Announcing Zoho One 21, our all-new unified operating system for business

We're excited to introduce the biggest and the most powerful Zoho One update yet: a highly versatile unified interface, enhanced AI and BI enterprise search, cross-functional services, expanded marketplace, product enhancements, and so much more.

Less than half a decade ago, remote work, digital transformation, Business Intelligence, and Artificial Intelligence were mostly buzzwords picking up steam. Fast forward to 2021 and these buzzwords have become topics of utmost importance for large enterprises and SMBs alike to keep business continuity and productivity unaffected.

For instance, when COVID-19 hit, many small and mid-sized companies faced a series of disruptions because they used disjointed, siloed apps and data systems, which made it difficult for employees to collaborate remotely,  reliably serve customers, and build trust with their partners. In contrast, many larger companies had a distinctive competitive advantage because of the more sophisticated ERP system they already had in place.

As companies struggled to cope up with the digital transformation challenges brought forth by the COVID-19 pandemic, it became obvious that a handful of independent business applications alone would not be enough to help them stay on the right track. In order to transform their business successfully and harness the power of digital, the companies need an operating system that is unified as one interconnected ecosystem.

What is a unified Zoho One experience?

Digital transformation is not simply moving your business to the web and a unified experience is not just integrations. A truly unified experience requires an unwavering commitment to building the product from the customer's perspective, an environment for low-friction exchanges between various stakeholders (app users, developers, third-party service providers), and an exceptionally seamless experience for customers across touchpoints. Zoho One 21 is the result of our conscious effort to create a unified experience with these factors in mind, as well as a by-product of the vertical unification of apps, services, platforms, storage, and infrastructure stacks.

When we launched Zoho One back in mid-2017 to serve as a disruptive all-in-one suite of 35 cloud applications, it was done with the sole aim of leveling the playing field for businesses of all types by making it possible for everyone to afford enterprise-grade software.

Today, Zoho One serves 40,000+ customers from various industries across 160+ countries. This is the direct result of putting customer needs at the forefront.

With this release, Zoho One has solidified that commitment to users by making itself truly unified at every level capable of creating a unique experience. Read on to learn all about how unified experience, unified apps, and unified services are here to deliver an entirely new experience.

UNIFIED EXPERIENCE

Unified user interface

We had a few things in mind when we built the all-new unified user interface: total accessibility, consistency, intuitiveness, and speed. When it comes to a truly unified user experience, smart function and design deliberation conduct the orchestra side-by-side.

The Zoho One unified user interface will ensure consistency and continuity of experience when you move from app to app or device to device. The contextual, unified structure will save employees time and simplify the process of compiling and processing information.

Unified navigation

The new interface's contextual left pane makes navigation a breeze. Instead of scrambling through multiple open tabs, you can now switch between your most-used apps more efficiently. You can add and remove apps in the left pane, drag them into groups, and pin your favorites at the top to access them easily whenever you want.

Customizable dashboard

Whether it is access to apps and services or personalization, we focus on what customers tell us they would like from us. From a customer standpoint, this provides an opportunity to control their own experience.

For example: Zoho One users can build two interactive dashboards for themselves. This allows users to accommodate their unique product and service usage system. With over 50+ smart widgets, the new Zoho One interface lets you blend data, create views, and share with anybody you want. You can drag and drop your favorite widgets to create the best view for you, as well as do things like track calendar events, read emails, and check instant message notifications.

Unified calendar

A unified calendar is an integral part of a unified business. With Zoho One's latest update, you can track and plan your workweek, manage appointments on the go, and even choose from 40 different languages.

Expand a newly added invitation to see where it falls in your day. Quickly search for appointments and events, and even reserve resources like meeting rooms for your team. With options to view work and personal calendars together or separately, managing your priorities is easier than ever.

Unified configuration

To keep up with the promise of a completely unified experience, we wanted to bring together some of the common operating system elements under one hood. With Zoho One's new unified settings, your org administrators can personalize everything under a unified central console without needing to separately access each app anymore.

UNIFIED SERVICES

Enhanced enterprise search, enriched by Work Graph

In a business environment where different teams use different sets of software, a good search system should be able to understand the flow of exchanges between apps. The effectiveness of any search function lies in its ability to understand natural language queries and then show the most relevant and contextual results.

Introducing Work Graph, a service that maintains a unique graph for every user: a web of their connections with their team, other business users, resources they work on frequently and share, and other useful info. In addition to enriching user experience in the background with something as simple as automatic prompts, Work Graph arms our enterprise search service, Zia Search, to pick up on informal, natural sentences and process them to show the most contextually relevant results.

Dedicated app and device management

While the need for constant social distancing will someday end, the hybrid office model is here to stay. As companies are hiring more employees remotely, they also need to onboard those new hires remotely. Employee roles and privileges have evolved with the changing landscape of business, making remote management a daunting task.

We have now included Mobile Application Management in Zoho One. With this update, business administrators can remotely assign and configure mobile devices to their users. They can set application access privileges, automate app assignments and restrictions based on user roles, making remote device management more efficient and secure.

Business-wide organization dictionary

We are all accustomed to spell checkers in the software we use. Auto-correct can be helpful at times, but those automatic changes and prompts can also be annoying when you need to type the name of a colleague, a product title, or some term unique to your business.

The new Org Dictionary service now added in Zoho One maintains a dictionary that will automatically recognize and remember the unique words your company uses, including people, designation, and product names. This will not only save your users from unnecessary prompts but also help ensure consistency and correctness across your organization.

MORE NEW APPS

Zoho One offers an array of apps in categories such as Marketing, Sales, Service, Finance, BI, IT, HR, Service, Developer, Productivity, Collaboration, and Communication. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we prioritized ecommerce, remote collaboration, and data cleanup over other categories and added new apps that would help our customers.

eCommerce

Zoho Commerce

With the rapid growth of the online market, modern customers enjoy the around-the-clock convenience of being able to purchase what they want, whenever they want it. By creating that experience for customers, businesses are able to reach out to a broader audience and generate better sales revenue.

The Zoho Commerce app allows you to quickly set up your online store by dragging and dropping elements from pre-built professional templates. With Zoho Commerce within the Zoho One infrastructure, you can now design and host your website, manage inventory, accept payments, and analyze data—all from one place.

HR Management

Payroll (Available in India region)

Businesses use earnings management software to stay compliant and streamline their payroll operations. Its secure employee portal enables better collaboration between employees and payroll staff so that work gets done faster.

Adding more power to the HR management apps in Zoho One, Zoho Payroll offers stress-free maintenance of employee financial reports that helps you save precious time on employee payroll processing, so you can focus more on growing your business.

Remote collaboration

Whether you're a 100% remote company or an organization slowly transitioning into a hybrid work model to allow employees more flexibility to work where they're most productive, having a reliable online collaboration and learning platform is crucial. You'll also need a foolproof remote assistance tool to provide support and help resolve a problem from a remote setting.

Zoho Lens

Our very first augmented reality remote assistance app, Zoho Lens, offers you a pair of virtual eyes to help you solve problems faster and reduce on-site visits. Using Zoho Lens, technicians on the ground can just show the problem to an expert using their smartphone and get assistance in no time.

Zoho Learn

Zoho Learn is a comprehensive learning and training platform that helps you craft valuable learning experiences, manage learning programs, evaluate trainee progress, and measure the impact of your courses. Zoho Learn also provides a structured system to capture, organize, and manage your company's most valuable asset: knowledge. Zoho Learn offers shared workspaces to collaborate in real-time, pre-built templates to help create content quickly, and a scheduling system to manage courses and lessons.

TeamInbox

As the most recent addition to the Zoho One ecosystem, TeamInbox allows teams to work together from a shared inbox, which offers better context, fosters transparency, and provides a bird's-eye view of the work being done. You no longer have to worry about wasting time on endless email chains to get the right information to the right person. With Zoho TeamInbox, you can assign emails to team members and hold contextual discussions with your team before replying to ensure consistency and correct information.

Data Preparation and Analytics

DataPrep

Self-service data preparation allows professional analysts and business users to prepare, refine, and transform unstructured data into highly organized data sets for further analysis. It helps them run queries and build reports by themselves, irrespective of their skills.

With DataPrep now an integral part of the Zoho One ecosystem, you can prepare data faster than ever, enrich raw data, and sync it with your data warehouse or to your preferred analytics/BI service. DataPrep is multipurpose by design and offers multiple built-in interactive dashboards and analytics to make data visualization a breeze.

ZOHO ONE MARKETPLACE

As users and their needs become more complex, demand for more complex features increases as well. To meet these needs, a simple operating system should naturally evolve into an ecosystem allowing third-party integrations to enhance functionality.

The Zoho One Marketplace offers over 1,000 internal and external app integrations, which are used by more than 30,000 businesses to streamline processes, create workflows, and nurture collaboration.

Into the era of the unified Zoho One ecosystem: a whole new world of possibilities

Whether you are a new business or an established player moving towards digital transformation, the new unified Zoho One can empower innovation and sustainable growth by unifying every aspect of your business.

With the right apps for you and your teams, improved services across the apps, and extensible platforms with the right integrations to connect them, the all-new Zoho One can effectively solve all your business needs.

With every new release, Zoho One evolves. And as we continue to iterate and improve on this cohesive structure, the unified Zoho One experience will continue improving as well. And with today’s announcement, we hope to help customers move away from disjointed apps and information silos and enter into this new era of unified experience.

Do you think this unification will make a significant difference in everyday productivity and overall experience? Please feel free to let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.