• by Ray Schultz , February 8, 2023

Zoho Corporation has launched a unified communications platform called Trident as part of an upgrade of its Zoho Workplace.  

Trident is Zoho’s first native desktop app for email and chat. The company says it is a collaboration, productivity, and communication experience platform, combining mail, messages, audio/video calls, calendar, tasks and more into the same place. 

Also being offered are mobile device management capabilities and OTP-restricted emails to enhance security.

In addition, Zoho is debuting an AI-based grammar tool, BluePencil. This provides writing suggestions and a text editor that can be used on any third-party webpage, the company says. 

Zoho Workplace now has more than 16 million users, showing 30% growth YoY. Its mission is to “enable businesses to unify their work to a point where the line between apps disappears, says Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist at Zoho.

In another development, the Zoho Voice platform is now a full phone system. It is integrated directly within the team collaboration app Zoho Cliq and the web conferencing app Zoho Meeting. 

Employees can use this to make direct line calls, send SMS messages, and pick up inbound calls across the apps. 

Another feature, Zoho Webinar, allows users to broadcast to attendees and deploy polls and Q&As, and is part of the Zoho Meeting app.  

Overall, the “improvements to unified communications, the addition of high performance native functionality, improved security, and the addition of new AI capabilities keep Zoho Workplace in the uppermost echelon of productivity suites in my analysis, says Dion Hinchcliffe, vice president and principal analyst of Constellation Research.