Zoho Corp. today debuted an upgraded release of its Zoho Workplace productivity suite with several new productivity features designed to make it more competitive with Microsoft Corp.’s Office and Google LLC’s G Suite. 

Despite never raising funding over its 24-year history, Zoho has emerged as a major player in the business software market. The Austin, Texas-based company has more than 50 million users across its suite of 45-plus cloud applications, which organizations use to automate core processes such as accounting and employee onboarding.

Zoho Workplace is the company’s entry into the productivity segment. The suite includes nine applications that provide document and presentation creation features as well as tools for team communications. Linking it all together is WorkDrive, a dashboard similar to Google Drive through which team members can share documents they compose in the suite’s other applications. 

WorkDrive has received a major update as part of today’s launch. The main highlight is a feature called TrueSync that, according to Zoho, can make it easier to work with large team folders that contain many files. 

Previously, users would access a team folder by downloading its contents to the WorkDrive desktop client on their machines. The issue was that importing a folder with a large number of files could be time-consuming and take up a lot of storage space.

According to Zoho, TrueSync addresses the challenge by downloading not the files themselves but rather shortcut icons that stand in for those files. When a user clicks a particular document’s shortcut, WorkDrive displays a cloud-based copy of the document that doesn’t take up any storage space but can still be edited inside the desktop client. 

Also in the interest of making large folders easier to work with, Zoho is enhancing WorkDrive with an improved search function for finding specific files. On the backend, administrators can track how users interact with company files via an analytics console.

Zoho has also updated Zoho Mail, the Gmail alternative included in its productivity suite. The email service now enables users to access Zoho’s team communications applications as well as its Writer word processor, which is a part of the suite, without opening a new tab. Workers can use Writer inside the Zoho Mail interface to compose and edit attachments. 

Other enhancements in today’s update include expanded language support and a new feature in Zoho Sheet, the company’s spreadsheet editor, for synchronizing data between spreadsheets. 

The update follows a quarter in which the company claims to have seen its productivity suite’s user base grow to 2 million organizations worldwide. According to Zoho, a quarter of new customers switched over from G Suite or Microsoft.

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