Zoom now has an email platform like Gmail or Outlook, and a calendar app

At Zoomtopia yesterday, Zoom launched two key products that will help the company expand its offerings beyond just Zoom Chat and a Video conferencing platform to small and medium sized businesses.

In a recent news release, the Video conferencing service said that it would be offering its own email and calendar client  named “Zoom Mail and Calendar Client”, within the Zoom app.

The purpose of this is to allow users to integrate their existing accounts with Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, and other popular email and calendar services without having to leave Zoom.

“We are adding Mail to the Zoom App! If you do not have the Mail option displayed, you may need to update to the latest client, or your system administrator may need to enable it,” the company stated in the announcement.

According to Zoom’s head of product Joseph Chong’s blog post, users’ communications through the Zoom Mail Service are encrypted from beginning to end. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who place a premium on email privacy should consider using the Zoom Mail and Calendar Services (beta), Chong notes.

Zoom expects that its users won’t have to switch apps when sending group messages, starting a video meeting with the team, or answering an email from a client.

Those who use the Zoom One Business plan have the option of creating their own custom domain, while the revised Mail and Calendar page offers the new ‘@zmail.com’ domain.

Zoom Mail and Calendar, when used as a client, can incorporate Google and Microsoft 365 (exchange), as confirmed on a separate announcement.

Zoom’s built-in calendar feature streamlines the process of starting a meeting by eliminating the need to send out awkward Zoom links or check to see if somebody is already present before inviting them. You can also view a link to the recording of finished meetings without having to wait for the host to finish uploading and sending it to your team manually.

After it introduced Zoom Team Chat, Zoom started to compete with giants like Slack and Microsoft Teams, signaling it had joined the competition to provide a comprehensive hybrid work solution that combines instant messaging, video conferencing, and email.

Zoom is more directly competing with Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) by allowing businesses to connect to their existing email service or, if they don’t have an IT department, hosting it for them.

For small businesses to make it through the pandemic, they may need to upgrade their insecure email servers to something more modern. Since most firms already use Zoom for their meetings, they may as well switch over to using the company’s email and calendar services instead of those offered by Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.

The company also discussed some other new products at its Zoomtopia event. One of them is Zoom Spots, a virtual co-working space, that aims to “bring the fluid interactions of in-person work” by maintaining constant camera access for you and your colleagues. The company says Zoom Spots will be available at the first quarter in the coming year.