoho Office suite (Writer, Sheet, and Show).

·         WorkDrive introduces Team Folders, a shared workplace with role-based member permissions for cross-team collaboration and storage.

·         WorkDrive deploys virus scanning, encryption, and WAN acceleration at the platform level, thereby strengthening all Zoho services and applications built on top of it.

·         WorkDrive introduces image, video, and document conversion services.

·         WorkDrive is integrated with Zia, Zoho's AI assistant, providing unified search as well as OCR in applications such as Zoho Notebook. 

·         WorkDrive provides administrators advanced analytics, data administration, and granular access controls.  

·         WorkDrive has an advanced external file-sharing feature, allowing users to collaborate with external stakeholders while maintaining control of the files. 

·         External users who have edit permission can add files to a shared folder or edit shared Zoho Office Suite files.

·         WorkDrive brings businesses advanced team management capabilities, allowing administrators to manage settings at the team and Team Folder levels.

A New Workplace for a New Workforce  

·         Zoho Sheet is integrated with Zia, Zoho's AI assistant, giving customers automatic insight into their data, data cleansing, and even the ability to scan data tables within images and convert them into spreadsheets.

·         Zoho Cliq allows users to build bots, custom message actions, commands, and schedulers that connect with other workplace tools to centralize and consolidate data.

·         Zoho Writer gives business users the power to create documents with fillable fields. They can publish those documents as a web form to collect responses or generate merged documents (docx/PDF). Users can deliver the merged documents via email or send the filled document for signature.

·         Zoho ShowTime offers on-demand training with ticketing and course completion certificates, allowing trainers to reach customers across time zones and provide flexible learning.

·         Zoho Mail features email retention and eDiscovery whereby admins can retain organization-wide emails for a specified period and easily search across those retained emails and retrieve relevant information. 

·         Zoho Notebook is enhanced by Zia, Zoho's AI assistant. Users can employ the Ask Zia feature to save content to Notebook, search for notes, set reminders, and share notes with voice commands.

·         Zoho Meeting has added new moderator controls, including the ability to lock meetings, switch presenters, and mute or remove participants.

Pricing & Availability

 WorkDrive is available starting at ₹120 per user/month. Zoho Workplace is available starting at ₹99 per user/month.