Trident, a native app to consume Zoho Workplace, is just one of several new collaboration experiences from Zoho, which they expect will ultimately expand beyond the Workplace apps into other areas like marketing and sales.
Chandrashekar LSP, Zoho Canada managing director
Today, Zoho is launching both their Trident unified communications platform, and complementary collaboration technologies. In the short term, they better integrate Zoho Workplace apps into a single native offering which is more efficient. Long term, Trident is part of a broader initiative to integrate functionality, simplify tool use and make digital adoption easier.
Zoho Trident itself is a new collaboration, productivity and communication experience that is Zoho’s first native desktop app for email and chat. It combines what had previously been separate applications around mail, messages, audio/video calls, calendar and tasks into a united entity, rather than the individual product experiences of the past.
“This is what Workplace now has to offer – a one stop shop,” said Zoho Canada managing director, Chandrashekar LSP. “The centre of gravity becomes a tool like Workplace, where boundaries between applications have been eliminated. If you are on a project and assigned a task, you get it from an email. Then you go into the project management application for details. Now with Trident, you can seamless go across applications without having to switch apps, and so get full native applications.”
LSP said that Trident is only the beginning.
“We are bringing down boundaries of applications,” he said. “Think of its as a portal. This is the first version of it. We will be bringing in a lot more applications. Over time I would expect that Trident may expand beyond the Workplace Suite of apps and go beyond into sales and marketplace applications.”
In addition to introducing Trident, Zoho has also improved collaboration by improving the integration of their Zoho Voice platform.
“While Trident is the UI part of the release, Zoho Voice was not integrated previously with instant messaging and coding,” LSP stated. “We have now integrated the phone system directly within the Zoho Cliq team collaboration app and web conferencing app Zoho Meeting, bringing about a full integration between the phone system and Zoho Play.” This lets employees make direct line calls and send SMS messages, as well as pick up inbound calls across the apps.
Another addition to the application is a new Zoho AI-based grammar tool, BluePencil. Similar to Grammarly, Blue Pencil brings writing suggestions and a text editor which can be used on any third-party webpage.
“It gets natively into Zoho Writer so that you wont have to pay for it separately,” LSP said. “In addition, a widget gives you this capability no matter where you are.”
Universal Drag & Drop functionality has been expanded so users can save time doing things across multiple workplace products. For example, you can drag and attach from an email into Cliq or other designation.”
Mobile Device Management capabilities and OTP-restricted Emails have also been added to the workplace suite as Zoho focuses on security.
“This has been expanded from our ManageEngine,” LSP said. “To access it, a user would need to be sent an OTP.”
TrueSync has been added to Zoho WorkDrive so that a document can be synced with an online storage system, making hard drive storage limits no longer a concern. TrueSync creates a mirror of all WorkDrive files and folders on the desktop so you can seamlessly switch between the cloud and your computer.
“You can between the cloud and local systems, and you wont see the difference,” LSP said.
Zoho Workplace has grown 30% year-over-year and now has more than 16 million users. Additionally, migrations from Google, Microsoft and GoDaddy to Zoho Workplace almost doubled in 2022.
