lately, Zoho has been focused on integrating and improving their existing services, and they haven’t launched a new product in about a year. This changed today with Zoho Discussions, a service that further expands the Zoho Suite and lets anyone create an online forum community.
The best way to experience Zoho Discussions is to visit Zoho’s (
) own forums, which use the same technology.
Key features include advanced and easy user management, user labels (which indicate special users, such as company employees), feeds and notifications, privacy controls and topic moderation, and integration with other Zoho services such as Zoho contacts.
Zoho Discussions can’t compete with advanced forum solutions such as Invision Power Board or phpBB, but for a company’s internal forum or a bug suggestion board it has all the features you’d want. Most importantly, with Zoho’s wide area of products and services, which are all tightly integrated into one another, Zoho is slowly becoming what the upcoming Google Wave (
) aspires to be: a fully integrated communication/document creation/sharing platform for companies and individuals alike.
zoho doesn't get all the buzz that google does. will be interesting to see how they do when the wave breaks. the introduction of functional forums is helpful for many small businesses.