Take a tip from the Zoho Creator Forum and Development team
Like many others, I am frustrated with the secrecy and lack of information regarding eh Zoho CRM development priorities and time lines.
I was reviewing something on the Zoho Creator forum to see if I could create my own app to fix some of the issues we have with Zoho CRM and I found a VERY useful idea over there. It is one that I think the Zoho CRM Support and Development team should implement.
The Creator Group has instituted a regular (or semi-regular) policy of actively soliciting input for application development and improvements. They select a time window for submissions from the users. They then list the suggested improvements and provide some input themselves of what has to happen in order to implement the improvement. This includes a VERY rough timeline. The user community then VOTES on the feature they want to see implemented first. The forum moderator and development team keeps the user groups up to date with progress reports on the Forums.
They call these improvements "Community Driven Features". For the most recently completed cycle the winning feature was announced on January 28, 2010 and the feature was fully implemented on April 6, 2010.
This type of feedback, participation and interaction with the user community would be a godsend for the CRM user group. In addition, it will give Zoho some excellent feedback to help you set priorities for your development schedule.
If Zoho Creator can do this I bet the good folks on the Zoho CRM team can do it too.