Introducing Private Communities in Zoho Discussions

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Dhan

For over an year, Zoho Discussions has been helping businesses and non-profit organizations create and foster communities that involve and empower its members and help crowd-source decision making.

One of the design goals of Zoho Discussions was to reduce the amount of technical expertise administrators needed to setup and maintain an user community. But one of the things we’ve heard loud and clear is that many of our customers did not find the initial setup process as easy as they’d like it to be. The main reason was that Zoho Discussions setup management had so many options and controls that it took some time to get used to.

We also realized that our customer base was broadly split into two main segments – those who wanted to setup a private community (for improving employee engagement, supporting private beta launches etc) and those who wanted to set up a public customer support community.…

Improved community membership management with Zoho Discussions: Introducing Subscriptions

Posted on October 28, 2010 by Dhan

One of the challenges of running an online community is who you invite or let in to participate.

While some communities are “open”, some other communities, as a result of their nature, tend to be a bit more vigilant about who can come in and read/post.

Zoho Discussions has for long supported membership and provides fine-grained control over who can access and participate in a conversation, but today we are building on that and making it a bit easier.

We built a nifty feature that simplifies life for community admins:

membership requests

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Membership requests allow visitors to apply for memberships that the community admin would then evaluate and grant. If adopted for your community, this subscription feature in Zoho Discussions will help you know your users better and also help reduce spam. This is also ideal for open communities where you would like to know your users better before you allow them in to participate.…

Bulk Question Import into Question Banks – Zoho Challenge

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Dhan

It has been more than a month since we wrote about any thing new in Zoho Challenge. However, our friends and fans out there have made sure that it was not quiet on the media front. In the past 6 weeks, Zoho Challenge was covered in several blogs, newspapers and was also mentioned in

BBC’s WebScape program and just yesterday at

Teacher Boot Camp. Not only that, in the period, the volume of users using Zoho Challenge has almost tripled – of course without any strain on the

service’s availability

Consistent with serious usage, we have received lot of feedback and feature requests from our users. We have been continuously adding power to Zoho Challenge and the precious feedback we received from users like you have helped us refine and fine tune the product significantly. Over the next few weeks, we will unveil each of these features and enhancements done to Zoho Challenge.…

Beyond Web Analytics: Tools to Improve Customer Support Efficiency

Posted on September 16, 2010 by Dhan

You cannot improve what you cannot measure! In this day where inbound traffic is everything for a website, webmasters can’t live without Web Analytics tools. They give you hard data about how your website was accessed, the usage patterns, user interests and trends and so on.

However, they cannot tell you semantic data about your application. For instance, Google Analytics cannot tell you the efficiency of your support reps, or the rate of participation of your customer community. It cannot tell you whether your users really “found” the answers to most of their questions or they just kept shooting in the dark till they got frustrated. It cannot tell you if ideas are languishing without votes or questions without answers. You will need special tools for that.

Zoho Discussions now has an

integrated statistics and analytics panel

that gives you just that ability.…

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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New in Zoho Challenge: Comprehension Questions

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Dhan

Today, we are announcing a feature that will be very useful for both our academic and business users alike – Zoho Challenge now has support for comprehension questions. In Zoho Challenge, a comprehension question is one that first presents a paragraph, a passage, a graph/image or maybe a combination of them, and then makes a series of follow-questions about that introduction. Typically, these questions measure how good the test-taker is at comprehending what is being discussed in the introductory part, how well he can extrapolate based on information presented, or, for example, his abilities to analyze and arrive to conclusions based on some information being presented.

So now you can get that psychometric test for your [potential] employees or you can you include graphic interpretation questions – that test a candidate’s ability to answer questions that involve more comprehension or broader skills than normal, single questions.

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