Tech major offers free work-from-home solution to beat coronavirus
ZohoCorp's new virtual platform enables entire staff of organisations to work remotely
Dubai: With the fear of coronavirus spreading globally and organisations increasingly asking their staff not to undertake non-essential travel, possibly even stay home, a technology major has come up with a free, innovative solution to allow large groups of people to continue with their work remotely.
Speaking to Gulf News, Dubai-based Ali Shabdar, regional director of ZohoCorp, said, “We officially launched Remotely, a virtual collaboration and productivity platform, two days ago, to give not only our 8000-plus employees, but our 50 million users all over the world an option to work from home.”
Remotely has packaged 10 different applications that create a full-fledged functional and contextual online team workspace. Together, the tools allow any business to carry on its operations with a scattered workforce, while maintaining high productivity
He said ever since the coronavirus outbreak, the CEO of the Texas-headquartered Zoho has been working from a remote farm in South India, and is encouraging employees, even those here in the UAE, to go back to their home towns. In fact, the Remotely platform was itself developed by a Zoho team sitting remotely in different parts of the world.
Shabdar said, “Remotely has packaged 10 different applications that create a full-fledged functional and contextual online team workspace. Together, the tools allow any business to carry on its operations with a scattered workforce, while maintaining high productivity.”
He said the Remotely solution, being offered free of charge, encourages companies to put their employees’ health and safety first, while containing the spread of coronavirus.
He said users employing Remotely feel as easy and natural as in an in-person meeting.
The tools included in Remotely are as under:
Cliq: It provides an array of communication options — chat, audio or video — that allow you to discuss important matters with teammates or customers. You can also use the app to create intelligent bots that will help ease your remote work – they can fetch you notification or alert you about things.
Zoho Meeting, Zoho ShowTime: Group communication — whether it’s business meetings or remote training — can be achieved through these apps. These advanced web conferencing and training tools make it possible to keep the conversation going, even when you’re at a distance.
Zoho WorkDrive, Zoho Projects, Sprints: Whether you’re working together on a document or a project, collaborative team spaces designed for remote work can come in handy. Similarly, Zoho Projects and Sprints are useful for project management.
Zoho Assist: This is a cloud-based remote support and access app that helps you troubleshoot and correct issue from a distance through web-based, on-demand support sessions.
Zoho Lens: Uses augmented reality to help service technicians do their jobs better. Lens uses the customer’s phone camera to show the technician the conditions on site, then the technician is able to annotate and highlight the video stream, so the customer can see what they need to fix.
Zoho Writer: The word processing app enables colleagues to offer instant, remote feedback.
Zoho Sheet and Zoho Show: Makes spreadsheet creation easier by letting collaborators contribute data in real time. Zoho Show enables an easy-to-use presentation builder, that allows multiple people to work on the same slides at the same time, no versioning is required.