Multi-Language Support in Zoho Discussions Forums

Posted on September 9, 2010 by Sivaranjani

It’s been almost a year since we officially
launched Zoho Discussions
and so far, the number of businesses that deploy Zoho Discussions has steadily increased. With the increasing popularity, come a large volume of feature requests from our users. Out of which, one of the most highly requested features is the ability to use Zoho Discussions in multiple languages as it greatly helps our customers to reach and engage a large of number of people worldwide who speak different
languages – especially non-English speakers.

In order to better serve our customers all over the world, Zoho Discussions now supports 10 different languages: Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. And Zoho Discussions offers
you two ways of implementing language support for your user community:

1.…

Zoho@Zoho: How we promote and encourage linchpins

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Rodrigo Vaca

In his latest book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, Seth Godin advices people to find ways to be unique… find ways to be become indispensable in a modern world that is filled with generic drones inhabiting nondescript office cubes. There’s some good advice for individuals in there. But there’s of course another side to that coin… How can companies create an environment where linchpins naturally appear and develop?

We are not management consultants, neither we’d dream of competing with Seth Godin… but we can tell you how we we promote and encourage linchpiness at Zoho.

Of course, it all starts with the culture. Zoho Corp is a very open company where anyone and everyone can comment, propose and criticize. But that is never enough. At around 1,200 employees, we are not what you’d call small.

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Better Community Engagement = Quality User Generated Content and Improved SEO

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Dhan

Hitting the top spot in a search engine results page will, to say the least, bring good things for your site. High-quality, relevant, constantly-updated content improves your websites’ worth in the eyes of the search engines. And most times, the people who have the best, relevant, fresh content for your site are…. gasp! your customers. These days, crowd-sourcing some of your content to your community is a no-brainer. It is a win-win situation where you serve your customers by providing them a forum to get answers and to connect with other users. And at the same time you also serve the marketing purpose of getting the content and activity that you need for SEO.

It is then of little surprise that a whole bunch of forum software vendors mushroomed to serve this demand.

However, traditional forums software requires additional modifications or plugins to create meaningful search engine optimized sites.

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Integrated Single Sign On for your Customer Support Community : Tailoring Zoho Discussions Part II

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Dhan

In Part 1 of this series of blog posts, we talked about visual customization and branding features of Zoho Discussions. However, branding does not stop with visual customization alone. Most businesses collect user data (email, name, demographic info etc) and use it to provide better support, introduce features, conduct campaigns and also to offer a member area.

End users expect to use their profile information right in all areas of the website – including user communities. Most online community services encourage their customers to transit to “Open ID” (or Google, Yahoo, FB, Twitter based) authentication. This approach definitely has its merits since the end user has to manage one less profile and password. But, this approach presents 2 problems:

Businesses need to change their existing model and develop and deploy code updates to their existing system
Existing users (most businesses already have an registration requiring forum / community) will have to forget their current profile and migrate over.

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Enhancing Online Support Forums with Zoho Discussions – and new features!

Posted on January 29, 2010 by Rodrigo Vaca

Customer support is one of the most commons scenarios Zoho Discussions is used (and designed!) for. There are many types of customer support – Zoho Discussions is oriented towards the self-service/community-driven one: customers themselves helping each other through customer support forums. This of course makes sense for a number of reasons. Not only it is more economical for companies to provide support this way, but it also provides a better support experience for customers, who get better answers from real customers in similar situations.

We recently introduced a few new features that make Zoho Discussions-powered online customer support forums even better. As with other things Zoho, we’ve been using them for our own internal forums (which we use quite extensively!) as well as using them silently in our customer-facing forums.zoho.com.…

Zoho Discussions is now free for Open Source Projects; jQuery deploys Discussions

Posted on January 20, 2010 by Raju Vegesna

At Zoho, we use many open source components including JavaScript
libraries like jQuery. When John Resig from jQuery blogged about his issues with Google Groups,
we approached him to offer Zoho Discussions for free as we immensely
benefit from jQuery. After evaluating several discussion forums, John
finally decided to go with Zoho Discussions.

We ended up analyzing countless solutions but in the end we chose to go with Zoho Discussions. A combination of decisions drove us to this decision:

Zoho Discussions seamlessly integrates both regular, forum-style,
discussions and Q&A. Additionally all the moderation and
administration tools are designed around building and managing a slick
workflow for answering questions and concerns.

The Discussions team at Zoho has been incredibly accommodating. Not
only providing all the hosting for free but going out of their way to
fix concerns and integrate our full Google Groups back history.

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