Zoho launches WorkDrive to put greater focus on teamwork

Zoho has overhauled its cloud-based file management platform, placing greater emphasis on team collaboration and offering a single repository for documents across its portfolio of apps.

The company, which sells a range of office productivity and line-of-business applications, has offered Zoho Docs as its main file management tool for storing and accessing documents such as spreadsheets or presentations, similar to Google Drive, Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive.

To that end, Zoho created Team Folders – essentially shared workplaces to store files that relate to a particular team or project. Once added to a Team Folder account, a user gets access to files by default, with a graded range of role-based permissions for document access; certain users are able to view and comment only, for example, while others may be authorized to edit and share files more widely. Updates to documents will create alerts, allowing users to track project development.

Zoho Team Folders
Zoho’s new Team Folders are basically shared workplaces to store files related to a specific team or project.
WorkDrive integrates with Zoho’s various other collaboration tools, such as its Slack-equivalent Cliq, while the Zoho Office apps built into WorkDrive allow for joint authoring and editing. Other features in WorkDrive include virus scanning, encryption, file conversion and the ability to share files with users in external organizations.

“The construct of Work Drive is built around the team,” said Vijay Sundaram, chief strategy officer at Zoho. “The ability of sharing, starting from working together on the documents to the workflow that moves the documents across people within the team, is all encapsulated in that structure without the user having to explicitly do anything.”

WorkDrive also serves as the underlying file system for Zoho’s applications, which include CRM, marketing and service desk software. The advantage here, said Sundaram, is that businesses using Zoho’s suite can work with related documents in a single repository that is easily searchable and accessible by users.

Source: https://www.computerworld.com/