Building Extensions #2: Features supported in the platform to build Extensions for Zoho Desk

This series aims to equip developers with all they need to build extensions for Zoho Desk in Zoho Sigma and publish them in Zoho Marketplace.

Hello Developers!

Our previous post on Zoho Marketplace and Extensions gave a solid introduction for developers. If that post got your interested in building your own extensions for Zoho Desk, read on. Extensions for Zoho Desk allow you to provide a new custom feature as an add-on to Zoho Desk or facilitate seamless integration and secured data flow between Zoho Desk and other business applications.

There is a range of features available in the developer platform for Zoho Desk that allows developers to build a wide range of useful extensions and custom features. This post will introduce you to these features.

Building robust widgets

Create widgets to transfer contextual information and facilitate seamless data flow between services by integrating them with Zoho Desk. Take advantage of features like multi-widget support, inter-widget communication, and a modal box to build powerful extensions for Zoho Desk.

Integrate your favorite channels with Zoho Desk

Feedback, comments, and queries from customers are of great value to businesses. Zoho Desk agents receive tickets through emails, phone calls, chats, community channels, and more. The agents provide service to their customers based on these communications. The source you receive requests from does not need to be restricted to the channels supported by Zoho Desk.

The Channel Framework lets you to integrate Zoho Desk with external channels like Facebook, YouTube, and GitHub and allows you to receive comments and feedback as tickets in your Desk portal. It also lets the agents handle those tickets directly from Zoho Desk, so you can easily provide multi-channel support in Zoho Desk.

Building tightly coupled integrations

You can use the connections support on the platform to connect to third-party applications and synchronize data across services. Seamless dataflow can easily be implemented between the services you are integrating using the JS SDK bundle provided on the platform. The bundle includes a wide range of useful APIs including:

Data APIs: fetch and operate on the Desk data elements
Data storage APIs: store data while building extensions
Request APIs: invoke third-party APIs from within the extension
Events APIs: capture and manage events
Hooks APIs: register a hook for an event or UI action, which gives you control over the event in your portal