All businesses—no matter how small or big they’re—need reliable storage and collaboration platforms to operate effectively. Although you have plenty of good options for both of them, it’s hard to find a platform that provides both functionalities under one roof.

Enter Zoho Workdrive, a cloud storage and collaboration platform that streamlines your data by offering them secure cloud storage and collaboration tools in one place.

Let’s jump in to explore Zoho Workdrive in detail and find out what makes it a great file storage and collaboration platform.

What Is Zoho WorkDrive?

Zoho WorkDrive is a cloud-based file storage and collaboration platform that allows teams to easily store, share, and work together on files in real-time.

It was launched as a replacement for Zoho Docs a few years back to serve as the underlying storage platform for its suite of office and productivity apps. And during this time, several changes have been made to the platform.

The latest installment comes in the form of WorkDrive 4.0. WorkDrive 4.0 brings a host of new features across different facets, including user interface, data administration, third-party integration, and more, to keep up with the growing needs of a hybrid work environment.

Zoho WorkDrive is available on both mobile and desktop.

What Can Zoho WorkDrive Help You With?

Being a file management and collaboration platform Zoho WorkDrive lets you do a whole lot more than store files. This is possible thanks to its diverse set of features, which includes the following:

Team Collaboration

One of the best things about WorkDrive is team collaboration. WorkDrive does this using Team Folders, which allows members of a team to upload documents to a single folder to make them available to everyone in the team at once. This way, users don’t have to email files individually and follow up with people later.

Similarly, if someone in the team makes any changes to any file in a Team Folder, WorkDrive alerts everyone about the same via notifications, so they’re always up to date with the changes and don’t have to check the space every now and then themselves actively.

As a way to keep all project files and documents organized, WorkDrive allows workspace admins to create sub-folders inside a Team Folder. It’s something large organizations can make the best use of to categorize files by the department. Admins can also set access permissions for each team member to limit their access to the folder’s contents.

Lastly, every WorkDrive workspace has a Trash under the Team Folder to keep all files and documents safe. As such, whenever someone in the team deletes a file or a folder, it goes to Trash. This way, there’s an option to recover it if it’s needed later or when someone in the team accidentally deletes it in the first place.

Access to Zoho’s Powerful Office Suite

When teams subscribe to WorkDrive, they also get access to Zoho Office Suite. Zoho Office Suite is a suite of tools to help teams with office work. It includes three tools: Writer, Sheet, and Show. All three offer a clean and easy-to-use interface and provide a variety of templates to speed up work and work even when you’re offline.

Additionally, each tool offers several other useful functions, like the focused writing mode in Zoho Writer, pre-defined and custom functions in Zoho Sheet, and various design and animation options in Zoho Show.

Combined with WorkDrive, this not only assists teams with office tasks but also helps them keep their files across each of them in one location. As a result, it becomes easier for team members to collaborate in real time, collect feedback, and publish their work for everyone on the team to see.

Collaborative Workspace

WorkDrive takes the collaboration experience to the next level. It gives you the ability to build a collaborative workspace where you can work with colleagues without inviting them to a Team Folder. Similarly, it also simplifies file sharing with individuals or other teams on the platform, which, in turn, makes collaborating more efficient.

Since multiple people can work on a file at once, it can result in multiple copies of the same file. This can make identifying the original file a challenging and tedious process. But thankfully, WorkDrive supports version history, so team members can access all the different versions of a file, compare them, and revert to a previous version when required without any hassle.

In line with this, another useful feature that makes the collaboration experience on the platform better is activity monitoring. Using this, team leads can easily audit everything happening in their workspace to keep track of the progress. Furthermore, activities can be checked in detail via filters to see more valuable insights.

For times when team members need to discuss something or share feedback on a file or document, WorkDrive’s feedback feature (called File Annotations) can come in handy. With this, users can easily share their thoughts on an idea or leave feedback under files or documents through contextual comments.

Data Management Tools

Zoho WorkDrive supports over 220 file formats. Since this covers a pretty wide spectrum of file formats, it ensures there aren’t any compatibility issues on the platform, so teams can directly view files in the workspace or upload the ones they want without having to convert them first.

To make file discovery and search on the platform easy, WorkDrive gives you the option to search files by name, creator, or keyword in the document. Similarly, it also supports OCR and object detection, which allows you to locate images and scanned documents in the workspace by simply entering a keyword into them.

Besides, there’s an option to categorize files in the Team Folder. This allows you to keep your files and documents organized to make it easy for anyone on the team to find them.

Work With People Outside Your Team

If your team works with other businesses, you may want to show clients your progress to keep them updated or take their input on something.

WorkDrive makes doing this super easy. The platform allows you to quickly create an external link to a file you want to share. To make this collaboration effort safe and keep your data secure, the tool lets you secure each link you send out with independent access permissions, expiry dates, and passwords. Basically, it gives you complete control over your links and lets you decide what users joining your workspace can and can’t access or do.

Similarly, WorkDrive’s “Client Users” can let you invite your external client or a partner to your team. This can come in handy when you want to have your stakeholders look at or collaborate on a project for a brief period of time.

Advanced Analytics

When you work with large teams, you’d want to know certain stats about your workspace. On WorkDrive, you get access to all such stats along with reports on everything happening in your workspace in one place.

So, for instance, if you’re a workspace admin, you can easily check when a file’s updated, how much storage space a project is taking, and the amount of free space available.

Uninterrupted File Access

Zoho WorkDrive is available on both mobile and desktop, and it keeps all your files and folders across your devices in sync. This allows you to work on one device and continue where you left off on another.

In addition, the platform also syncs your files and folders to your desktop, so you can work even when you’re offline and then sync the changes when you go online.

Zoho WorkDrive Plans and Pricing

Zoho WorkDrive offers three plans: Starter, Team, and Business.

• Starter: $2.5 (Rs 140) per user per month; storage starts at 1TB per team with 1GB file upload limit
• Team: $4.5 (Rs 275) per user per month; 3TB per team of storage space and 5GB file upload limit
• Business: $9 (Rs 550) per user per month; storage space of 5TB per team with 50GB file upload limit

Each plan offers all the basic file storage and management features. But as you go to the higher tier, it unlocks access to a few additional ones. Check out WorkDrive plans for a comprehensive look at the difference between all three plans and pick the right one for your organization.

Additionally, when the offered storage space isn’t enough, Zoho has additional storage options, which can be purchased separately.

Zoho gives new users a 15-day free trial period with full access to all WorkDrive features. With this trial, individuals and teams can test and explore the service to determine if it meets their requirements and then subscribe to a plan accordingly.

Check Out Zoho WorkDrive