Meet Zoho Remotely, a must-have remote work platform for all Bahraini startups


In this quick guide, we’re going to present a quick overview of what Zoho Remotely is, its perks, pricing, and of course, how it can help your startup grow in these trying times with the menacing COVID-19 pandemic battering the global economy.

Devastating as it is, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic also has the potential to bring new opportunities for Bahraini businesses, including, of course, the country’s startups. 

The specific surrounding that optimistic forecast is redundant for the purpose of this article — we would rather save that for another day. Nonetheless, the forecast is especially true for startups dealing in tech-driven sectors including FinTech, HealthTech, e-commerce, and other ICT niches. 

You have to ensure, though, that your organization is in an ideal position to survive and wait out the storm relatively safe. The only way to accomplish that is to:

  • Restore normalcy by resuming a steady operational workflow.
  • Increase operational efficiency irrespective of lockdowns and social distancing.
  • Figure out innovative strategies as and when the market demands.
  • Cut down on unnecessary operational expenses. 

As you’ll see by the end of this article, Zoho Remotely promises a rich return on all these fronts. 

What is Zoho Remotely

Zoho Remotely is an all-in-one productivity suite of applications by India-based software maker Zoho Corporation. It is designed to enable teams to communicate and collaborate in real-time. 

Being cloud-based, the suite also allows you to work remotely from anywhere, anytime so long as you have a working internet connection. 

It was officially launched in March 2020, just when organizations across the world found themselves scrambling to find the best ways to work remotely against the backdrop of COVID-19.

Zoho Remotely includes the following 11 applications and services: Zoho Meeting, Zoho ShowTime, Zoho Assist, Zoho Cliq, Zoho Projects, Zoho WorkDrive, Zoho Sprints, Zoho Lens, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, and Zoho Writer.

As you can see, there’s an application each for pretty much all of your workplace and productivity requirements.

Price of Zoho Remotely

For now, you don’t have to pay a penny to access Zoho Remotely as the company made it available for free. It was actually a nice gesture on the company’s part given the precarious situation — financially or otherwise — most startups found themselves in due to the lockdown.

Zoho Corp has confirmed that Remotely will remain free until July 1, 2020. 

Benefits of Zoho Remotely 

First of all, as a cloud-based suite, Remotely doesn’t require any prior-installation or complicated local administration. That leaves your IT and support desks to look after more pressing issues. 

Here’s a rundown of all the 11 apps native to the suite:

Zoho Cliq: For allowing real-time messaging and file-sharing between different departments and team members. Cliq also gives you the option to create private and public channels with audio and video calling features. Additionally, you can also integrate it with other software and sophisticated bots.

Zoho Meeting: An all-in-one online meeting and webinar platform. It is fully secure, private, and offers you the ability to download, record, and share your sessions.

Zoho Workdrive: It is Zoho’s answer to Google Drive and other similar cloud-based services. Workdrive is fully encrypted and complies with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II security protocols. Moreover, it’s designed for teams and helps with collaboration, whereas Google Drive is meant for personal use.

Zoho Sprints: Sprints lets you track the progress of any particular task or project in real-time using a specially-designed board. For better transparency and efficiency, you may choose to integrate it with other Remotely apps, or even some third-party apps. Overall, it’s a planning and tracking tool for agile teams. It is meant for flexible teams who review ongoing processes and adapt to multiple iterations and changes. It is ideal for software development and design teams that follow an agile methodology.

Zoho Projects: With Projects and its natively supported Gantt Charts, you can easily collaborate and track/share your work with the help of automated tasks. It’s a project management tool to track the progress of any particular task or project in real-time. You can project activities, assign work, manage resources and collaborate with your team efficiently.

Zoho Lens: Lens lets your IT and support engineers to remotely access any team member’s smartphone camera so they can identify issues and help resolve them. This app has built-in support for live camera streaming and offers a myriad of features including VoIP, text chats, snapshots, session recording, freeze image, as well as the ability to highlight on 3D objects.

Zoho Show: It’s an easy-to-use slide-making tool that lets you create presentations featuring images, graphs, videos, animations, tweets, and whatnot! There are several ready-to-use templates to choose from that make it easy for you to manage, customize, and share the looks and feel of each individual slide. 

Zoho Writer: Writer is the native word processor application in Zoho Remotely. It’s pretty similar to Google Docs and comes with its own writing-assistant bot called Zia that provides you with real-time tips on contextual grammar and readability.

Zoho Sheet: It is a fully-packed spreadsheet for logging data and analyzing it as and when needed. It is easy-to-use and supports intra-team and inter-department collaborations.

Zoho Showtime: Showtime is an online learning platform that brings together trainers, management, team members, support staff, and pretty much anybody in or outside your organization for conducting training sessions. The application comes equipped with various features such as engagement analytics, screen share, whiteboards, open mic, and session recording.

Zoho Assist: As the name suggests, Zoho Assist lets you resolve all your customer queries and feedback without requiring a call center. It allows your customer support team to provide on-demand remote support over voice/video chat, screen sharing, remote file sharing, and other similar features.

As you can see, Zoho Remotely has a solution for pretty much all your operational requirements. And better still, it is still available for free. Not only that, Zoho has an excellent track record so far when it comes to making cloud-based solutions for enterprises — so reliability or trust factor shouldn’t really be an issue. 

If you have any questions about Zoho Remotely, feel free to reach out to us using any of our social media channels over at Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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