Feature Enhancement - Zoho CRM's revamped timeline view now extends to three years and offers enhanced support for notes, filters, and email statuses.

Hello Enterprise Community,

We're excited to announce that the look and feel of Zoho CRM's timeline view has been refreshed!

Along with this UI refresh, we've added some new capabilities. You can now do the following:

Use the timeline to refer to events that've happened over the last 3 years, a notable increase from the previous 6-month timeframe.
Add notes in response to timeline events.
Filter timeline events.
View the status of emails directly from the timeline.

Let's dig into each of these improvements:

Extending the timeline duration

We've extended the duration of the timeline from the last 6 months to the last 3 years. This should help in everything from tracking events when there is a longer sales cycle, having a more comprehensive view of the record, meeting compliance requirements, making audits easier, and so on.

We're also working on providing the ability to download the archived data for entries beyond 3 years (upto 10 years). When this is implemented, timeline data entries beyond 3 years will be included in CRM storage.

Add notes to timeline events

Most notes are added in response to events related to a given record. For example, a sales development rep might add a note after a discovery call with a lead; an account executive might make a note related to a meeting with a contact; a customer success executive might flag an upsell opportunity after a call—and so on.

Despite this connection in reality, records' timelines and notes were previously disconnected, which often deprived your notes of context and thereby made it harder for your CRM users to understand why the note was made and what its scope was. To address this, we've enabled users to add notes to entries in a record's timeline.

Clicking on the note in the record's related list takes you to the timeline event it's linked with.

This will help you preserve the context of your notes, as well as help you initiate discussions right from the timeline.

Filter your timeline events

While it is comprehensive, the list of timeline events could be overwhelming for CRM users. For example,

Sales managers might want to see the sequence of work performed by sales reps with respect to a lead or a contact, but they have to scroll through endless field-level changes.
Auditors might want to look at changes to individual field values.
Admins might want to check workflow-related changes, and so on.

On top of that, we've also extended the duration of the timeline to 3 years.

You'll now be able to filter the events in your timeline by module, user, time, and source of change. This helps you find and focus on exactly what you need and nothing more

View email status

For each sent email entry in your timeline, you'll be able to view a full history of its status changes (sent, opened, clicked, bounced) right from the timeline.

What's next

Allowing users to download timeline entries that go beyond three years and upto 10 years
Extending the duration of Audit Logs from 2 months to 3 years
Carrying over the timeline when a lead is converted
Adding support for viewing email threads in the timeline

Availability

Editions: All

Release plan: These enhancements are being rolled out to everyone in a phased manner. They will be available to most organizations by the end of May.

For organizations with huge volumes of data, they will be available by the end of June.