Zoho Unveils Major Update to Zoho One
The new Zoho One offers a seamless experience across its 50 applications, putting the user and context at the core.
Topics
Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, has announced numerous enhancements to Zoho One, its all-in-one business software platform, featuring an evolution in the user experience that facilitates easy and secure collaboration.
The new Zoho One offers a seamless experience across its 50 applications, putting the user and context at the core.
“Today’s Zoho One update redesigns the user experience to address how work is evolving from an app-based system to a platform-based system,” said Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho.
“Customers are not licensing apps with Zoho One. They are licensing peace of mind. They expect Zoho to take care of the technology part and let them be productive in their business. Our enhancements with this release deliver essentially that – a unified experience delivered through unified integrations, context, workflows, and data.”
ALSO READ: Dubai Culture Partners With Zoho For Digital Transformation of Businesses
The software platform stands out for its privacy, security, and trust, underpinned by Zoho’s ownership of the entire technology stack. End-to-end control, coupled with deep integrations, ensures consistent reliability and compliance, equipping organisations with a competitive edge through seamless, intelligent operations.
Zoho One’s new features offer unification across three domains: Experience, Integrations, and Intelligence.
Experience – removing boundaries between apps
Zoho One’s new UX provides a connected, context-aware user experience:
- Spaces bring easier access to your everyday apps.
Apps within Zoho One are grouped into Spaces across the top toolbar, and each serves a distinct purpose. Personal Space includes apps unique to the individual, including personal productivity software.
Organizational Space includes tools for company-wide communication (Forums, Town Hall, Ideas, and more). The software includes function-specific spaces grouped by Department (HR, Marketing, Finance, and more).
All of these spaces can be customised to better serve employees’ needs. This user experience unifies several aspects between applications, from search to settings, and more, offering a consistent experience across the board.
ALSO READ: Emotions Make the Experience
- Action Panel and Quick Navigation keep employees informed and on task.
The Action Panel aggregates action items for the users across applications, helping users plan their day. The Approvals section unifies various review actions across various apps, whether it is approval of jobs, expenses, trips, or document signatures – all of these are aggregated in a single action panel, bringing information to users instead of asking them to visit the application.
The Quick Navigation helps users access anywhere across the Zoho One Operating System with a few clicks.
- Dashboard and Boards remove boundaries between apps.
Zoho One’s expanded dashboard consolidates data from all connected apps, even third-party ones, into a single location that can be personalised using pre-existing or custom widgets. Dashboards pre-created in Zoho One, powered by Zoho Analytics, can also be brought together as “Boards” within Zoho One.
The Boards concept is sprinkled throughout Zoho One, putting context ahead of the application. For example, the Tasks app brings together contextual boards for personal tasks, group tasks, unified tasks, and tasks from Projects and Sprints.
- A new approach to workplace collaboration.
The announcement includes the addition of Vani to Zoho One, offering an all-in-one, visual-first intelligent virtual space. With Vani, Zoho One users can brainstorm, plan, and innovate together – across things like flowcharts, whiteboards, diagrams, mind mapping, and video calling.
ALSO READ: Emotions Make the Experience
Integrations – delivered natively
Zoho One offers native integration with Zoho apps and third-party software. Various types of integrations are supported:
- Unified integrations.
Zoho One offers a unified integration panel offering visibility into various Zoho-to-Zoho integrations, Zoho-to-third-party integrations, as well as third-party-to-third-party integrations.
This unified integration panel provides administrators with clear visibility into whatever is going on across their organisation. New integrations can be enabled from a central place within Zoho One.
- Foundational integrations.
Zoho One offers a Unified Portal, a customizable space where users can consolidate all of their application-specific portals, allowing for control over multiple apps from a single screen. The Unified Portal supports third-party software portals, even those from custom apps.
- Pragmatic integrations.
Important integrations, such as domain verification, can be configured within Zoho One from a central place. Domain verification, typically needed across several applications, can now be configured centrally – without having to do so separately for each app – within Zoho One.
ALSO READ: Zoho Introduces Advanced AI Capabilities to CX Platform via Zia
Pre-built integrations with GoDaddy allow users to quickly verify their domains, even if they aren’t tech-savvy.
- Outcome-based integrations.
Workflows that extend across many steps often require configurations across apps, and Zoho One allows for the proper integrations along the way.
One example is Zoho One’s new Smart Offboarding tool: From within a single workflow, employees can easily transfer department ownership to a new department head, manage employee device data, and more, allowing smooth offboarding of users without having to hop between multiple applications.
Intelligence – unified and contextual
Zoho’s AI assistant, Zia, is now prominently featured across all of Zoho One:
- Intelligence aggregated.
AI capabilities across various Zoho apps are available within Zoho One. Thanks to unification, users can benefit from aggregated intelligence.
- Hub for intelligence.
Zoho’s intelligent content management system, Zia Hubs, has its own dedicated space within Zoho One alongside pre-created, dedicated workflows that automatically bring more utility to company data.
ALSO READ: Zoho Launches Zia Hubs
For example, executed contracts from Zoho Sign and recorded Zoho Meeting conversations both are automatically added into Zia Hubs folders, allowing contract details and relevant conversational details to be surfaced in a Zia Search.
- Integrated and Contextual intelligence.
Ask Zia will soon be available within the bottom toolbar, allowing fast, prompt-based searches that pull relevant data across multiple Zoho apps to provide a full picture of a user’s schedule, unfinished tasks, or the latest action items from a meeting.
Given the broad set of apps that are deeply integrated into Zoho One, Ask Zia can also deliver highly contextual intelligence to guide decision-making.
“At RJG, we’ve built our operational ecosystem on Zoho One for the past seven years because of its reliability, deep integrations, and security. This new release from Zoho solidifies that foundation,” said Jason Yoffy, User Experience Manager at RJG Inc.
“What competitors patch together through partnerships, Zoho now delivers natively, from unified portals to outcome-based workflows like smart offboarding. As a UX leader, I’m impressed by how seamlessly these integrations now surface in a single, consistent experience.”
“For a global business in a technical industry, that kind of holistic, dependable integration isn’t just convenient – it’s transformational.”
ALSO READ: Zoho Integrates OpenAI Across Its Product Lineup
Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, said, “Businesses of all sizes and scales are struggling to battle the complexity and chaos of fragmented technology that results in inefficiency and subpar experiences for all.”
“Opinionated, intentional, and holistically integrated platforms don’t just transform how technology can be focused on delivering expected outputs that drive growth, but increasingly can be set to the task of optimising the business outcomes – everyone from the individual contributor to the executive strategist expects.”
More Functionality, More Apps
When anchored by Zoho One, a company’s tech stack benefits from the software’s security features like smart offboarding, easy management of employee devices, and support for encryption keys.
Furthering security is Zoho’s native integration, reducing entry points for potential breaches and streamlining anomaly detection, and Zoho Directory, providing admins a secure platform for workforce identity and access management, included as part of Zoho One.
Zoho One also adds customer-defined encryption, Cloud LDAP, and CLOUD RADIUS to allow organisations to more effectively manage authentication, access, and authorisation.
ALSO READ: Emotions Make the Experience
