Zoho launches major enhancements to operations platform

Global technology firm Zoho has released new apps and services for Zoho One, its operating system for business.

Zoho says the new release empowers businesses to solve disjointed data challenges and close communications gaps across silos, enabling organisations to be more productive, adapt more quickly to changing business conditions, and become poised for growth.

"The experience that employees, customers, partners, and suppliers get when dealing with businesses is typically a reflection of how that business and its systems are structured internally," says Zoho chief strategy officer, Vijay Sundaram.

"Today, the majority of systems are disconnected as a result of siloed solutions offered by vendors. Unification of a business requires the unification of underlying systems, which can then provide a truly unified experience, internally and externally, along with unified insights."

"Zoho One was created with the vision of driving efficiency and innovation for businesses in Australia and keeps expanding its unbeatable value with new additions and improvements year over year," he says.

Zoho One aims to resolve operational, digitisation, and retention challenges that businesses encounter.

Businesses now have more robust real-time, organisation-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 organisation, 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 catalogue data and 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 specific to each individual within the organisation. 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, organisation-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 aims to help businesses better manage operations.

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.

The addition of Zoho Commerce enables retailers to quickly build online shops with the tools needed to construct a website, accept orders, track inventory, process payments, manage shipping, market their brand, and analyse 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:

Organisations now have a learning management tool with Zoho Learn that enables interactive training programs and assessments with Zoho's course builder. Online centralisation of company information, training programs, and more, gives businesses a better way to nurture employee growth.

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.

Teams can now use the TeamInbox shared email inbox to eliminate task duplication and streamline email conversations in one central location.

Another industry-first, Org Dictionary offers a central dictionary for the entire organisation. It automatically incorporates the organisation's employee name and other sources, offering a central, consistent diction across various Zoho applications and users.

Unified and personalised experience with Context

Zoho One's enhanced user experience allows easy customisation and personalisation of workspaces. Employees can now see their apps, services, and dashboards in one view with centralisation across calendars, dashboards, navigation, and more.

Widgets encapsulating data across the organisation can be aggregated together in a custom dashboard. This provides users visibility across the organisation in a single view to drill down just one click away.

A Deep Ecosystem that Extends and Integrates

Recognising 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. It 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 a newly released no-code tool, Canvas, low-code tool, Zoho Creator, and the Catalyst pro-code platform.