Zoho Corporation, a well-known tech company, announced big updates to Zoho One. This is its all-in-one business software. The enhancements change how organizations operate. They aim for a smooth and rich user experience. They also work on stronger integrations and unified AI intelligence.
Launched in 2017, Zoho One now offers over 50 apps. It serves more than 75,000 customers globally, with users averaging over 22 apps each. The suite is notable for its strong privacy, security, and reliability. Zoho fully owns its technology stack, which allows for tight control and deep integrations.
Key Themes of the Update
Zoho One’s enhancements are built around three fundamental pillars: Experience, Integrations, and Intelligence. Each contributes to creating a more unified, contextual, and intelligent working environment.
-
Experience – Breaking Down App Silos
Zoho One’s user interface has been redesigned to reduce friction and make the workflow more natural:
- Spaces: Apps are now grouped into “Spaces” in the top toolbar, categorized by role (Personal), function (HR, Marketing, Finance), or organization-wide tools (Forums, Town Hall, Ideas, etc.). These spaces are customizable to suit each employee’s context.
- Action Panel & Quick Navigation: The Action Panel aggregates pending tasks across apps such as approvals (jobs, trips, expenses) and document signatures into a single view, bringing information to users rather than making them navigate between tools. Quick Navigation makes it possible to jump across the Zoho One OS with just a few clicks.
- Dashboards & Boards: The enhanced dashboard collects data from all linked apps (including third-party ones) into a unified, widget-based workspace powered by Zoho Analytics. “Boards” a contextual view created with those dashboards align everything by context (e.g., personal tasks, team tasks, or project tasks) rather than by individual apps.
- Visual Collaboration with Vani: Zoho introduces Vani, a visual-first, intelligent virtual space for brainstorming and collaboration (whiteboarding, diagrams, mind maps, flowcharts) as well as video calling all integrated within Zoho One.
-
Integrations – Native, Centralized, and Strategic
Zoho One now delivers more comprehensive and centralized integration capabilities:
- Unified Integration Panel: Administrators can now view and manage all Zoho-to-Zoho, Zoho-to-third-party, and third-party-to-third-party integrations from one central console.
- Unified Portal: The Unified Portal enables users to consolidate application-specific portals (even from third-party or custom apps) into a single, customizable screen.
- Centralized Domain Verification: Domain verification (such as for email services) can now be managed centrally rather than separately in each app. Zoho even provides pre-built integrations (for example, with GoDaddy) to simplify setup.
- Outcome-Based Workflows: New workflows span across multiple apps. A notable addition is Smart Offboarding, which allows teams to configure offboarding tasks (department transfer, device data management, etc.) within a single, coherent workflow without context-switching between apps.
-
Intelligence – Unified and Contextual AI
Zoho’s AI assistant, Zia, now plays a more central, cross-application role in Zoho One:
- Aggregated Intelligence: Zia’s AI capabilities from various Zoho applications are unified, so users benefit from broader, cross-app insights.
- Zia Hubs: A dedicated “hub” in Zoho One stores company data such as signed contracts from Zoho Sign, or recorded meeting conversations enabling Zia to surface relevant information through intelligent workflows and search.
- Ask Zia: Coming soon to the bottom toolbar, this prompt-based AI interface will allow users to query across multiple Zoho apps, giving them a holistic view of their schedule, pending tasks, and actionable items. Because of deep integrations, the responses will be highly contextual and relevant.
Also Read: NEC & Red Hat Strengthen Global IT Modernization Efforts
Customer and Analyst Perspectives
“Today’s Zoho One update redesigns the user experience to address how work is evolving from an app-based system to a platform-based system,” said Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho.
“Customers are not licensing apps with Zoho One. They are licensing peace of mind. They expect Zoho to take care of the technology part and let them be productive in their business. Our enhancements with this release deliver essentially that – a unified experience delivered through unified integrations, context, workflows, and data.”
“At RJG, we’ve built our operational ecosystem on Zoho One for the past seven years because of its reliability, deep integrations, and security. This new release from Zoho solidifies that foundation,” said Jason Yoffy, User Experience Manager at RJG Inc.
“What competitors patch together through partnerships, Zoho now delivers natively, from unified portals to outcome-based workflows like smart offboarding. As a UX leader, I’m impressed by how seamlessly these integrations now surface in a single, consistent experience. For a global business in a technical industry, that kind of holistic, dependable integration isn’t just convenient – it’s transformational.”
“Businesses of all sizes and scales are struggling to battle the complexity and chaos of fragmented technology that results in inefficiency and subpar experiences for all,” observed Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.
“Opinionated, intentional, and holistically integrated platforms don’t just transform how technology can be focused on delivering expected outputs that drive growth, but increasingly can be set to the task of optimizing the business outcomes – everyone from the individual contributor to the executive strategist expects.”