Dear Zoho Cliq Support Team,

We are writing to request a significant enhancement to Zoho Cliq that would greatly benefit our geographically dispersed development team.

Current Challenge:

Currently, Zoho Cliq automatically routes users to specific data centers (DCs) based on their location during account creation. This presents a challenge for our team, as we have developers located in the European Union (EU) and India.

• EU developers are automatically assigned to the https://cliq.zoho.eu DC.
• Indian developers are assigned to the https://cliq.zoho.in
  DC.
• While we are in the US zoho.com DC

This separation hinders collaboration within our external channel, as users from different DCs cannot interact with each other.

Proposed Solutions (in order of preference):

1. Cross-Data Center Collaboration: Implement functionality that allows users from different DCs to seamlessly collaborate within an external channel, regardless of their assigned DC. This is the most desirable solution, as it would eliminate the current limitations and foster better teamwork across geographical boundaries.

2. User-Selectable Data Center: During account creation, provide users with the option to choose their preferred data center. This approach aligns with common practices in other SaaS platforms, where users can select their desired region.

3. Manual Data Center Change: If the above options are not feasible at present, we would appreciate the ability to request manual data center changes for users. This would at least allow some level of control over user placement.

Benefits:

• Improved team communication and collaboration across geographical locations.
• Enhanced flexibility and user control over data residency.
• Alignment with industry standards and best practices for SaaS applications.

Current Workaround (and its Limitations):

We have attempted using a VPN to bypass the data center restrictions, but this solution is cumbersome and impractical for ongoing collaboration and it's not working for us.

Impact:

The inability to collaborate seamlessly within Zoho Cliq due to data center limitations hinders our team's productivity and communication.

Conclusion:

We strongly believe that implementing cross-data center collaboration or user-selectable data centers would significantly enhance the usability of Zoho Cliq for geographically distributed teams like ours. We encourage you to consider these feature requests and look forward to your response.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Ram