Zoholics Australia 2018 Wrap Up

A few lucky members of the Ardento team attended the recent Zoholics conference in Sydney and Melbourne.

Zoholics brings together staff, partners and customers of Zoho for two days of ‘all in’ Zoho action.

The name ‘Zoholics’ is truly fitting when it comes to these events. Users of Zoho software are passionate and enthusiastic about the direction of the technology.

Ardento has partnered with Zoho for the last 3 years, delivering Zoho solutions to a wide range of customers across Australia and we simply can’t get enough of this software stack.

We are true Zoholics!

Zoho – The Operating System For Your Business

The speed at which Zoho adds functionality and new applications to its portfolio is hard to keep up with. Zoho employ over 6000 people globally and a huge portion of these employees are software developers. This is evident in the fact that Zoho now have over 40 enterprise, cloud applications, all coming together in the ground breaking offering Zoho One.

This year at Zoholics Australia, Zoho continued to emphasize its direction for a complete integrated, end-to-end business management suite. Each application is becoming more connected within the Zoho ecosystem, allowing data flow and business process to seamlessly cross from sales, to finance, to reporting and beyond!

While there was too much specific content to cover in detail in this post I still want to highlight some of the areas I was most excited about.

Zoho CRM

The flagship product from Zoho is its enterprise cloud CRM. The 2018 release of Zoho CRM saw a number of new customisation options added. Features such as sub forms, user lookup fields and canvas view add excellent flexibility to the CRM customisation features.

Zoho CRM dashboards have also had an overhaul. This has been a long time coming for Zoho users and now we finally have fresh and exciting dashboard options built directly into Zoho CRM. One big takeaway here is that dashboard charts and widgets no longer have to start as a CRM report, chart widgets can be added directly to new dashboards quickly and easily.

Zoho Books

Zoho Books has flown under the radar in Australia for some time. With the prolific uptake of bookkeeping systems like Xero, the market has not had much time for alternatives.

However Zoho Books should not be overlooked.

The product is an excellent accounting package with some advanced features rivaling ERP capabilities, such as an integrated workflow engine for creating alerts or scripting automated behaviors.

The system also boasts really strong reporting capabilities and deep inventory management. Extended Zoho apps such as Zoho Expense and Zoho Subscriptions really round out the finance side of the Zoho suite.

Another feature which makes Zoho Books so attractive is its deep integration to Zoho CRM. This provides fiscal visibility to sales teams directly from within CRM.

Zoho Creator

A large part of the Zoholics 2018 conference focused on rapid application development using Zoho Creator.

Zoho Creator brings a lot of smiles to our development team as it provides an excellent solution for developing cross platform web and mobile applications. Zoho Creator provides a simple solution for closing any functionality gaps businesses may have when implementing other Zoho applications by allowing developers to create custom applications quickly and cheaply.

Zoho Flow

Zoho Flow is a cloud connector application leveraging the existing integration end points of Zoho applications, but what makes this product exciting is its simplicity.

Any user can build a ‘flow’ based on a trigger in one Zoho application which then automatically executes functionality in another application.

The ‘drag and drop’ interface makes it easy to visualise the flow of data without the need for heavy technical knowledge or lots of code. Zoho Flow also extends to other non-Zoho cloud applications.

Need to push data from Zoho Projects to Zoho CRM when a project milestone is met? Create a Flow!

Zoho Reports

Any body who has worked with the Ardento team in the past will know that reporting and analytics is a passion of ours. Turning business data into valuable insight is a strategy all businesses should implement.

Zoho Reports has matured a lot in the past 2 years. The system is now a solid data visualization and analytical tool. Connecting natively to Zoho applications as well as other popular cloud systems like Xero, Zoho Reports provides visually stunning dashboards, report scheduling and drill down capabilities.

Some of the exciting new features around the corner are data point alerts, geo maps and a fresh new user interface.

Zoho Reports is now our ‘go to’ cloud business intelligence tool.

The Future

Partnering with Zoho to deliver their integrated cloud applications to Australian business is a rapidly expanding part of Ardento.

We are seeing increased interest and uptake of the software from all industry sectors and we are committed to ensuring new and existing users of Zoho get the most from the software.

Zoho have a big vision for the future of cloud software and we are excited to be able to bring this vision and value to our clients.

This article was originally posted on the Ardento blog site