Zoho have for a while now entered the arena of social CRM and have now branched into that of social software for business, with their online collaboration platform, Zoho Pulse.
Zoho Pulse is cloud based collaboration software that works rather like Facebook, but... for business. The format is very similar - walls, posts, 'what am I doing' type feeds, polls and forums; and the aim is to keep everyone in the business in tune, notifying the right people on the right topics, collaborating on ideas, schedules, and indeed any corporate matter, even where the staff Christmas party should be!
Admins can create groups and pages. Users have a profile, a photo and so on and can create / reply to wall posts in much the same way as Facebook. All members of a group get alerts when anything changes on the page or forum they are following.
Examples of where it comes into its own are discussions and centralisation of ideas, for example. Or, company announcements, polls on company matters and so on.
There is some overlap between this and Zoho People and we would recommend that it be implemented with a strategy in mind.
So why would you opt to use this and not Facebook? Well, Facebook is extremely useful for this sort of stuff, but ... well people will often not use their work address for their Facebook account or if they do, maintaining two accounts is time consuming and detracts from the aim of collaboration software. In addition, Zoho Pulse can be branded with your company logo and own page names and so on and this does instill more of a business use image.
We're using it now, tentatively to make announcements, rather than having to send mass mails or post an alert in Zoho People which may only be used occasionally, Zoho Pulse does have more of a familiar type of alerting / notification process with email alerts to 'subscribed' members.
It's also great for discussing ideas as mentioned. You no longer have to sift through emails looking for that great idea from Allan or the useful response to your own idea that Pat sent last month. It all gets centralised in the "Ideas" forum and then you can refer to it at any time.
In reality though, there are any number of potential uses for Zoho Pulse.
Licensing is based on the number of users. There ais a free version with limited functions, paid editions start at 2 USD / user per month for Professional and 5 USD / user per month for the Enterprise version. This sort of app can be used with a few staff but really comes into its own in enterprise level businesses.
You may be wondering "why pay for this when we can use Facebook?" - this's a good question! We do feel license pricing is a little high for most small business to see any benefit when the likes of Facebook is free; we have made recommendations to Zoho to consider bulk licensing models to make it more attractive for small businesses. However, Zoho Pulse does have several advantages:
- It is built on the Zoho platform and integrates to many other Zoho business apps;
- It has a free custom app builder so you can build your own apps with easy drag and drop functionality, and
- It is private, ie. only your organisation will be using it.
Upcoming Features
- Extranet version that you will be able to use with external users, such as customers. This will give real value to Zoho Pulse to connect with clients, becoming a strong link to Zoho CRM as an after sales tool.
- Zoho Projects integration
- Zoho People integration
Contact Us
Mangoho are Zoho Alliance Partners in the UK and are Zoho gurus with experience of implementing Zoho solutions.
If you are interested in implementing an online collaboration solution such as Zoho Pulse for your business please contact us here.