CMS Weekly

Create Public or Private Forums with Zoho Discussions
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-28

Continuing on the topic of social media tools, Zoho has just announced Zoho Discussions, a new social tool in their ever-growing productivity suite. While new to the public, Zoho has been using the tool internally already, so it’s strength in managing hundreds of active discussions daily has been proven. Zoho has taken on Microsoft Office and Google Docs with its productivity platform, and has been quite prolific in application releases.

Some examples are:

Zoho Creator 3.0 – for data driven applications

Zoho Marketplace – online community and marketplace for Zoho Creator Apps

Zoho Creator Partner Program

More than 100,000 applications have been created, but it’s still to be determined if the Zoho line is going to be able to stay in the game with the heavy weights Google and Microsoft in serving the small and mid-size business market. They are certainly throwing some attractive features into the mix, particularly for smaller clients. And Zoho Discussions allows businesses to remain in control of their brand and the user experience they provide to customers through custom URLs, branding options and elements, customizable look and feel, even including full rebranding (white labeling) options.

# Rich User Experience: Zoho Discussions, features:
Topic Administration where community moderators and users can manage the topics.
Integrated advanced search, RSS, and SEO for content discoverability.
Branding control for businesses.
Rich User Experience including WYSIWYG editor, threaded conversations, drafts and previews.
Administration features promising less administrator work while supporting more users.

Check out the Zoho Discussions video on cmswire.com.

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