Zoho Charges Ahead with 50 Million Business Users, and Powers up its Workplace Suite to Help Businesses Accelerate Their Transformation Journey

Introduces WorkDrive, a Content Collaboration Platform, with Knowledge and Context of Underlying Business Processes

Zoho Corporation, a global, privately held company that offers the most comprehensive suite of business software applications in the industry, is thrilled to announce today another historic milestone for the company: 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. 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 content collaboration platform 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.

"A content collaboration platform must understand the context of the documents it stores. A proposal may turn into a sales contract and then into a service level agreement. In this case, the customer engagement went from prospecting to sales to service management. By understanding the connections between these documents—hence their underlying context—a content collaboration platform can connect and engage the relevant people," said Gibu Mathew, Vice President, and GM, Asia Pacific, Zoho Corp. "WorkDrive creates a common, unified file system across all business processes, making the system significantly more valuable to the customer. This unique type of a solution can only come from a vendor who offers both online file management and the business applications."

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). Documents created from Zoho Office Suite can be stored in Team Folders, a shared workplace with role-based member permissions for cross-team collaboration and storage.

WorkDrive is integrated with Zia, Zoho's AI assistant, providing unified search as well as OCR in applications such as Zoho Notebook. Administrators also have access to advanced analytics, data administration, and granular access controls. 

For external collaboration, the advanced external file-sharing feature allows users to collaborate with external stakeholders while maintaining control of the files.

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.

Customer Statements

H.E.R Entrepreneur is an omni-channel media platform that inspires, educates and connects entrepreneurs, leaders, government and investors across Asia through its online and offline content. The preparation work behind the scenes often require materials to be neatly documented and organized, and Zoho Workdrive has allowed us to store large files in a safe location, while collaborating at a high level. At times where files were accidentally deleted, it can be restored conveniently.” said Renee Tan, Managing Director of Rendeur Pte Ltd. “We started with Zoho Mail and were impressed by how it has helped our business. Together with the excellent service support, we decided to explore more applications under Zoho, and has went with Workdrive ever since. Given the large storage space, we are now able to plan with more precision, and manage multiple client’s project with ease.

"Prior to Workdrive, we had been finding it hard to manage client files and coordinate internal and external programs, we also were using multiple platforms which affected our collaboration abilities and decreased security," said Bob Sullivan, Co-Founder of Vector Solutions. "When we switched to WorkDrive, Zoho showed us how one application can change our efficiency tremendously. One of our favorite aspects is being able to create folders where our clients can see only their secure documents while we can see everything from all clients. It improved our collaboration and work ability greatly."

Pricing & Availability

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