Open source projects require a collaborative environment where developers can be in constant contact with each other - and also where discussions and decisions are transparent and accessible to the entire community. Zoho Discussions enables open source projects to create online communities where all project members can share their code, conduct reviews, fix bugs and create highly reliable software projects.
At Zoho, we rely on many open source products. So, one way in which we'd like to give back to the open source community is by providing an extensive free plan exclusively for open source projects, as well as extending a deep discount on advanced plans, so all open source projects can create a vibrant online community using Zoho Discussions.
Zoho Discussions also offer SEO options to help improve the way your content is seen by search engines.
Zoho Discussions also comes with a powerful anti-spam engine and of course lets users flag content as inappropriate.
User labels come in handy to indicate official responses from the company, to indicate who is a moderator of the board, or even to recognize the most frequent and valued contributors to the community.
Once an idea is brainstormed with the community, it can be scheduled for implementation or delayed for later prioritization. Capture these status details right in the topic and let your community know - thus increasing their involvement.
Users can stay in touch with important updates by watching an entire forum / sub forum or a specific set of "expert" users.
Comprehensive and flexible user management allows you to add individual users, user groups and the entire company. Once accepted by the user / group each user can be individually administered, assigned labels and permissions
Zoho Discussions comes with a built-in powerful standard search, as well as advanced search with multiple parameters and drill-down
Community users can submit a post to your online forum simply by sending an e-mail to a pre-configured e-mail address. Even this comes with throttle control basic spam detection features
If you want to engage your customers, you need to make it easy for them to participate. If you want to engage employees, you want them to use their same login. Zoho Discussions support multiple login options, including Gmail and Yahoo logins, integration with your own website login and others.
Once a topic is posted, users can express their opinions through commenting, voting and changing topic status. After flowing through these status, an actionable conclusion is drawn. After this, the topic can be frozen (locked) for participation and retained for archival purposes. Some topics could add value by reinforcing another more detailed participation. These, we call related topics.
Support customers from around the globe in their native language. Zoho Discussions can accept user generated content in almost any language. For all system generated content, Zoho Discussions today supports English, Chinese and Japanese. We expect to expand full support to multiple languages shortly.
