Zoom has become one of the most popular conferencing platforms, both for private and business use. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has only helped fuel the app's fame, making it pass more than 500,000,000 downloads on the Play Store.

However, now that vaccines are starting to roll out to the masses, the prospect of returning to the office is growing. With that in mind, Zoom doesn't want people to forget about it and would rather have companies to continue using it on a daily basis. The company is said to be working on developing its own productivity suite, which could include email, calendar, and even instant messaging solutions.

According to The Information, people close to Zoom's CEO Eric Yuan have revealed the company is currently working on a web email client and also considering building a calendar application. These are reportedly developed with designing the "next generation" of email in mind, instead of merely copying what Google and Microsoft already offer. Regardless of the approach, building a full productivity suite would allow Zoom to compete head-to-head with the two market leaders, at least when it comes to managing email, calendar, and online meetings.

In addition, Zoom is also said to place a stronger focus on messaging, although it isn't clear whether it will build a product to rival with Teams and Slack or simply improve the embedded chat features in online meetings. That being said, with Salesforce taking over Slack, the company may indeed want to expand into full-featured messaging, providing a complete offering to companies that may not want to combine services from too many vendors.

Lastly, The Information mentions Zoom's product roadmap includes directory services, which clearly hints at the company building a complete suite targeting companies, which could integrate everything they need to get employees working.

Even though these products are still in their early development stages and may not even be brought to the market, Zoom is expected to start offering them in the first quarter of 2021, potentially as preview versions. That being said, Zoom is known to work seamlessly with a wide range of third-party software, including Slack, Outlook, and Asana, and integration with these tools is probably going to continue to be supported for the foreseeable future, especially because most existing corporate clients wouldn't switch to its productivity suite for some time, if ever.

Source: The Information