The IT Nerd

With the current challenges facing distributed work teams, the newest version of Zoho Projects will help users manage projects with features that include:

• Instant messaging and virtual meetings by integrating with Zoho Cliq and Zoho Meeting.
• Virtual check-in and check-out by integrating with Zoho’s HR management tool, Zoho People
• Improved UI that supports multiple themes and single-click navigation
• Business rules for Tasks – users can set escalation rules for specific tasks
• Custom view in Gantt chart – save specific views of specific tasks within the Gantt report
• Status timeline for tasks – identify task bottlenecks at a glance
• Workdrive integration – better file management and team file sharing capabilities
• Discuss module – organize chatrooms old and new
• Single page layout – reach majority of functions and modules from the same page
• Contacts – CRM contacts to be imported as contacts instead of client users

More details about Projects 7 can be found on the Zoho Blog.

Data privacy and online surveillance transparency continue to be serious issues for Canadians. A newly released survey reveals that a vast majority of businesses in the country do not inform their website visitors of third-party tracking.

The November 2020 study – conducted by CRM Essentials and sponsored by Zoho – surveyed 429 Canadian business leaders and employees and found that only 19% of respondents inform their website visitors that they use third-party tracking codes.

The data being collected and leveraged by third-party tracking can include IP addresses, behavioural data, social activity, transactional data, feedback, application usage data, and even information about a user’s devices and browsers. While this data is most often used for the purposes of personalizing ads, other uses can include developing analytics about user behaviour, allowing social media sharing, and more.

Key survey findings:

• Only 38% of Canadian businesses have a well-defined, documented policy for customer data privacy that is strictly applied.
• Only 19% of respondents inform their website visitors that they use tracking codes from third-party companies. 
• As many as 23% of Canadian businesses did not know that third parties can install code on their website without consent.
• Only 11.8% of Canadian businesses are completely comfortable with how third parties use the data.
• Only 21.6% of Canadian businesses say that third-party companies have done a good job of explaining what they use their customer data for.

The most common purposes that Canadian businesses allowed third parties to install code on their websites were:

• Sharing content on social media (26.6%)
• Gathering analytics on who is consuming content (23.1%)
• Tracking advertising campaigns (21.4%)
• Tracking affiliate relationships for transactions (15.2%)
• Plugins to perform functions like SEO, security comment capture, and more (13.8%)

Canada Compared to the United States

Almost twice as many Canadian businesses surveyed (22.4% CDN vs. 11.4% U.S.) said that they were unaware that third parties could install coding on their website without their consent as compared to U.S. businesses. Additionally, American businesses are more than three times as likely (31.8% U.S. vs. 10% CDN) to be very comfortable with how third parties use their customers’ data.

Canada vs. the U.S highlights:

• Canadian businesses are almost twice as likely not to be aware of third-party software they’ve deployed on their sites.
• U.S. businesses are more than three times more likely to be very comfortable with their customer data being accessed by companies they do not have a direct relationship with.
• U.S. businesses are more than twice as likely than their Canadian counterparts to spend at least 50% of their marketing budget on digital ad platforms. 
• U.S. businesses are 88% more likely than Canadian businesses to say digital ad platforms are a primary factor in meeting company sales objectives.

Report Methodology

Conducted in November 2020 by CRM Essentials, LLC, this study surveyed 1,416 individuals across the United States and Canada. Participants of the study included a range of business leaders from manager roles to the C-level at small and large enterprises across a variety of industries.

Today, global technology company Zoho announced a strategic alliance with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to provide superior Customer Relationship Management, IT Service Management and e-Commerce solutions to solve problems for large businesses. This alliance partnership brings together the breadth and depth of Zoho’s product portfolio with TCS’ decades-long experience and domain expertise in technology-led consulting and business integration services. Together, Zoho and TCS will drive growth for global organizations through stronger technology alignment with business goals, more transparency across solutions, and greater operational efficiency.

TCS is a trusted consultant and integrator for enterprise businesses, with a vast network of diverse clients. TCS helps clients improve their customer experience through its capabilities in CX strategy, design, customer insights, marketing, sales and service transformation. Combining Zoho’s unified data model and TCS’s technical and industry expertise, organizations will benefit from faster, more seamless, and innovative capabilities to enhance customer experiences. Zoho’s portfolio of more than 45 applications is built on one technology stack so that services including AI, unified search, powerful analytics, and many others are inherited across all applications, providing businesses unparalleled value while solving complex integration challenges.

As an entry point, organizations can implement Zoho’s seamless and centralized customer experience platform, CRM Plus, which unifies all customer-facing teams on a single interface and provides end-to-end, real-time, and contextual intelligence. The platform sets a new standard for omni-channel customer engagement, sentiment collection and analysis, and prescriptive actions by leveraging Zoho’s powerful analytics and AI engines.

Zoho, in alliance with TCS, will allow global enterprise organizations to realize new revenue opportunities, gain operational efficiency, and drive business success from anywhere, whether remote, in-office, or both.

A lot has already been said and written about the global shift to remote working models and the need to adapt your company to the new ways of doing things. 

But at a time when it seems like every software company in the world is pushing out new remote working tools – or rebranding their existing tools to attract new customers like Google did recently with Google Workspace, not to be confused with the longstanding Zoho Workplace –  how do you determine the best way to equip your team for the new reality?

If you happen to be working on a roundup of the best software choices for small businesses, I wanted to take the chance to highlight some of the apps that Zoho offers for the modern workplace.

Why Zoho?

With more than 50 million users worldwide and praise from industry experts and customers alike, Zoho’s offerings have proven to be top-of-the-line. 

In fact, since March of this year, 15% of new Zoho Workplace users have actually migrated from other legacy products like Office 365 and Google Workspace, indicating that Zoho is providing an experience that not even the most tried and true software offerings can.

Those users are switching to Zoho for a number of reasons including: a unified interface for all Workplace apps, contextual Zia Search across all Zoho apps and platforms, and built-in security that does not require increased payment for increased security, like some of the other options out there.

Apps For The Remote Workforce

Among its numerous product offerings like Zoho Remotely, Zoho Workplace, and Zoho BackToWork, are a few apps most relevant to the current workplace that I would like to highlight for you:

• Zoho Meeting not only provides all the features you want and need to smoothly run online meetings and webinars, but it does so all with the peace-of-mind of complete and comprehensive security. Through a combination of admin security controls, two-factor authentication, encryption, thorough and complete privacy policies, data center security, and compliance to internationally accepted security and privacy standards, Zoho ensures you and your workforce are secure and safe.

• Showtime is Zoho’s answer to the new problem of training and onboarding new hires without being able to have them in the same room as you. Enhance your training sessions with features like the ability to pull in co-trainers into a session, session recording, screen-sharing, whiteboard tools, engagement analytics, and much more.

• Cliq focuses on the name of the game in today’s modern workplace: seamless collaboration. Through the use of tools like searchable conversations, options to switch to voice or video calls, integrated calendars and to-do lists, custom build bots and keyboard shortcuts, and top-notch security, your team can work in a way like never before.

Zoho Corporation, 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 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 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 have. 

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 organizations, 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.

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 (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 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.

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. 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.
• 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.
• 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 $3/user/month for the Standard version and $6/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.

Zoho Corporation today announced BackToWork, a fully comprehensive modular solution enabling businesses and organizations to safely transition back into the workplace. Free for the remainder of 2020, BackToWork, powered by Zoho Creator, is the latest program to be introduced as part of the company’s ongoing relief efforts, which support businesses impacted by the COVID-19 crisis.

In March, amid global office shutdowns, Zoho introduced Remotely, a free suite of 11 business applications designed to help companies of all sizes transition to remote work. Since its release, more than 25,000 organizations are using Remotely, which will remain free for businesses through September 1. In the next phase of relief efforts, Zoho unveiled its Small Business Emergency Subscription Assistance Program (ESAP), which continues to provide Zoho’s small business customers free access to their existing Zoho applications. Nearly 20,000 organizations have taken advantage of ESAP, providing financial relief during this crisis. In April, Zoho’s Vertical Relief Plan was rolled out, offering businesses in three hard-hit industries — Retail, Government & Non-Profit, and Education — custom-built tools and assistance programs to navigate pandemic-related issues. Zoho is entering a new phase with BackToWork, giving businesses around the world a safe and secure way to return to the office.

Scalable to companies and organizations of all sizes, BackToWork supports Chief Operations Officers, Chief Human Resources Officers, Facility Heads and their teams in making critical decisions around returning to the workplace without compromising on the safety and compliance aspects. The robust application consists of six modules designed to address every concern involved in the process of re-entering the workplace, all within one secure, easy-to-navigate solution:

• Safe Entry: Define multiple buildings and locations and control facility access based on employee wellness and travel history via a contactless end-to-end check-in system through generated QR codes.
• Employee Wellness Assessment: Track workplace wellness by defining self-assessment, safe entry, and travel policies. Employees can securely and privately submit a wellness questionnaire reporting travel history, recent medical history, and other pertinent possible exposure history.
• Maintenance and Assets: Define and manage assets and building maintenance requests for employees. Repair/replacement requests can be handled in the app.
• Admin Control Panel: Gain a 360-degree view of workplace data in pre-configured dashboards as well as add and manage your employees, and define roles for tasks such as approvals, emergency contacts, etc.
• Volunteer: Add and manage your company’s volunteer programs.
• Communication: Materials such as announcements, FAQs, and best practices, policies and safety documents can be shared with employees and managed in the Communication module.

Other Key Features

• The user-friendly application allows organizations the option of advanced customization to tailor to their specific company needs through Zoho Creator. 
• BackToWork is currently available in five languages (English, French, Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic) and will soon be available in three more (Spanish, Portuguese, and German). 
• The application can be easily integrated with top HR platforms like Zoho People and BambooHR.
• BackToWork is accessible via progressive web app, iOS and Android.
• BackToWork can be simply integrated with Active Directory and Zoho Directory.
• Zoho has several enhancements in the pipeline including a Travel Management module and integrations with popular video conferencing platforms.

Pricing and Availability

As part of Zoho’s ongoing effort to support businesses during these uncertain times, BackToWork will be offered free of charge until the end of 2020. After that period, it will cost $2 USD/user/month for all regions.

Zoho Privacy Pledge

Zoho BackToWork 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 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.

Zoho Corporation today shared the latest adoption numbers on Zoho Workplace, its enterprise collaboration platform.  In the last quarter, Zoho Workplace has seen a dramatic increase in adoption and now supports 15 million users globally. The company explained this unprecedented growth as a consequence of the pandemic as well as high demand from business users seeking better business application integration. More than 25 percent of new Zoho Workplace customers have made the decision to switch over from G Suite and Microsoft. 

Business users are increasingly seeking a convergence of collaboration, productivity, business, and communications tools as indicated by a recent study by Beagle Research. According to the study, 67.2 percent of respondents across North America felt that their work is chaotic due to non-integrated systems. Zoho Workplace uniquely fills this gap as competitors such as Zoom, Dropbox, and Slack fail to provide a seamless experience from start to finish. In addition, platform-centric competitors such as Microsoft and Google do not easily support contextual work environments where collaboration needs to happen within business applications. 

Zoho Workplace provides a unified platform including email, chat, audio and video conferencing, shared file storage, and online office suite that enhance the productivity of employees, anywhere. It is an online workspace that allows users to intuitively and securely work together, meet, collaborate and accomplish goals in a contextual setting. The platform includes:

• Zoho Mail: Custom domain-based, secure business email with Calendar,  Tasks, Notes and Bookmarks.
• Zoho Cliq: Secure instant messaging with audio and video call capabilities. Zoho Cliq has seen a 225 percent increase in messages sent and 1200 percent increase in calls made per day since March.
• Zoho Meeting: Online meeting and conferencing application. Zoho Meeting has seen a 772 percent increase in meeting sessions since March.
• Zoho ShowTime: Online training and virtual classroom solution.  Usage has increased 1100 percent since March.
• Zoho Connect: Intranet for organization and organization specific social-media platform for employees.
• Zoho Office Suite: Online office suite with enhanced co-creating, reviewing and collaboration features. Suite includes Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show. 
• Zoho WorkDrive: Cloud storage for the entire organization with ability to share files securely. Usage has increased 300 percent since March.

Zoho Workplace enables single sign-on across these applications where work streams follow users as they move from screen to screen. This convergence of business, communication, productivity, and collaboration applications allows users to effectively work in context within teams, across their organization or with external stakeholders. Zia and Zia Search boost user productivity as AI and search work across all 9 apps on the platform. Instead of having to extract data across multiple solutions, users can complete projects, from start to finish, all on Zoho. IIFL, Equitas Bank, Lambda Students, India Cements and Don Franklin Auto have chosen Zoho Workplace instead of other solutions because they require tight integration across their enterprise collaboration and business applications.

Zoho Privacy Pledge

Zoho Workplace 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 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. 

COVID-19 is forcing businesses to digitally transform how they operate. From enabling teams to work remotely to training employees, technology has never been more critical. Yet, a new Canadian study by Beagle Research Group and sponsored by Zoho reveals that technology systems have not kept up with changing times.

According to this April 2020 survey of employees at 208 Canadian businesses, two-thirds of staff give their workplace tech tools a failing grade. Sixty-four per cent of respondents do not think their technology helps them be productive while working in the office or remotely. This sentiment is worse for businesses with fewer than 500 employees where more than two-thirds of staff lack confidence in their tech and another 88 per cent say it takes too long to build systems to support their job.

 Technology highlights include:

 64 per cent of employees give their technology infrastructure a failing grade.

• Businesses with fewer than 500 employees are the most dissatisfied with their work technology with 68 per cent saying they lack confidence in their tech.
• 88 per cent say it takes too long to build systems that support their job.
• Sales department employees are among the most dissatisfied, with 59 per cent saying they lack confidence in their tech infrastructure.

Conversely, the survey revealed that even though employees struggle with their technology, they are happy at work. Eighty per cent of employees feel engaged and aligned with their employers’ business and think their management is competent. 

 Engagement, Alignment and Competence Highlights

 73 per cent have a sense of purpose in their work.

• 70 per cent say they take pride in their job.
• 66 per cent say their boss is knowledgeable and communicates clearly.
• 64 per cent say it’s easy to align their work with the objectives of the business.

Report Methodology

Conducted in April 2020 by Beagle Research Group, LLC, this study surveyed 509 individuals across the United States and Canada. Participants of the study ranged from non-executive and non-managerial employees at small and enterprise businesses in a variety of industries.

Zoho Corporation, a global technology company that offers the most comprehensive suite of business software applications in the industry, today announced Remote Work Tools on Cliq, an enhanced version of its chat software that allows employees to check-in to work, greet co-workers and interact as they would at the office, no matter where they’re working from. Available now, the enhanced platform brings the office into Cliq to ensure teams don’t miss out on the little things.

As businesses shifted to working remotely in the wake of the global pandemic, Cliq usage skyrocketed. The platform saw a 225% increase in message volume and a 1200% increase in calls made per day, with group calls growing 10x in the U.S., 25x in Europe and 15x in India. As remote work became widespread, teams faced the challenge of collaborating as they would in their physical office space. Cliq with Remote Work Tools addresses this by solving what traditional chat software can’t.

Key Remote Work Tools on Cliq features include:

Easy Check-in. With a simple click connected to human resource management systems, employees can check-in and check-out to work from Cliq as if swiping their ID when walking into or out of the office.

Availability transparency. Team members can easily update their work status (available for collaboration, engaged with work, having lunch or taking a short break), allowing co-workers to see who’s available and who’s busy as if walking the office floor.

Auto-timed status updates. Work status is synced based on activity across other Zoho Apps, letting co-workers easily see if teammates are in a remote session in Zoho Assist or attending a meeting in Zoho Meeting.

Live video feeds to see who’s available. A virtual equivalent to peeking at a co-worker’s desk to see if they’re free before heading over for a quick discussion, live feeds enable teams to see if it’s the right time to connect with a co-worker.

Instant group calls. Group calls are initiated with the touch of a button, allowing teams to collaborate when the situation calls for a quick face-to-face meeting.

Team work-hour reports. Integrating reporting allows teams to quickly view a summary of average user availability and check the team’s status and summary reports in their human resource management system.

Easy document management. Integration with Zoho Writer enables teams to preview, share or export documents from the document link.

Instant leave approvals. Managers can approve leave requests directly from chat to quickly update resource management.

Integrated extensions. Messages can be turned into project work items, such as adding a technical issue to Zoho Projects using an integrated extension.

With these and many other features, Cliq with Remote Work Tools brings the in-office experience home for improved team morale, collaboration and productivity. Teams can even build their own tools with widgets that integrate with users’ everyday apps to create a custom home view directly inside Cliq. For more information on Cliq and other Zoho apps, visit www.zoho.com.

Zoho Corporation, a global company that offers the most comprehensive suite of business software applications in the industry, is today unveiling Bigin, a new pipeline-centric CRM software designed specifically for small and micro business owners. Bigin by Zoho CRM offers a simple solution for millions of small businesses to keep track of their customers and improve customer relationships without having to worry about high costs or complicated features.

Bigin is a pipeline-centric CRM solution focused on small businesses who do not need an elaborate, end-to-end CRM. If businesses outgrow Bigin, they can upgrade to Zoho CRM with ease.

Bigin Highlights

• 30-minute setup: Bigin allows users to get up and running within 30 minutes through effortless on-boarding.
• Multiple pipelines for customer operations: With the option to create multiple pipelines with fully customizable stages, Bigin empowers small businesses to run their distinct customer operations inside their CRM.
• Built-in Telephony: Making and receiving calls anytime, anywhere is made possible through Bigin’s built-in telephony, which lets users choose from a range of popular telephony providers in the Zoho Phonebridge marketplace. With integrated telephony, Bigin pulls all the necessary information so that uses can have well-informed calls with customers and prospects.
• Workflow Automation: Bigin helps sales reps drastically cut down the time spent on repetitive manual tasks with easy-to-create automated workflows.
• Real-time notifications and analytics: Real-time notifications from prospects are delivered inside the CRM. Additionally, Bigin’s out-of-the-box analytics dashboards with charts and KPIs empower businesses to make smarter decisions based on data and up-to-date key performance metrics.
• Fully mobile: Manage emails, stay updated with your pipeline, and access key business information in real time with our mobile apps for iOS and Android devices.

Pricing and Availability

At $7/user/month, billed annually, Bigin is not just built for small businesses, it is also priced for them.

How is Bigin different from Zoho CRM?

Bigin is a pipeline-centric CRM solution focused exclusively on small and micro businesses who do not yet need an elaborate, end-to-end CRM. Bigin is also an ideal fit for freelancers and individuals who want to manage their personal business pipelines online. Zoho CRM, on the other hand, is focused on growing businesses of all sizes, especially enterprises who are looking to utilize the larger CRM platform for their advanced business needs.