Hi,
I am trying to find out if I can make a web form that can be used to enter contacts into the zoho contacts that are part of the zoho mail suite (also accessible at contacts.zoho.com).
VERY IMPORTANT - this is in reference to the contacts in zoho mail suite - NOT in CRM. I did see the webform for CRM contact entry, but we are planning on using zoho primarily for email and possibly campaign purposes, and while CRM's functionalities are impressive, they are not applicable for our purposes.
While we are extremely happy with many features of zoho and the mail suite interface, contact management is extremely frustrating, and becoming a dealbreaker for whether or not our nonprofit can become part of zoho (I have been testing apps out on my zoho account so we can see if it is feasible for our nonprofit to make the switch).
More information about why we need this webform can be found in my post here:
Additionally, the layout of the mail suite contacts is very confusing for our users, with all the different types of contacts including shared, organization, and local contacts, and we want to control where the contacts they enter are stored.
Ideally, this web form would enable us to create one entry that could be passed into the local, shared, or organization contacts, or a combination of these. But, if only one of these options is available, that's better than nothing.
We also don't want anyone accidentally inviting contacts to groups using the traditional interface and there is no way to hide the invite to group button.
Additionally, since you can't maintain categories in shared or organization contacts, and you can't add custom fields to contacts, we want to be able to utilize predefined fields such as address 1 or city to hold custom information. For example, I could customize my web form to have the address 1, address 2, and city fields included in it. But, instead of having text boxes for the person adding the contact to type in, I could have drop-down lists of distribution category names. The chosen category would be stored in the address 1 field, which we don't use for anything else. There would be no issue with the person who is entering the contact in typing the wrong distribution list name or being confused about where to type it because they would just see the drop-down for distribution list and would be unaware the info was actually being stored in the address 1 field.
Then, later, when i want to send mail to a particular distribution list, I could do a contact search for the distribution list name in organization contacts, and all contacts that have that name in their address 1 field would come up. Then I simply select all and send mail. Definitely not as easy as if zoho would just have categories available for the organization contacts, but a possible workaround.
If you could please send me the code to feed the contact details from the web form to the zoho mail suite address book contact fields, we would greatly appreciate it. Again, this is not the CRM contacts, which I did see a webform for. This is the mail suite contacts - preferably the organization contacts, or even better, the code to add contacts to local, shared, and organization, as well as to calendar invites/notifications and campaigns if possible.
We very much like all other aspects of zoho mail suite, but the contact management is atrocious and so important. And, you came out with contact manager software, but it doesn't integrate with mail suite or zoho contacts, so it doesn't help us. I've even tried integrating with Zoho Campaigns and other zoho products, but nothing syncs contacts so you are entering contacts and maintaining them in multiple places.
Additionally, if you could send me code so that the web form could have the ability to update existing contacts rather than just adding new contacts, that would be even better. But, if all it can do is add new, that's definitely better than nothing, and we can have an administrator do contact updates from the traditional contact interface. We just need something to do new contact data entry that will feed directly into the mail suite zoho contacts for our nonprofit organization. Thank you very much.