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Zoho Launches Next-Gen Zoho One

Puneet Mehrotra Sep 16, 2019

Unified Technology Platform

Zoho, India’s homegrown cloud computing company, this week launched the next generation of its OS Zoho One. The next generation of Zoho One is designed to run an entire organization—from sales and marketing, finance and HR, operations and business intelligence, and more—all on a unified technology platform. Zoho One now comes with a new business workflow management application, Orchestly, that lets customers effortlessly create, manage, and optimize their business processes through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

Zone One - the OS

According to Zoho, in the two years since its launch, Zoho One has seen considerable growth and now serves more than 20,000 customers. Three new services are added to the operating system, one new application tying together every corner of business operations, and several updates. Approximately 25% of Zoho One customers use more than 25 applications on the platform and more than 50% utilize 16 or more applications.

The updates include

Phone Bridge
PhoneBridge, Zoho's telephony platform, integrates over 50 telephony vendors on one side and several Zoho applications on the other side. PhoneBridge integration enables telephony in Zoho apps like CRM and Recruit. It allows customers to make calls from Zoho apps, and provides contextual information on incoming calls. Enabling PhoneBridge will give users context for all incoming calls from Zoho CRM, Zoho Recruit, Zoho Mail, and 20+ other apps.

Single Sign-on
The new Single Sign-On (SSO) service from Zoho One allows customers to integrate any third-party applications onto their Zoho account. Zoho Single Sign-On now supports around 50 third-party applications and is growing every day. Zoho's SSO works with third-party systems like Active Directory, it also makes it scalable for mid-to-large sized businesses. Zoho One admins can now enforce YubiKey authentication as an added factor for increased security, on top of existing multi-factor authentications already supported.

App Management and Provisioning

Zoho One currently enables provisioning for all 45+ Zoho apps. This is now being extended to custom apps created through Zoho Creator as well as external apps available through Zoho Marketplace.
Zoho, third-party, custom, and SSO apps can be provisioned either individually to users or for groups using custom criteria.
Zoho One's new Admin Panel with dashboards and reports allows admins to monitor user activity and app usage, enabling them to find and manage underutilized resources. Admins also get extensive reports on user management, sign-in activity, app usage, and account security.

Business Workflow Management

Orchestly

With an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, Orchestly enables managers to define processes effortlessly without having to code.
Using Orchestly, managers and administrators can automate and run their regular workflows, including cross-departmental ones such as purchase approvals, content publishing, asset management, and onboarding.
In the case of a new employee, the recruitment, interview, offer submission, and onboarding are handled across the recruiting department, HR department, legal department, and the team the applicant is joining. Even though so many departments and applications are involved in this process, Orchestly is able to cut across these various teams and applications to create comprehensive workflows and automate complex processes.
Onboarding a new employee involves multiple departments, each potentially with their own workflows. Orchestly is able to manage and automate a process that bridges each of those departments and their workflows.

Zoho Sign

The enhanced Zoho Sign now provides an additional level of verification for customers by adopting blockchain-based timestamping through Ethereum, the globally accepted open-source platform.
Whenever a document is signed using Zoho Sign, an Ethereum transaction will happen in the background, to which the hash of the signed document will be added to the transaction notes.