Zoho ramps up its collaboration platform Cliq, launches smart conference rooms solution

Bengaluru—October 9, 2023—Zoho, the global technology company, today announced that it has grown by 37% in India, one of its fastest growing markets, in 2022. The company also launched Cliq Rooms, a smart conference rooms solution, and announced new updates to Zoho Cliq, its communication and collaboration platform, that will enable it to further boost its upmarket momentum. These announcements were made on the sidelines of Zoholics India, the company’s annual user conference, held at Bengaluru this year.

Seamless collaboration across functions helps solve the problem of data silos, and also allows for better business continuity and operational efficiency. The improved platform capabilities of Cliq, enables cross-functional collaboration in organisations.

“Zoho Cliq is the most refined collaborative platform in the world. Zoho offers the operating system for business and we call Cliq the operating system for Zoho. The entire functionality of the Zoho suite is increasingly available through Cliq, with its beautiful messaging interface. This allows employees across a large organisation (like Zoho Corp. itself) to communicate and collaborate, provide data in real time to apps, and consume reports, all from the world-class interface, across the desktop and mobile platforms,” said Sridhar Vembu, CEO and Co-founder of Zoho Corp.

“With this launch, Zoho Cliq provides a robust platform that can enable employees to perform most of their tasks right from within the app, whether it is resolving a customer issue or approving expenses. This can help organisations, especially ones in the medium and large segment, improve both employee experience and customer experience by bringing in the key functions from front-end and back-end apps into the Cliq interface,” added Vembu.

Expanding platform capabilities: Zoho Cliq offers low-code extensibility that allows developers to build and run custom apps on Cliq (up to 1 million rows). Unlike competitors, Cliq has its own custom database, allowing developers to run their apps in a serverless fashion. They can also extend the platform and create workflows to third-party applications using Connections, which simplifies the process of external integrations for developers. Through Schedulers, developers can create workflows that will allow users to pull regular updates from a Zoho or third-party application, and push data back into the app concerned from within the Cliq interface.

Smart conference rooms solution: With Cliq Rooms app for Android TV, users can enrich their meeting experience by scheduling meetings for physical conference rooms, connecting to the TV audio and video, projecting screen, and also conducting hybrid meetings. Unlike its competitors, Cliq Rooms works with any Android TV. With Cliq Rooms, users can also connect their A/V input to their phones or laptops.

Run live events: Organisations can run internal virtual events on Cliq. The organisers can choose who will appear on stage, share posters in-between sessions, and ask questions to the audience. Different communication channels can be set up between the presenters and the organisers as well as the presenter and the audience. Attendees can join the events right within Cliq’s web interface, mobile apps or watch from the comfort of their home with the Cliq TV app.

Compliance with industry regulations through eDiscovery, Data Retention Policy (DRP) and audit logs: Through e-discovery module in Cliq, businesses can access, remove, and recover data as needed. They can create data retention policies to determine how long the data can be retained before deletion. They can also ‘hold’ data in case of an investigation. Audit logs record all critical actions performed within Cliq, and can be used for investigating suspected data breaches and tracking unintentional modifications to the admin console. These functionalities help organisations comply with various industry regulations.

AI functionalities: Through Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant, users can get meeting summary, create action items as tasks in Zoho Projects and set follow-up reminders from within Cliq. Zia also acts as a writing assistant, helping users craft, polish, and proofread messages. Users can also get sentiment analysis using Zia.