The Year that was for the Operating System for Business

For Zoho One, 2019 was the year of transformative change.

In mid-2017, we announced Zoho One as the industry’s first, truly disruptive suite of over 35 cloud applications to help businesses run every aspect of their operations. Over the past two years, we’ve added more applications—nothing new for us—but more importantly, we’ve strengthened services that span across applications and added developer-centric tools for customization.

This year, we took that concept of being the only suite businesses will ever need to the next level. The new generation Zoho One is the Operating System for Business that will help businesses seamlessly operate end-to-end functions – sales and marketing, finance and HR, operations, and business intelligence – all on a unified technology platform.

The Operating System for business is a three-layered solution where the underlying platform supports the services on top of which the applications run.

 New applications

 Orchestly – A business workflow management software that allows Zoho One users to effortlessly create, manage, and optimize business process through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

 Zoho MarketingHub – Marketers can use this new service to automate marketing processes and visualize customer journeys. Marketers can create their own journeys or get started right away with a variety of pre-designed templates.

 Zoho Scanner – The service helps our users scan and digitize any document it flawlessly. Adding important documents to office workflows has never been easier.

We launched Zoho One as a suite of over 35 apps, and we promised to keep adding the latest software and services that come from the Zoho universe. Today, the Operating System for Business has more than 45 apps including several built-in services like AI, Business Intelligence, Messaging, Search, and more. We are happy to have made Zoho a highly customizable, extendable, and integratable platform all at the same cost to the customers.

 Brand new OS-level services

Communications: One of the big features we unveiled for Zoho One users this year was the deep platform-level integration with telephony service providers. Phonebridge connects more than 50 telephony vendors on one side with several Zoho apps on the other.

 Zoho One users who have enabled Phonebridge will be able to make phone calls from within apps like CRM and Recruit. It also provides contextual information about the caller such as pending support tickets or previous queries.

 Single Sign-on: Our Single Sign-On (SSO) service allows users to integrate any third-party application onto their Zoho account. We currently support around 50 third-party apps and continually add more. This makes it convenient for Zoho One users to manage all their activated Zoho applications and other applications from a single window.

 The new service also gives admins the option to enforce YubiKey authentication as an added security layeron top of the existing multi-factor authentication.

 App Management and Provisioning: The Zoho One admin panel enables provisioning for all 45+ Zoho apps. This year we extended this provisioning to custom apps users created using Zoho Creator.

 This increases flexibility to admins to provision apps for different users in the organization. The upgraded admin panel also shows statistics such as app usage so that admins can identify and effectively use underutilized resources. Admins also get extensive reports on user management, sign-in activity, app usage, and account security.

 New UI to empower admins

 The Zoho One launcher underwent both a design and functional upgrade in 2019. The updated user interface for our Web app gives both system admins and users better options to organize their apps.

 The admin dashboard also features important organization-wide numbers like successful sign-ins, failed sign-ins, app usage, most utilized apps, and more. This data will help admins understand their organization better and optimize app provisioning.

 We’ve had a great time making these upgrades for Zoho One in 2019 and we are working hard to make 2020 even better.

 We wish you all a Happy New Year in 2020. Do share comments on what you expect in terms of making Zoho One even better for you.

You can follow us on Twitter at @OSforBiz and on LinkedIn at OSforBiz