Now track online, in-office, and client location meetings separately with the new Meeting Venue option - Zoho CRM

Hello Enterprise Community,

I'm excited to announce a new enhancement to Meetings in Zoho CRM that brings greater clarity and structure to how meetings are categorized.

Previously, meetings could be created by entering a name, specifying a location, optionally marking them as online using a checkbox, and setting the date and time. While this offered flexibility, it didn’t provide a consistent way to classify meetings based on where they take place.

With this enhancement, you can now specify the Meeting Venue to categorize meetings explicitly—making it easier to organize, filter, and report on meetings based on where they’re held.

Online - When the meeting is conducted online via any of the integrated providers.(for example Zoho Meeting, Zoom, etc.)
Client location - When the meeting is conducted at a location preferred by you and your client. (could be at the client's office or any other common place.)
In-office - When the meetings are held in your office location.

Meeting Venue

The new Meeting Venue field has been introduced in the layout. It's a picklist field that will have the three options — Online, Client Location, and In-Office — that users can choose from while creating a meeting.

> If the meeting venue is set as Client Location or In-Office, you can:

—Mention the Location of the meeting.

—Check the box if it's an All day meeting.

—Also, if the meeting should Repeat.

> In case of online meetings, the Provider field will be available where you can select the online meeting provider from the given options.

All day, location, and repeat fields will not be available once the meeting venue is set online.

Based on your business processes, you can remove any of the three available options for meeting venue. For instance, if your organization doesn't conduct online meetings, you can simply remove it from the options. The Provider field will also be removed from the meeting layout automatically.

Similarly, if you don't require the options for in-person meetings, you can remove Client Location or In-Office options, and the Location field will also be removed.

You can add the options back from the list of unused fields at any point of time.

However, please note that you cannot add additional options for the meeting venue field.

The preferences tab

For the convenience of setting up the online meeting providers, we've introduced the Preferences tab in the modules and fields section of the Meetings module. Admins will be able to enable/disable meeting providers to be used in their organizations here, without requiring to navigate to the Marketplace. Once a provider is added, users need to authorize their accounts before they can host meetings with the new provider.

Release Plan:

These enhancements will be rolled out for all new signups by this week.

Existing users will be getting this update in a month’s time.

Additional Notes:

All existing offline meetings will be categorized as "Client Location", and online meetings will remain unchanged.

In automation areas such as Blueprint and Workflows, the meeting creation action will be considered client location by default.

If you've created a Calendar booking for offline meetings, they will be considered as client location meetings, and online meetings will remain as online.

What's next?

From the product perspective, going forward, these changes will allow us to introduce venue-specific enhancements and deliver a more tailored experience for every meeting type.