Zoho CRM Digest - April 2024

Zoho CRM Digest - April 2024



Welcome to April, the season of blooming trees and blossoming flowers! As nature comes alive, so does our community. Dive into this month's digest to explore vibrant discussions and exciting announcements. 

Zoho CRM product updates:

Email-related enhancements in Accounts and Deals modules in CRM:

  • We're excited to unveil a highly anticipated feature in Zoho CRM: the ability to send emails directly from the accounts module. The email composer in Accounts module now offers quick suggestions for related contacts' email addresses, and makes it possible to access attachments and email templates specific to the Accounts module. Additionally, in the Deals module, email addresses of "contact roles" linked to the deal record will now be provided as quick suggestions. Explore the announcement for more details.

Resolve Conflicts during Deployment in Sandbox:

  • This announcement introduces notable upgrades to Zoho CRM's Sandbox, specifically targeting conflict resolution and some UI enhancements. Users can now swiftly access comprehensive conflict details right from the "Check Dependency page" and resolve issues directly from there. These updates aim to streamline the deployment of sandbox changes to production accounts, tackling common pain points such as missing associated items, duplicate name conflicts, and developer-user association conflicts. For more details, refer to the announcement post.

Introducing Zia Notes Summary: 

  • Introducing Zia Notes Summary, a new feature in Zoho CRM that offers users quick summaries of their CRM notes. This feature is particularly beneficial when navigating through numerous notes or requiring a concise overview of details captured in the notes section. This update provides two summaries: "Overall Summary" for a bird's-eye view of all notes on a record, and "Last Note Summary" for the most recent update. For a deeper dive into the new feature, check this announcement.

Multiple Kanban Views per Module: 

  • Previously, users were limited to one Kanban view per module, necessitating edits for different categorisations. Now, with the latest update, multiple Kanban views are supported, enabling effortless switching between views. The ability to expand and collapse stages in the card view enhances its compactness. Deal stages can be updated swiftly via drag-and-drop functionality, and stage-specific records can be created directly from the Kanban view. Moreover, access permissions can be set to control viewing and editing privileges for each Kanban view. Additionally, pipeline selection will be persisted until the user changes it, an option that was requested by many community members previously[Ref]. Check out this announcement for full details.

Add Tasks to Zoho CRM Calendar: 

  • We're excited to announce that the option to add tasks to the CRM calendar, a much-awaited feature requested by the community, has now been implemented. With this, you get daily and weekly views of CRM tasks in the Calendar, allowing you to easily keep track of your tasks right alongside your meetings and calls. Additionally, you can switch between single and multi-user views to manage tasks effectively and, create tasks directly from the calendar. For more details and resources related to this release, check out this Idea post.

Useful Discussions: 

  • @Felipe Salomão de Sousa Vale wanted to auto-format the phone numbers by removing special characters and spaces, including the country code if not present, and prefixing phone numbers with only 11 digits with the  "+" symbol. @Bhoomi Joshi and @Rodger Brehau provided the required suggestions for formatting the phone numbers using Functions. Check the post to learn more. 

Sales duo performance tracking:

  • @Bas van den Berk brought up an interesting sales report requirement. Every prospect is assigned to a pair of consultants. They wanted to add a matrix-like component to their dashboard to track the performance of sales duos based on the number of clients they have successfully closed, and to visualize the data to quickly identify the most successful duos. @Ishwarya SG suggested using a "Heat map" chart as it makes it easy to identify the top performing sales-duos at a glance. Discover the details in this post.

Multi-product purchase tracking at the Account level: 

  • @Ashley was reviewing an old post on tracking multiple product purchases by the same Account. While a Subform based solution was already suggested, @Max Tyack proposed an alternative approach using a custom module and lookup fields, which Ashley welcomed. Max also confirmed that Ashely's additional requirement for auto-updating prices across records can be achieved with either approaches using Workflows and Functions. Check out @Max Tyack's response in this post for further details.

Functions:

  • @Alejandro wanted to automatically capitalize the first letter of each word in a contact's information for all fields, regardless of how users enter it. @Rodger Brehaut shared the Deluge code to be associated with a workflow, which runs when the record is edited. Check this post for the code.

Execute Function only for select deal stages:

  • @Chris wanted to run a Function based on a deal's stage and needed to know how to best exclude select deals stages. @Hugh Marshall and @Bhoomi Joshi came up with different approaches to solve the same need, each, creating a list of stages to avoid and validating if the active deal is is not on that stage list. Check the code they shared in this post.

Automating Quote Management: 

  • @Coen | Heative mentioned that their sales process involves sending multiple quotes to customers, with only one being accepted. Once a quote is marked as "Won", they would like the other related quotes for the contact record to be automatically updated to "Lost". Check the solution proposed by @Ishwarya in this post, which includes a code snippet to be associated with a workflow to meet this requirement.

UpdateRecord Success: 

  • @David Shaw uses an updateRecord call in a Function, triggered by a clicking a button, and wanted to check whether the response indicates a success or failure. They provided a simple code for this requirement, with @Bhoomi Joshi and @Sunderjan Siddharth making the necessary tweaks to get it to work. Check this post for the working code.

Auto-updation of deal stage:

  • @Benjamin wanted to update the deal stage to "Scheduled" automatically whenever a new meeting is added to a deal record in Zoho CRM. @Pheranda Nongpiur shared theFunction code to achieve this. Check this post for the code.

Optimize CRM storage by automatically moving or deleting attachments:

  • @Anthony observed that their users were adding multiple attachments to a custom module, which significantly increased the CRM storage usage. They were looking for a way to automatically delete attachments or move them to Zoho WorkDrive when a field's status is set to certain criteria. Check out the solution posted by @Hugh Marshall, complete with code, in this post to achieve this.

Calling Functions linked to a Workflow: 

  • @David wanted to know if there's an efficient way to call a Function running within a Workflow from another similar Function without exposing the first Function via API. @Nicolas Donoso provided the solution: call the first Function using the automation namespace in the code. Check this post for the solution and sample code.

Dev's Corner:

  • @Felipe wanted to show an alert during the deal creation stage if a specific field is duplicated, without blocking the deal creation process. @Hugh Marshall suggested using Client Script, and @Maadhari M provided a detailed explanation including sample Client Script code, to prompt users about duplicates while allowing them to proceed and save if needed. Check this post for the solution. 

Real-time Dropdown popup for CRM field update during deal Creation: 

  • @Javier Molina wanted to open a popup with a dropdown list for users to select an option and pass it to a CRM field in real-time during deal creation. Check this post for Subash Kumar's Client Script code that fulfils this requirement.

Best practices for handling large record sets:

  • @David sought best practices for handling large record sets, especially when iterating over more than 200 records at once. Multiple community members shared their solutions, with @Kiruthiga recommending the use of the COQL API to determine the total record count. Additionally, she provided helpful tips and sample code for effectively handling large data sets. Jump into the post for detailed answers. 

Filtering recent calls by date and time: 

  • @Paul de Geode encountered difficulties retrieving calls made in the last week, particularly in filtering records by date and time using the V2 API. @Christoph Wenzel and others offered workarounds, recommending either the use of V6 API or COQL to address the issue. For more details, check out this post.

Naming variables in Deluge scripting:

  • Big shout out to @Rodger Brehaut for sharing invaluable insights on naming conventions for variables in Deluge scripting based on their type! Rodger suggests opting for descriptive names over generic ones like "response," making future code easier to understand and work with. Read this post to learn more. 

Kaizen: 

  • This post discusses self-client and server-based clients in Zoho CRM. Check out this post for videos and detailed explanations, along with suggestions for further reading to see how they're applied using Java SDKs.

Kaizen #134 - Manipulating Rich Text Field (RTF) using Zoho CRM APIs: 

  • Want to understand the ins and outs of working with Rich Text Field (RTF) and how to manipulate RTF using Zoho CRM APIs? Look no further than this post.


Thanks for taking the time to read this month's round-up. Keep tabs on the digest every month for the latest ideas and discussions. Stay tuned and engage in the Forums to be included in the upcoming month's digest. Have a wonderful month ahead!


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