Zoho debuts Workplace

There was a very interesting article published in PC world recently by Mark Hachman that looks at the new release of Zoho Workplace, their unified cloud workspace that brings all of Zoho’s ‘office apps’ together.

The article’s author took the time to dive into the suite and explore the platform’s 9 unified applications. He remarks in his piece that the productivity tools are “more tightly integrated than ever before.” and he’s certainly right on this point.

Workplace gives you a quickbar at the top of the application that allows you to seamlessly jump between the most common cloud applications without the need to have multiple tabs open or log into multiple products.

Workdrive contains the following Zoho Apps:

Getting to know Zoho

It’s easy to forget how humble Zoho’s beginnings were. At A2Z we work with it on a daily basis and serve hundreds of clients that are using zoho products so we’re very well acquainted with Zoho.

In his article, Mark comments on how G Suite and Microsoft office 365 are slugging it out but notes that:

“Zoho has quietly established itself with 15 million users across 2 million organizations.”

And though he points out that Microsoft might currently have the market share coming in at 42.7 million consumer officer subs, Zoho’s offering brings all the features of its titanic competitors, but for a much more affordable price. 

Zoho Workplace offers a very impressive list of features on its pricing page starting at just 80p per user for the mail only plan, £2.40 per month for the standard and £4.80 for the professional versions. 

What’s not made completely clear in Mark’s article is that Zoho offer a ‘Forever Free’ version of this plan that will give you access for 5 users completely for free. 

What’s interesting about Workplace?

While the new workplace doesn’t bring any new applications, the article highlights that Zoho is trying to integrate the separate workplace apps into a ‘cohesive whole’ and outlines the ‘canvas-like’ dashboard that brings together data from the different tools together.

The Dashboard was a very understated feature in the article as it really does give you this overview of everything that you’ve got on.

You’ll get an overview of your most recent emails, a snapshot of your calendar, upcoming tasks, notes, bookmarks, recent files, reminders, meeting/showtime sessions and you also get to see your zoho stream which is a feed of all your notifications, invites and @mentions.

Looking at it from an ‘application’ perspective is very interesting, but as the ‘pandemic era’ dawns on it, I don’t think that we should understate just how useful this suite is from a remote working and team collaboration perspective.

In Mark’s PC World article, he meantions a quote from Backman who actually underpins my point by writing:

“Backman says that Zoho is also designing consciously with home work in mind, with APIs that allow users to set an ‘away,’ ‘our of office’ or ‘in a call’ status that ripples through other apps within the workplace.

This is a feature that we love at A2Z Cloud!

The Conclusion

Mark ends his piece by saying

“Will you end up using Zoho@ Probably not, unless your business signs up for the service.”

And as a user of Zoho’s Workplace, I can only recommend that people give it a try for themselves to see just how comparable it is to some of Zoho’s larger rivals; Microsoft and Google.

As we move to a world where more and more people are going to be working from home and more and more businesses are going to have to be investigating remote working solutions, a solution like Zoho’s Workplace is a real shot in the arm with a friendly price tag. 

Not only does Workplace have a free tier, it’s free to try the professional plan for 15 days with no credit card required so you can find out for yourself!

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