Zoho Workplace Apps Explained: What Does Each Tool Do?
Updated: 4 days ago
Introduction
Think about your regular working day. You start your day checking your emails, replying to your customers, writing a report, sharing some documents with your colleagues, and having meetings. Before you know it, you will be aware that you used multiple applications to finish all your work.
But when these are spread across different applications, it is quite difficult to manage. More time is spent than required in searching for the necessary documents.
That is when Zoho Workplace becomes helpful.
It combines business email, document creation, file management, communication within the team, and video conferencing into one comprehensive productivity solution that enables you to perform daily routine tasks easier without switching back and forth between applications that have nothing to do with each other.
But what is their purpose? And which of them would be useful to your organization?
Let’s find out.
1. Zoho Mail: How to Keep Business Emails Simple and Professional
E-mail remains one of the important tools of business communication used by firms to communicate with their customers, partners, and even employees.
Using the Zoho Mail services, you will be able to send emails from an email address of your corporate domain rather than sending those from your personal email account. In addition, you will be able to manage your emails, contacts, and calendar easily.
Hence, in place of using your personal email address to send a business proposal, you can now contact individuals using sales@yourcompany.com.
Best for: Businesses needing professional emails and efficient management of communications.
2. Zoho WorkDrive: Keep Your Business Files Organized
Have you ever wasted several minutes looking for a document, just to find out that the latest version was sent via an old email message?
It occurs more frequently than we expect.
Zoho Work Drive lets companies control their cloud business documents storage, organization, sharing, and collaboration. Instead of exchanging documents by attaching them to emails, people can access common documents according to their permissions.
For instance, your sales team can store their proposals in one common folder and your marketing team can manage campaign documents in another one.
This will help you to control file access, find the files and use the required documents.
Best for: Businesses that need to exchange proposals, reports, presentations, etc.
3. Zoho Writer: Create Documents and Work on Them Together
Creating documents is a common task when drafting a business proposal, preparing reports, or taking meeting notes.
Zoho Writer is an Internet word processor which allows users to create, edit, and exchange documents. Additionally, it offers collaborative features which let team members collaborate in editing documents without having to go through emails back and forth.
Consider the scenario where you prepare a proposal for a client alongside your colleague. Instead of having to share multiple copies of the proposal, all you have to do is edit it together.
Best for: Groups preparing for business proposals, reports, letters, and other documents.
4. Zoho Sheet: Make Working With Data Easier
Spreadsheets are helpful in nearly all businesses. Be it monitoring monthly expenditures or sales performances, spreadsheets can assist in transforming data into something more meaningful.
Zoho Sheet is used for organizing data, formula calculations, creation of graphs, and analysis of data through online spreadsheets. Zoho Sheet can be used for collaboration, where team members can collaborate by using the shared data.
Your sales team can use the spreadsheet to monitor the monthly goals, while the managers can analyze the data to determine how well your business is doing.
It simply implies that there is no need for you to undergo different data whenever analyzing an important aspect.
Best for: Businesses which have to monitor budgets, sales data, inventories, expenses, or performance reports.
5. Zoho Show: Turn Your Ideas Into Presentations
At times, it might be more beneficial to show something instead of just talking about it.
If you need to present your strategy, share the results of one quarter or introduce a product to your client, then using presentations will help you convey the message better.
Zoho Show allows you to make and demonstrate presentations during meetings, trainings and other business talks.
In this way, your sales team can create a presentation for a potential client, while your human resources team can prepare slides for training purposes.
Best for: Sales people, managers, trainers and all those who need to present any kind of information.
6. Zoho Cliq: Increase Communication Speed in Your Team
Workplace communication may not always involve emails.
There are times when one may just need to ask a quick question, give a brief update, or check if a particular task is completed or not. All minor communication via emails may delay the process.
Zoho Cliq offers business messaging capabilities as well as communication channels and tools which are essential for staying in touch.
For instance, the marketing team of an organization can have its own channel created specifically for the launch of a new marketing campaign. This will ensure that all the updates are discussed under one umbrella without going through long email threads.
Easier way of everyday communication.
Best for: Organizations that require fast internal communication.
7. Zoho Meeting: Make Remote Meetings More Convenient
Collaborating with clients or colleagues who come from another place does not necessarily mean that collaboration is difficult.
Zoho Meeting allows firms to conduct meetings online, engage in video conferencing, and share screens while talking about projects and presenting some information.
For instance, you can show your presentation to your customer, give a product demo, or talk about your project without having everybody gather in one place.
It will facilitate communication with those in other places and will enable the team to carry on their discussion.
Best for: Remote teams, customer meetings, product demos, and online training.
8. Other Useful Zoho Workplace Applications
Alongside these core applications for enhancing productivity, you can find some more applications from the Zoho family that help with scheduling, managing tasks, ensuring security, and collaborating within teams.
Here are a few of them:
Zoho Calendar: It helps in scheduling meetings, managing appointments, and tracking significant events
Zoho ToDo: It helps in managing tasks, setting priorities, and tracking responsibilities.
Zoho Connect: It provides tools for communicating, engaging and collaborating among employees within the organization.
Zoho Vault: It is used by organizations to securely store and share passwords.
Zoho Directory: It provides solutions for identity management and access control among supported applications.
The most important point to be aware of is that every application offered by Zoho does not necessarily comes with every plan of Zoho Workplace.
For this reason, before deciding on an application, one should consult the Zoho Workplace pricing and editions page.
9. Zoho Workplace Pricing: Which Plan is Best for You or Your Business ?
Selecting the correct productivity software is essential, but being aware of the price of the software is equally important. Each firm requires different things, and therefore Zoho Workplace has packages tailored to suit the need of firms of different sizes.
Whether your firm requires business emails or collaboration software, being aware of what different packages exist could help you make an informed decision.
Zoho Workplace Pricing Plans
Following is a brief description of the major plans available in India:
Zoho Workplace Plan | Price per user/month (annual billing) | Best suited for |
Mail Lite (5 GB) | ₹59 | Businesses needing professional business email |
Mail Premium | ₹199 | Companies that need more sophisticated capabilities for their emails |
Workplace Standard | ₹99 | Teams who need e-mail, file storage, document collaboration, spreadsheets, messaging, and meetings |
Workplace Professional | ₹399 | Organizations that need more space and collaboration options |
The prices indicated are on a per-user per-month basis and are charged annually. Tax may be applicable. For the most updated pricing information, please refer to the Zoho Workplace pricing page.
What Is the Difference Between Workplace Standard and Professional?
Workplace Standard is a pragmatic choice for organizations requiring both communication and productivity tools in a single subscription plan. This plan comes with 30 GB mailbox storage for each user and shared WorkDrive storage that starts from 100 GB.
Workplace Professional is for organizations with higher storage needs and advanced capabilities. It consists of 100 GB mail storage per user, 100 GB retention storage per user, and WorkDrive storage shared from 1 TB onward depending on the size of the team.
While both services offer the use of a variety of workplace apps, the difference is in the features and storage options. Check out the plan comparison first.
How Can You Choose the Right Plan?
Consider the following before choosing a plan:
Does your company need just business email services or a full productivity bundle?
How much email storage and cloud file storage is needed for each individual?
Do your employees work on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations together?
What extra security and/or email archiving do you need?
How many user licenses will you need?
For a smaller firm that only requires email and collaboration tools, Workplace Standard could be the right place to start with. In case of more stringent needs for storage space or collaboration tools, then Workplace Professional would be more appropriate.
An important pointer: See whether the price of the subscription is more than the application programs you are using. It is not just about getting the cheapest plan but the most effective one.
How Do Zoho Workplace Apps Work Together?
Comprehending what each tool does is useful, however, it is only when one understands the potential of those applications in the workflow process that the advantage becomes obvious.
Suppose your sales department wants to work out the proposal for the new client.
Here is how they may use Zoho Workplace:
Discuss the project: team members exchange information and discuss the updates via Zoho Cliq;
Prepare the proposal: they create and edit the document in Zoho Writer;
Keep all the related documents: they save all the necessary documents in Zoho WorkDrive;
Schedule the discussion: they schedule the discussion in Zoho Calendar;
Connect with the client: they communicate with the client via Zoho Meeting.
All the applications have their functions, however, they can be very useful in creating a more efficient workflow.
By not wasting time searching for data and changing one application to another, the team will be able to concentrate on the most important things.
The exact integrations and features will differ from the selected applications and their plans.
Final Thoughts
All companies operate differently, and therefore, there is no one-size-fits-all solution that can be applicable to all teams.
Some companies may require a professional level of email and file exchange. Some may require document collaboration, spreadsheets, messaging, and video calls every day.
That is why it is useful to know what each Zoho Workplace application is capable of before selecting a plan.
First, evaluate the difficulties your team faces. Do employees spend too much time trying to find files? Is there a problem with scattered communication? Are documents exchanged endlessly?
After identifying the problems, it is easy to see which solutions would be useful to implement.
The Zoho Workplace suite combines a variety of productivity tools that assist in communication, collaboration, and management of work tasks. Selecting the proper mix of solutions will help you to streamline your work processes.
The key idea is not about using many applications. The key idea is about helping your team perform more in a simpler way.
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