Zoho Connect for Intranets, Workflows and Announcements

Zoho Connect is Zoho’s employee intranet and internal collaboration platform. It gives your company a private network with a homepage feed, groups for teams and projects, discussion forums, a knowledge base called Manuals, task boards, and tools for announcements and town halls. It also supports custom apps, so you can build things like onboarding checklists or equipment requests inside the same platform your staff already open every morning.

We handle the whole intranet, not just the initial build. That covers portal structure and branding, group architecture, the knowledge base, task boards, custom apps and workflow automation, integrations with your other Zoho apps, permissions and guest access, offboarding, retention rules, and monthly reporting on who is actually using it. New groups, articles, and automations get built as you need them under a flat monthly rate.

Yes. We manage the platform, we do not resell it. You hold your own Zoho Connect subscription, which means the account, the content, and the data are yours. Zoho Connect pricing runs per user with a free tier for very small teams, and it is included in Zoho One. If you already pay for Zoho One, you are almost certainly paying for Connect and not using it.

It is. Zoho One bundles Connect along with the rest of the suite, which is why so many Zoho One customers are paying for an intranet they never switched on. If you run several Zoho apps, our Managed Zoho One plan usually costs less than managing three or four apps separately, and we will tell you when that math works in your favor rather than waiting for you to ask.

Yes. We have moved companies off SharePoint, Confluence, Google Sites, and homegrown WordPress intranets. The work starts with an audit of what you have, because most legacy intranets contain a lot of content nobody has opened in years. We decide together what survives the move, then rebuild it in a structure people can navigate, rather than dumping old folders into a new tool.

Connect links to the wider Zoho suite, so CRM, People, Desk, Projects, and Cliq can push updates into the right group. Beyond Zoho, it supports webhooks and a set of common third-party connectors. Where the standard options stop, we build against the Connect API, which covers pulling data out of your own database or assembling a feed from two systems at once.

A consultant builds the intranet and leaves. The problem with intranets is not the build, it is month seven, when half the groups are dead, the knowledge base is out of date, and three people who left in spring still have accounts. We keep the structure pruned, the documentation reviewed, the permissions current, and the automations working, which is the part that decides whether anyone still uses it.

A straightforward network for a single-site team is usually live within two to three weeks. Multi-department rollouts with a knowledge base migration, custom apps, and SSO typically run four to eight weeks. The variable is rarely the configuration, it is how long it takes to agree what your group structure should be and to get existing documentation into a shape worth migrating.

Yes, through guest access, and getting it configured properly matters more than people expect. We set external users up so they see only the specific groups they need, with no access to the wider feed, the knowledge base, or your internal announcements. We also review that guest list on a schedule, because contractor accounts are the ones that quietly outlive the project they were created for.

Offboarding runs the same day. We remove access, then transfer ownership of any groups, boards, manuals, and custom apps that person held, so nothing gets stranded inside a disabled account. This sounds obvious and it is the single most common gap we find when we take over a network somebody else set up. Six weeks later someone needs a document and it is locked.

Mostly by giving them a reason to open it. That means the homepage shows their team’s current work rather than a stale welcome banner, the knowledge base answers questions they genuinely have, and the things they need to do, like requesting time off or finding a policy, live there instead of in email. We also report on usage monthly, so a group nobody visits gets fixed or retired.

The usual comparisons are Microsoft Viva Engage with SharePoint, Workplace alternatives since Meta retired it, Simpplr, Staffbase, and Happeo. Connect wins on price and on integration when you already run Zoho, because it talks to your CRM and HR data without middleware. It is a weaker fit if your company is deeply committed to Microsoft 365 and your documents already live in SharePoint.

No, and teams often need both. Cliq is real-time chat, the equivalent of Slack. Connect is the intranet: the persistent layer where announcements, documentation, policies, and project boards live. Chat is where you ask a quick question, the intranet is where the answer gets written down so nobody has to ask again. We manage both, and they integrate with each other.