Hi,

VERY IMPORTANT - this is in reference to the contacts in zoho mail suite - NOT in CRM.

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 utilize 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).

After days of trying to understand contacts vs groups and shared contacts vs organization contacts, I do finally understand the difference.  And the biggest issue is, each of the 3 types of contacts lack at least one vital functionality, making none of them a good functional choice as they are now:

      - Local contacts are able to be grouped into categories which is one of the most important things; but, they aren't shared among all of the organization users.

      - Shared contacts can be shared with other user and can be grouped by making multiple personal groups; but, they don't become part of the address book. So, when you are composing mail in mail suite, the addresses don't autofill into the to/cc field when you start typing. This means the only way to email these contacts is to send mail from the contacts screen rather than from mail suite, defeating the purpose of mail suite. 

      - Organization contacts are able to be shared by all users and auto fill in the to/cc field; but, they can't be grouped into categories, so this makes distribution lists impossible (I mean small lists, not big newsletter emails that should be sent using zoho campaigns, but emails that should be able to be easily sent to small groups of people like committee members).

To make things worse, if you add a contact to your local contacts and then select it and add it to shared or organization contacts, it essentially duplicates the contact as a new contact entry rather than maintaining it as one contact with designations of local, shared, and/or organization.  So, if you have a contact listed in organization contacts and in local contacts so that you can send the person an email as part of a category (distribution list) and so that other organization users can also have access to the contact's email address, and then that person's email address changes, you now have to update the contact twice. And, the other users all have to update the contact in their local contacts as well (not to mention also having to update the person's email in the other non-integrated apps (like calendar invites/notifications and campaigns).

And, even though zoho advertises mail suite as one of the hubs of the zoho applications, which it certainly is since email is one of the most essential parts of business communication, since zoho mail suite contacts are not actively synced to CRM or to campaigns or to any other zoho app i can find, there is no way to use another zoho app to maintain the contacts used in mail suite.

I thought this would all finally be rectified when zoho announced contact manager as a centralized location for managing contacts - thank goodness!  But no, this unfortunately didn't solve anything.  You need the paid version of CRM to get the mail add-in that will allow you to use CRM contacts in composing emails.  And I would gladly pay for CRM if it was applicable to our nonprofit.  But, to pay for a very powerful application we will never use in order to manage the contacts in our mail suite application seems a little ridiculous and is counterproductive to the entire reason we want to switch to zoho - the mail suite interface.

I would be fine to pay for a program like contact manager if it would manage the contacts in the zoho mail suite, and integrate them into the other apps like zoho calendar (for event invites and notifications), zoho campaigns, etc.  But, to be honest, I do think even having to pay for that is a little silly since having one central contact address book, with distribution list categories, that is integrated with the email interface and calendar is a standard function in all other email providers.  I have never had an issue maintaining contacts and distribution lists before now.

In fact, in all other email programs i have ever used, these categories (also called distribution list categories or groups in other programs) are stored in fields within the contact.  So, if you had one contact that would fall under the general categories of volunteer and donor as well as more specific categories such as fundraising committee and advertising committee, you would have just one contact entry in your address book for this person.  And, the entry would have a distribution list field that listed all the distribution lists the contact was a part of.  This way, if you wanted to send an email to all your volunteers that asked if anyone could help at an upcoming event, you could just email the distribution list "volunteer committee".  And if you just wanted to email the advertising committee about putting an ad in the paper, you could just email the distribution list "advertising committee". And, you didn't need to maintain 4 separate contact entries for this one person to be included in these 4 distribution lists.

And, even more importantly, when you exported or imported contacts, the field that held the names of the distribution lists was exported and imported with the contact just like the phone number and address fields are, so you didn't have to remember who was in which list and re-create distribution lists from scratch.  But since zoho doesn't allow you to assign categories to organization contacts like it does local contacts, the contacts you would most likely use so all users could share them and so they could auto-fill in the to/from field (organization contacts) aren't able to be categorized into distribution lists in the first place.

Furthermore, you can't search local, shared, and organization contacts at once.  So if you have a contact as local but not shared or organization, and you can't remember which one they are in and you want to update the entry, you may have to do 3 separate searches to find the person.  You actually have to do 3 separate searches no matter what just in case you have the person in all 3 categories.  And that doesn't count all the searches and updates you will have to do for the other users local contact lists, and then again in zoho campaigns, calendar invites, etc.  All just to update one person's email address.

Just as I was about to give up completely, I figured let me try CRM one more time, and even considered paying for it despite the fact that the only functionality we would use would be email contact management.  I kept reading that it will actively sync with zoho campaigns which is another positive, so I gave it a try.  But it does NOT sync with campaigns. Even though you actually click a link that says sync contacts, it just IMPORTS contacts to campaigns - NOT SYNC.  Which means, they are not synced, they are not linked, they are just duplicate entries of the contacts, and if updates are made to the contacts, they have to either be updated in multiple places, or the contacts have to be repeatedly re-imported manually.

So, my requests below are my last hope of being able to use zoho for our nonprofit mail management, and for additional applications in the near future such as campaigns, calendars, etc.  And, I am really hoping you can help me because we really like the rest of zoho very much and i have been recommending it to everyone.  But this is just something that has to be fixed for us to be able to use the mail suite.  

Please, please, please, please make one of the following solutions a reality for us:

1. Please add categories to ORGANIZATION contacts like zoho has for local contacts.  Then, we would be able to use organization contacts as our main contacts and just not use local or shared contacts, so there would only be 1 place in mail suite that we would have to make updates to contacts.

Ideally, these organization contacts would also be available in calendar invitations/notifications and in zoho campaigns, but, if these features would take longer to implement, at least having categories in organization contacts would be a tremendous help ASAP. And that should be very quick and easy to implement since zoho already has that functionality in the local contacts.

Or, even better, consolidate local and organization contacts so that they are one contact entry per person rather than two separate entries.  Then have a field "yes or no" or a checkbox or something to indicate whether or not to include the contact as part of the organization contacts that all other users have access to.  You could even have a filter or choice in the search box so that you could easily search for all contacts that are marked yes to include them in organization contacts to view this group.

OR 2. Fix it so that the shared contacts that are available across the different personal groups will autofill in the to/cc field and be part of the address book that is used in mail suite.  Categories in the shared contacts would be nice as well, but this problem can be overcome by making multiple personal groups if need me (although categories would be MUCH easier).

It would also be nice if the "invite to group" button wasn't in the same bar as the "add to" button.  The whole concept of inviting to vs adding to groups is very confusing.  And it is way to easy for a user to think invite to group means add the person as a contact rather than as a member, so we are also worried that contacts will accidentally be invited to become members of our groups rather than just added as contacts.

OR 3.  Provide us with a web form or code needed for a web form which can be used to add new or update ORGANIZATION contacts in zoho mail suite (not CRM).  This way, contacts could be shared among all users.  And, with some creativity, I could make the categories I need.

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 just having categories in the organization contacts, but a possible workaround if you could just send me the code to feed the contact details from the web form to the zoho mail suite address book contact fields.

And again, if these contacts could be actually synced/shared with zoho calendar invites/notifications and campaigns so you are only updating the contacts in one place that would be extremely helpful.

Please fix the contacts in mail suite.  You have so many great apps and products.  Every day I come across another great app or feature that I didn't know was there before. But they don't all come together like they should.  And contacts are such a central feature to so many apps, with mail suite being the most important one.  If you can only implement these fixes in testing mode or beta mode, then please send me that.  We just need something.  Thanks!