DigitalBeat

After somewhat of a dry spell, Zoho has finally launched a new product: Zoho Discussions. Designed for companies and groups to carry on internal, time-lapse conversations, appears to be a combination of FriendFeed and traditional internet forums.

The simple interface lists all the topics on a particular forum, along with the name of the user that has added to the thread most recently and when. The topics are split among four main categories: Discussion, question, idea proposal and problem report. This last category allows users to corroborate a problem or bug or indicate that a problem has been resolved. This status appears in the general forum. Similarly, you can see how many other users have the same question, essentially prioritizing which questions are most important to answer first. These tools make Zoho Discussions ideal for companies where employees work remotely. By building a historical and indexed knowledge base, the service also acts like an internal company wiki.

Zoho Discussions is unique from FriendFeed and the impending Google Wave, in that companies can add the community software to their own domains and customize it with their own branding. This makes the service feel like a seamless part of a business’ intranet. Then again, these features are also useful for public Zoho Discussions applications. Some companies may use the forum model to provide customer service — allowing their own users to ask questions, cite bugs and share feedback. That makes the addition of customized branding even more important.

Zoho Discussions is available starting today. There is a good free version for more casual use — as is the Zoho way. But what it calls the “standard” version costs $25 a month. The general professional version costs $75 a month, and other features can be added for a quoted price.

A full list of Zoho Discussion features can be found here, including integrated chat so that users in the system can talk in real time, private messages so that only select users can see certain responses or additions, the ability to add subforums to certain topics, and sticky posts so that high priority topics can keep top billing for a longer span of time.

After Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, it was only a matter of time before Zoho followed up with a similar product. But this one tailors it enough for organizational and enterprise use, that it will probably snap up some of the market share from similar services with a more social and less customizable bent.

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Tags: co:Friendfeed, co:Zoho