The bottom line is Zoho connect is an intranet and can also be an extranet. An intranet is where you can communicate internally and externally. If it’s an extranet with all your users and your customers or clients, if required, you can be set up on a permission basis where you could invite external people to your intranet. But basically, it allows you to have lots of different tools within one area that you can publish on a URL and invite people to contribute. There are many ways you can contribute and discuss various topics, whether it’s a specific project or a subject that it’s ongoing within the company, and it allows you to discuss this. Some of the tools in connect are already available within Zoho one tasks, for example, but this adds them into the intranet and thus allows you to integrate other Zoho and non-Zoho applications.
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The first thing we’ll do is look around; all the icons we have in the Zoho Connect software are on the left-hand side, the right-hand side, and across the top to quickly look at what these means. The first thing we’re looking at is the feed, these feeds are things and projects or areas that you are a member of, and information is posted to keep you up-to-date on the things that are going on within your company or specific projects that are happening.
We’ve got my feed as things I am a member of, we’ve got a company wall, which is shared throughout the company for all users in the company, and it can be posted that will keep you informed and up-to-date on what’s happening. You have a schedule that throws any available tasks and any groups under which you are a member, and we’ll discuss groups later on. The fact groups are here, so you can see there was a Christmas party group, and you can see, I’m a member of what is Christmas party group. It would help if you were this fundamental to connect by creating groups with specific subjects or topics to discuss. You invite the people you want to be members of that group, and that’s where you can start adding things such as the tasks listed here. As you can see, we’ve got tasks listed already for this Christmas party; jump up to my tasks, and you can see that we’ve got tasks listed there.
Manuals
I must say that tasks are very powerful and can be integrated with other aspects, such as the Zoho projects we have set up, so you’ll see that they’ll also integrate with CRM tasks later. Manuals are where we can add manuals relating to various topics or groups that we have set up, and these manuals can be split into chapters, articles, and lots of information. Such as online HR; our policy guides and other guidance can be added there to allow staff to see things in one place.
There’s also an area for failure; it’s not meant to replace your normal file storage areas, such as a whore drive or Microsoft one drive. But it will allow you to add company files here specific to topics set up in the groups of tasks that you’ve created. It’s more easily accessible in one place relating to particular projects, so you don’t have to search through your folder structure for that information.
The next one down here is what we call a town hall, a unique feature in connect, and it’s what’s known as an ask me anything or area where you create a town hall meeting room. I think you could liken it to a meeting in a public environment, such as a town hall, where people are invited to listen to panelists, ask questions, and get answers back. Well, this is all done virtually, and you can set it up so that the panelists can answer and attendees can answer.
Events
It is a calendar related to many different groups or events within connect. You can integrate other calendars here to get a good overview of what’s happening in all your different calendars. And this one specifically and the most powerful aspect of it is the company events and where you can post events and things that are happening for everybody to see and is a single area, as well as integrating individual calendars that only that user will see.
Channels
Channels are also aware we can look up different aspects of communication and create discussions with other people. For example, at this Christmas party, you could start chatting with other channel participants, which is created when you start building up a new group.
Customer App
Customer app is not particularly used in a client we speak to but enables you to add custom applications that may be built in something like Zoho creator and add them to the Zoho connect environment.
Survey
This is because we have integrated Zoho survey with Zoho connect and you can post those services, get their replies, and see them all in one little area.
More
We got an area called forums where you can create new forums and have topics to discuss. As it says here, information such as your newsletters is available as part of social connect. Then this button, you can reorder your applications and add web tabs linked to other URL websites, whether internal or external, that you may want to give people access to as part of Zoho connect.
Move over to the right-hand side; I’ll just quickly look at the settings here; we’ve got what we call the settings cog, which allows you to look at all the settings of connecting to your setup correctly for the right people with the right permissions.
You can invite new users to connect, see usage details, and look at your subscription, and we’ll see these and other areas as well. These can be accessed by different areas where we can invite users. And for example, we’ve got this people button here, where you can add and invite users.
Here we’ve got the integrations button and integrate a couple of applications to show you how easy and powerful that is.
Moderation
Which allows you to moderate feeds and any forums you might have in case of abuse? For example, if you don’t, you can switch that on as far as the creation of the topics your groups are creating; you can also set up video conferencing meetings, whether straight away or whether the plant is a scheduled event scheduled video conference. And finally, we have Zoho showtime, which allows you to create presentations very similar to the webinars we’re doing; know that we’re using.
