The IT Nerd

Zoho Corporation, today introduced new apps and services in Zoho One, the operating system for business. The new release empowers businesses to solve disjointed data challenges and close communications gaps across silos, so organizations can become more productive, adapt more quickly to changing business conditions, and become poised for growth. 

Zoho One aims to resolve operational, digitization, and retention challenges that businesses encounter. Enhancement categories include: 

Unified, Real-time Insights for Critical Business Decisions 

Businesses now have stronger real-time, organization-wide analytics, connecting the dots between data previously lost across departments, teams, and accounts. Powered by Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant, and Zoho’s BI and Analytics Platform, Zoho One allows users to predict and provide insights across the organization enabling confident decision-making. New innovations include: 

• Embedded and Conversational BI: Zoho One now features embedded and conversational analytics enabling decision makers to drill down into their data and glean cross-departmental insights, all through natural language commands using Zia Insights. By providing 1,500+ pre-built analytics reports and dashboards, critical business decisions can be made with greater precision and speed. 
• Data Preparation: This self-service data preparation and management tool is now available in Zoho One. Whether users are preparing data from third-party apps or other sources, DataPrep, powered by machine learning, can help business users integrate, model, cleanse, transform, enrich, and catalog data, as well as integrate with Analytics or a third party for new-found insights. 

• Work Graph: Zoho’s new back-end service, an industry-first for business software, maps interactions between people, resources, systems and processes by studying signals and their strength across the board to build a business-wide work graph that is specific to each individual within the organization. The result of a work graph will be seen in the day-to-day productivity of users across various apps. 
• Enterprise Search: Zoho’s actionable, organization-wide search, which is powered by Zia, can now understand natural language requests. Natural language powered search will lead to more accurate data discovery across teams and functions. 

Scale and Manage Operations More Effectively in Unpredictable Climates 

Global health and economic crises have accelerated the need for digital solutions that support varying workplace and business models. Operations have become more complex, making employee data and security a priority. The addition of Mobile Application Management and Zoho Commerce aim to help businesses better manage operations: 

• Mobile Application Management (MAM): With remote work now persistent, Zoho One now includes enterprise-grade Mobile App Management capabilities. Admins can easily add and manage all of their users’ devices for better insight and control of provisioning, specific app permissions and policies, locking and wiping devices remotely, and more, to support employee mobility and flexibility. 
• Zoho Commerce: Businesses need to digitize faster than ever. The addition of Zoho Commerce enables retailers to easily build online shops with the tools needed to construct a website, accept orders, track inventory, process payments, manage shipping, market their brand, and analyze data. Zoho Commerce also integrates with third party payment gateways. 

Build Strong Employee Experiences, From Anywhere 

To help close the distance between employees, employers, and teams, which has widened with remote work, Zoho One delivers solutions that promote stronger collaboration and employee experience to support any mode of work: 

• Zoho Learn: Organizations now have a learning management tool that enables interactive training programs and assessments with Zoho’s course builder. Online centralization of company information, training programs, and more, gives businesses a better way to nurture employee growth. 
• Zoho Lens: To facilitate better communication and collaboration in a remote-work environment, Zoho Lens provides remote assistance and guidance to employees through augmented reality (AR) via real-time AR annotation, VoIP and text chat, and more. 
• TeamInbox: Teams use this shared email inbox to eliminate task duplication and streamline email conversations in one central location. 
• Org Dictionary: Another industry-first, this new organization-wide service offers a central dictionary for the entire organization. It automatically incorporates the organization’s employee name and other sources offering a central, consistent diction across various Zoho applications and users. 

Unified and Personalized Experience with Context 

Zoho One’s enhanced user experience allows easy customization and personalization of workspaces: 

• Unified Console, Dashboards, and Smart-Stack UI: Employees are now able to see their apps, services, and dashboards in one view with centralization across calendars, dashboards, navigation, and more. 
• Customizable Dashboard with Pre-Built Widgets: Widgets encapsulating data across the organization can be aggregated together in a custom dashboard. This provides users visibility across the organization in a single view with the ability to drill down just one click away. 

A Deep Ecosystem that Extends and Integrates 

Recognizing that businesses value flexibility in choosing apps that serve their specific needs, the Zoho One platform already integrates with 1,000+ third party solutions on Zoho Marketplace and now extends integration with 100+ telephony providers to enable seamless communications between stakeholders. Zoho One also includes a comprehensive platform for developers and business users to create, extend, and integrate. The platform includes newly released no-code tool, Canvas, low-code tool, Zoho Creator, and pro-code platform, Catalyst. 

Zoho Pricing: Pricing starts at $50 CAD per employee. For comprehensive pricing information, please go to: https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/

Zoho Corporation, a global technology company offering the most extensive suite of business software applications in the industry, announced that starting today, its online invoicing solution, Zoho Invoice, will be completely free of cost to further extend the company’s support for small and medium-sized businesses. 

In the last four years, Zoho Invoice’s revenue growth has rapidly increased, demonstrating the need for a comprehensive invoicing solution to aid businesses from any industry to shift from manual to digital. Due to the global pandemic, SMBs have decided to modernize their invoicing processes at an accelerated rate. To continue its support of the SMB community, Zoho Invoice offers advanced capabilities such as time tracking, auto recording of expenses, project billing, and 30+ real time reports to help freelancers and small businesses easily navigate the billing and payment collection process, without the concerns of cost. 

For small and medium-sized businesses billing and payment collection has continued to be a challenge, due to administrative costs, limited staff, and insufficient time resources. Additionally, businesses need the ability to access data remotely, which has caused a shift from on-premise solutions to cloud-based solutions. 

According to an Analysys Mason study, SMB spending on on-premise solutions for invoice management will be stagnant between 2019 and 2025, while spending on cloud-based invoicing solutions will increase from 0.9 billion dollars to 2.1 billion dollars. Fully cloud-based, Zoho Invoice enables businesses to create and send fully-customized, professional invoices in less than a minute, follow up for payments automatically, and get paid online to achieve efficiency in their invoice process. 

Zoho has supported small and medium-sized businesses for over 20 years, and Zoho Invoice has helped businesses with their invoicing needs for 13 of those years. Zoho Invoice’s free offering will continue to help businesses streamline their billing and payment collection process through streamlined payment collection, simplified billing, tax handling, and more. Invoice integrates with Zoho applications, and also integrates with third-party applications so that businesses can use the solution to contextually sync their AR information to relevant systems. 

Key benefits of Zoho Invoice include:

• Simplified billing: Businesses can create and send fully customized, professional invoices within minutes. Invoices can be sent automatically if they are recurring in nature. 
• Tax Handling: Businesses can track US sales tax or Canada’s GST levied on every transaction with tax summary reports to assist with tax filing. 
• Streamlined payment collection: Payments can be collected quickly and securely online through ACH, Debit/Credit Cards and PayPal. 

• Automated payment reminders: Based on customizable settings, the system will automatically send payment reminders to customers through email. 
• Effortless expense tracking: Expenses can be recorded automatically by scanning the bill or receipt using the Zoho Invoice mobile app.
• Client portal: Businesses can allow their customers to keep track of all relevant invoices, projects and make payments through the client portal. 
• Time tracking: Businesses can manage multiple projects, track time and accurately bill their customers. 

• Instant reports: Businesses have access to 30+, real-time reports that provide insights into key financial metrics such as best-selling products, invoice statuses, pending payments, and more.
• Mobile apps: Zoho Invoice is available on the web or as a fully functional, downloadable mobile app available for all devices.

Availability
Zoho Invoice is available for free immediately on the web and as a fully functional, downloadable mobile app on all devices.

For more information, please visit https://www.zoho.com/invoice

Zoho Corporation today announced its new Business Intelligence (BI) Platform — an AI-driven data analytics solution empowering businesses to surface precise and actionable insights through self-service data preparation and augmented analytics. Combining newly launched Zoho DataPrep with an enhanced version of Zoho Analytics, Zoho’s end-to-end self-service BI Platform enables organizations to cleanse, unify, and analyze cross-departmental data, obtain an encyclopedic view of the company, and ultimately move toward a more competitive business strategy based on real-time insights.

Zoho’s BI Platform brings together pre-built, visual dashboards, comprehensive data integrations, data preparation, augmented and embedded BI, security and privacy capabilities, flexible deployment models (cloud or on-premise), and scalability. Below are four standout pillars of this platform, which allow businesses to perform better and remain competitive in their industries:

1. Augmented Data Prep and Management – Zoho DataPrep, a new application, is an AI and machine learning-driven self-service data preparation tool. The addition of Zoho DataPrep to the BI Platform allows business users to easily create and manage data pipelines that enable them to integrate, model, cleanse, transform, enrich, and catalogue data before making it ready for analysis. 
2. Data Stories – Zoho’s BI Platform now offers an integrated enterprise portal builder (Zoho Sites) and presentation software (Zoho Show). Embedding live reports and dashboards into a website or presentation allows administrators to wrap additional context around data and foster more iimmersive discussion on business matters. Data Stories reduces friction within an organization, so that businesses can be data-driven without needing to learn new tools.
3. Augmented Analytics – Ask Zia, Zoho’s conversational AI, enables business users — with or without technical know-how — to surface data through natural language querying. Additionally, the all-new Zia Insights provides textual narration of key insights from reports and dashboards, which significantly reduces the time and effort required to explore data and glean insights. Zia Insights also includes what-if capability, enabling scenario analysis for effective decision-making.
4. Marketplace – Through Zoho Marketplace, an apps marketplace , Zoho is enabling partners to develop and publish analytical apps and integrations to complement Zoho Analytics users, thereby strengthening the BI and Analytics platform. Another dimension is the launch of deep native analytical apps, with domain-specific advanced analytics, in third-party marketplaces such as Shopify, ServiceNow and Atlassian.

The new Zoho BI Platform is built for scale and is extensible to more than 250 data sources—including Zendesk, HubSpot, Microsoft, Mailchimp, Stripe and Google—allowing businesses to integrate and analyze data sourced from diverse third-party systems.  Blending with outside data sources has always been one of the key strengths of Zoho Analytics, and a value demonstrated  by the fact that 60%of existing users have chosen it as their BI tool while solely running on non-Zoho applications and data sources..  

The BI platform gives users on-demand insight into operational data to inform critical business decisions with the support of Zia, Zoho’s AI tool. Zia augments data preparation and visualization by using natural language querying and generation, text narration of key insights from reports and dashboards, and cognitive and advanced analytics. . These self-service and real-time capabilities make it possible to capture actionable data insights to boost operational efficiency and productivity. 

With more than 50,000 organizations already using it, Zoho Analytics has consistently been one of the company’s fastest growing products. Within the last two years, Zoho Analytics has grown by 30%  YoY with a 40%YoY increase in the enterprise segment. The application has seen a 10% jump in customers switching from competitive platforms. Also, 50% of the customers have chosen Zoho Analytics after evaluating multiple competitive BI products. With this new BI Platform, Zoho expects above 45% YOY revenue growth.

I got a demo of this last week and I walked away impressed. Tasks such as cleansing data which is usually the domain of people with BI backgrounds can be done by end users. And it integrates incredibly well with Zoho Show (which is Zoho’s presentation software) to the point where slides can be “live” which allows you to get those deeper insights on the fly. The bottom line is that the Zoho BI Platform takes BI out of the realm of a few, and democratizes it.

Pricing and Availability

Zoho BI Platform, which includes Zoho Analytics and Zoho DataPrep, is available immediately in two versions, cloud and on-premise.  For monthly option, the cloud version is $8 per user, per month. The on-premise version is $30 per user, per month. For annual option, the cloud version is $108 per user, per year. The on-premise version is $360 per user, per year. 

Zoho DataPrep is also available as a standalone. The standard plan starts at $40 per month for 2 million rows including 3 users while the enterprise plan is highly customizable and the pricing is based on the customization.

For more information, please visit https://www.zoho.com/analytics/

Zoho Corporation is marking its 25th anniversary with a commitment to open 100 new offices around the world in the next three years, bringing opportunity to talent regardless of location. Privately-owned and bootstrapped, Zoho has grown into a multinational technology corporation with more than 9,000 employees serving more than 62 million users worldwide. 

Recently, the pandemic has proven Zoho’s business model and platform offerings are ideal for organizations that need to scale and lean on cloud-based collaboration to succeed. Some of the company’s major milestones to-date include: 

• Zoho registrations increased 22% between 2019-2020 from 51 to 62 million users. The company’s communication, collaboration, and other remote-work tools have proven highly valuable for customers, especially during the pandemic.
• Zoho has remained profitable since its inception, growing on average 30% year-over-year for the past five years, all while providing powerful yet affordable software to customers.
• In 2018, Zoho removed all third-party trackers from its properties as part of the company’s commitment to customer data privacy. Zoho is leading the data-protection charge so that others will do the same.
• Created in 2005, the Zoho Schools program has graduated more than 900 students from disadvantaged areas throughout India. Today, Zoho Schools graduates make up more than 10% of Zoho’s total workforce.
• The company’s commitment to fostering innovation and empowering ideas has created a ripple effect of opportunities: 57 start-up companies have been founded by former Zoho employees, raising $1.5B in capital to-date.
• With a portfolio of more than 50 applications in the areas of financial management, digital workplace, low-code app development, customer experience, employee experience, and many others, Zoho has guided the industry away from stand-alone apps toward platforms with its Zoho One suite. It has likewise challenged complex, enterprise pricing language with its groundbreaking, transparent, per-employee pricing model.

To support its vision of uplifting local economies and empowering local communities, Zoho has expanded its transnational localism efforts by adding two new offices in the rural Texas towns of New Braunfels and Bastrop; an office in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada; as well as two in San Juan Del Rio and Tequisquiapan, Mexico. As I am a Canadian, I am most interested in the fact that Zoho picked Cornwall to put their Canadian office in. It was chosen by Zoho because of the level of affordability and location.

In South India alone, Zoho has 15 functional offices with six more currently under construction. The company will continue to expand in various locations throughout Europe and Asia Pacific. As Zoho embarks on its next 25 years, it remains steadfast in its commitment to sustainable growth. Zoho plans to run its US headquarters in Austin, Texas, and its adjoining farm, entirely on solar power by the end of 2021.

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.