Efficient scheduling, meeting, and booking management are vital. This is where Zoho’s productivity applications come into play. Zoho Meeting, Zoho Calendar, and Zoho Bookings together create a powerhouse of functionality. Let’s dive in.
Zoho Calendar
Streamlined Scheduling
With Zoho Calendar, scheduling is streamlined. It allows you to spin up meetings directly from the homepage. It also provides a quick-launch capability for unplanned meetings, which is extremely handy.
Sharing Meeting Materials
Zoho Calendar’s functionality allows users to upload files and have them ready to go as part of a meeting. You can pre-load presentation slides or relevant white papers and share them easily with attendees.
Integrating with Other Zoho Apps
Zoho Calendar syncs natively with other Zoho applications. If you schedule an event in Zoho Calendar, it will reflect in Zoho Meeting and vice versa, ensuring you’re always on top of your schedule.
Google and Outlook Integration Challenges
While Zoho Calendar does allow integration with Google Calendar and Outlook, this feature isn’t flawless. Rescheduling events on these external calendars doesn’t always register an update on Zoho Bookings. As such, it’s advisable to handle all rescheduling within Zoho Bookings for accuracy.
Zoho Bookings
Creating and Managing Services
Create and manage various services, from 30-minute meetings to longer sessions. These can be one-on-one bookings or group bookings, providing flexibility based on your needs.
Customizing Availability
Bookings allows you to customize availability on a per-service basis. It can either reflect your availability or have specific hard-coded time slots, giving you control over your schedule.
Payment Integrations and Limitations
Bookings does facilitate payment processing by integrating with various payment processors. However, it’s important to note that each user needs to configure this for themselves or the admin needs to configure it on their behalf.
Notifications and Reminders
With Bookings, you can set up automated notifications and reminders for internal staff and customers, ensuring everyone stays in the loop about upcoming bookings.
Zoho Meeting
Launching an Instant Meeting
Zoho Meeting is an online meeting and webinar solution that provides an intuitive, user-friendly interface. On the homepage, you can start or schedule a meeting instantly, a feature particularly useful for spontaneous meetings or webinars.
Efficient Meeting Management
With the list of all your upcoming and past meetings available on the left-hand sidebar, managing your meetings becomes a breeze. Creating a meeting in Zoho Calendar automatically syncs it to Zoho Meeting and vice versa, providing a seamlessly integrated experience.
Easy Webinar Set-Up
Scheduling a webinar is also a straightforward process with Zoho Meeting. All you need is the event name, organizer details, any promotional or engagement materials, and the list of attendees.
Inclusion in Zoho One
An important note is that Zoho Meeting is part of Zoho One. This means that even if you host only a few webinars annually, you might still want to try out Zoho Meeting as other standalone webinar solutions can be costly.
Recording Limitations
We do want to note that Zoho is actively working on improving this, but recordings with Meeting aren’t the best. If high-quality recordings are important in your workflow, you may want to replace Meeting with a solution like Zoom.
Integrating the Trio: Zoho Meeting, Zoho Calendar, and Zoho Bookings
Linking Zoho Meeting and Bookings
Zoho Meeting can be integrated with Zoho Bookings. Once the integration is done, Zoho Meeting can automatically create a meeting link for each booking done via Zoho Bookings.
Reflecting Bookings in Zoho Calendar
Bookings can also be linked with Zoho Calendar. Bookings reflected in Zoho Calendar will make it easier to manage your schedule and avoid overlapping events.
Synchronized Scheduling System
These three tools together create a synchronized scheduling system. Once you book a meeting via Zoho Bookings, it will automatically create a Zoho Meeting and reflect the booking in Zoho Calendar.
Video Conferencing Limitations
Zoho Bookings allows you to integrate video conferencing tools into its platform. However, the only natively supported tool is Zoho Meetings. While it’s possible to integrate other tools like Zoom and Google Meet, it involves using Zoho Flow or Zapier, which could add extra steps and complexities to the process.
By harnessing the collective power of Zoho Meeting, Zoho Calendar, and Zoho Bookings, you can streamline your scheduling, meeting, and booking processes, helping you stay organized and efficient. However, as with any tool, it’s important to be aware of their limitations and adapt your usage accordingly.
