A great tool for the enterprise market

Jun 1, 2010 16:31 GMT  ·  By

Zoho has long been battling Google in the enterprise app market. Its set of web-based productivity tools compete with Google Apps and Zoho, but its line up includes apps that Google does not have an equivalent for. And now, it’s taking on the giant at its own game, search, with the launch of Zoho 'Actionable' Search. The new tool enables users to search through documents, emails, contacts, all the data across all Zoho applications.

“We are excited to announce Zoho 'Actionable' Search — a unified search engine for your business running on Zoho,” Zoho’s Raju Vegesna announced. “Zoho Search indexes data from multiple Zoho Apps — Zoho Mail, Docs, Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook, Discussions, Accounts and more — and offers a unique and unified approach to search. When you search for a keyword, it displays results from multiple apps in a single screen.”

The usefulness of the new feature is obvious. With the unified search, users won’t have to switch to and from multiple applications to find the information they want, all the data will be presented to them in a single page. Of course, just throwing together all the search results from all the apps wouldn’t be much of an improvement, different apps require different types of searches.

Fortunately, Zoho Search has this covered; the results are grouped based on their sources. Emails will be stacked together and the results will include the information that is relevant in this case, the message title and snippet of text, the sender’s name and so on.

The search feature also allows you to reply to the emails with just one click and you can view the entire message on the same page. When it comes to contacts, the search results include a photo of the person, their name and similar information. This customization is true for all result types. The new Zoho Search could prove to be an invaluable tool, especially for businesses that rely heavily on Zoho Apps. And it’s proof that small companies can stay ahead of the game even when battling giants like Google.