The IT Nerd

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.

Zoho Corporation is launching its Small Business Emergency Subscription Assistance Program (ESAP) to help Zoho customers worldwide weather this global crisis. A recent study by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business has found that half of Canada’s small firms have already seen a drop in sales due to the economic effects of COVID-19, with 4 in 10 of those affected businesses also reporting a decrease greater than 25 per cent¹. ESAP is one way Zoho is committing itself to helping its small business customers. For up to 20,000 qualified paying customers with 25 employees or less, Zoho is waiving the cost of every single application they currently use, for up to three months.

Zoho is a 24-year-old, bootstrapped, privately held company with more than 50 million users located in over 180 countries. Since the beginning, Zoho has owed its existence to its small business customers. While Zoho now has grown significantly upmarket, serving mid-market and enterprise customers in addition to small businesses, the company believes that for the broader economy to stay healthy, SMBs must first stay healthy and viable. ESAP is intended to lighten the financial burden put upon our small business customers during this chaotic and difficult period.

Earlier this month, Zoho launched Remotely, a virtual productivity platform of 11 collaboration applications, provided to businesses of all sizes around the world for free, so that companies could effectively make the transition to remote work. Since its release two weeks ago, more than 5,000 new companies are running on the platform, and that number is increasing every day. We have seen an average of 500 per cent growth in usage of our collaboration apps and 1,000 per cent growth in daily new users of Zoho Meeting.

Between this global program and the no-cost availability of Zoho Remotely, a full virtual collaboration platform, Zoho is committed to helping as many businesses as possible. We are encouraging other companies in a position to help businesses survive to join us in supporting the small business ecosystem.

Please see a video announcement of the Small Business Emergency Subscription Assistance Program from our CEO Sridhar Vembu: https://youtu.be/ZxSrdGeEG1M   

Recognizing that many companies are looking for ways to ensure business continuity in light of the Coronavirus, Zoho will offer Remotely, Zoho’s virtual collaboration and productivity suite, for free to any Canadian company that needs remote work tools.

Remotely includes Cliq, Meeting, ShowTime, WorkDrive, Projects, and other apps, to create a comprehensive integrated team workspace.

Zoho Corporation announced today that they’ve hit 50 million business users. This news comes at a time when Zoho is growing considerably. The company now has 10 data centers around the globe, which support more than 45 different applications that help businesses located in more than 180 countries. With the recent launch of Catalyst, Zoho continues to be a major player in the developer space as well, offering no-code, low-code, and pro-code applications. As more and more people around the world turn to Zoho for their business needs, the company is redoubling its efforts to provide the best, most unified platform, services, and applications in the industry.

With this in mind, Zoho has rearchitected its document management system 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.

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 $2 per user/month. Zoho Workplace is available starting at $3 per user/month.

Today, Zoho Corporation celebrates the strong adoption of its Zoho platform in Canada. The announcement was made at Zoho’s user conference, Zoholics Canada, which welcomed more than 400 customers across the country to Toronto for two days of keynotes, educational sessions, and 1:1 briefings with senior Zoho executives.

Zoho’s momentum is a result of Canadian companies rejecting the complex and expensive software platforms offered today in favour of Zoho One, the all-in-one, unified operating system that is designed from the ground up to run an entire organization—from sales and marketing to finance and HR to operations, and more. Since its launch two years ago, Zoho One has evolved to include over 45 applications with built-in services including AI, business intelligence, messaging, search, and more—all at the same cost to customers.

Globally, Zoho has surpassed 50 Million users in over 180 countries. Key Canadian highlights include:

• 20,000 paid customers, and tens of thousands of customers on Zoho’s free-tier offering
• 40% year-over-year revenue growth
• 40% partner contribution to revenue in 2019
• 46% partner year-over-year revenue growth
• 100% year-over-year growth of Zoho One, Zoho’s fastest growing product in Canada
• 100% year-over-year growth of Zoho One sold by channel partners

Zoho is the operating system for business—a single online platform capable of running an entire business. 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 is one of the world’s most prolific software companies.

Zoho Corporation, a global, privately held company that offers the most comprehensive suite of business software applications in the industry, today announced the release of Catalyst, the company’s visionary full-stack serverless platform for developers. Catalyst is a simple to use yet extremely powerful offering that allows developers to create and run microservices and applications. Catalyst gives developers access to the same underlying services and frameworks that power Zoho’s 45+ applications used by more than 45 million users around the world.

As a technology company, Zoho has built and vertically integrated all of the layers of its tech stack, from applications to app infrastructure to operating systems to network infrastructure all the way down to data centers. It has been a decades-long investment in technology, and now this reliable, scalable, and secure infrastructure—and all that it promises—is being opened up to developer.

Catalyst has already empowered developers to build services and applications, including a bug-filing bridge application, an app used to import users into a CRM, a microservice for lead distribution, a data-cleansing microservice, and more. Here are some of the key features of Catalyst:

Back-End as a Service

• Catalyst provides scalable storage for both structured and unstructured data via easy-to-use relational databases and file stores.
• Listeners enable developers to monitor Catalyst’s databases and file stores for changes in real time, while schedulers allow for the execution of functions at set-time intervals.

Function as a Service

• Over the past 13 years, more than 26 million functions have been built and executed on Zoho’s infrastructure by more than 200,000 developers. The expertise we’ve gained in this time is today being exposed to developers as Function as a Service.
• Powerful server-side functions can be created in Catalyst by developers in their preferred programming languages, including Java, Node.js, and Python.
• In addition to using the services provided by Zoho, developers can build their own microservices by utilizing Catalyst’s functions and persistent data stores.

Microservices

• Zoho is exposing some of the same functionality it uses to support its own apps and services as microservices in Catalyst. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and object detection are currently available, with more services such as anomaly detection and prediction analysis on the way.
• In the coming months, Zoho will expose business-oriented services such as grammar and diction checking (powered by Zoho Writer) and document previews (powered by Zoho Docs). Zoho will expose more microservices through the platform.
• Developers can use Catalyst to access other out-of-the-box services including sign-up and authentication, push notifications, search indexing, and emailing.

Tools By Developers, For Developers

• Catalyst’s unified interface drives developer productivity by enabling them to access all necessary tools from a single location.
• Catalyst provides web and mobile SDKs and APIs for developers to easily build serverless applications.
• Catalyst provides powerful command-line tools that enable developers to build, test, and deploy.
• Developers can simply create multiple sandbox environments to test their application before taking it to production.
• Developers are able to host their web applications within Catalyst as well as manage distribution via built-in Mobile Device Management (MDM).
• Catalyst comes with extensive performance monitoring and metrics for tracking usage in real time.

Pricing & Availability

Catalyst is available upon request at catalyst.zoho.com. As with all things Zoho, Catalyst will be priced aggressively.