Zoho Connect

Zoho Connect is a centralised intranet for internal communications, employee engagement and collaboration, framed by the vendor around building workplace culture. It includes Zia, Zoho's assistant, for drafting posts, summarising long discussions and highlighting key moments from a town hall.

Summarising discussions is the most useful of those three and the least glamorous. A thread that ran to sixty replies while somebody was on leave is functionally unreadable, and either they skip it and miss the decision or they spend twenty minutes reconstructing it. A reliable summary makes asynchronous participation actually work.

Being part of the Zoho suite is the significant commercial fact. An organisation already running Zoho for customer relationship management, human resources or projects gets an intranet that shares its user directory and integrates without work, and the incremental cost of adding it is far lower than adopting a standalone product.

The corresponding limitation is worth stating. A company not otherwise using Zoho is adopting a product designed to be one component of a suite, and it will feel less complete alone than the specialists in this category do. The pricing page could not be reached during capture.