The first two weeks brought six CRM updates ranging from privacy-ready webforms to a significantly more powerful Layout Rules engine, two community wins worth a look (a dashboard workaround for spotting leads with no activities, and a neat formula fix for quote tables), and two Kaizen builds worth adding to your toolkit.

Let's get into it!

Webforms now include cookie consent management, so visitors can opt in or out of tracking before any data is collected. Use the built-in banner or manage it via API. Either way, you're GDPR-ready with no custom development. Currently rolling out in phases.

Related lists used to cap at 10 records with no filtering. The new Expanded View shows up to 100 records per page, adds smart filters, and lets you run mass actions on selected records, all without leaving the record.

Your CRM agents already surface leads, flag deals, and track updates. Now you can pin any agent to your Homepage so those insights sit alongside everything else you monitor, with no more hunting for them.

Connect and validate them end-to-end before anything touches live production data. Newly supported apps include Zoho Campaigns, Backstage, Analytics, Finance, Forms, Flow, Creator, and Circuits, with Projects, SalesIQ, and Mail Merge coming in a later phase.

Layout Rules can now do far more than show and hide fields. Nine new actions (set values, lock fields, show buttons and links, verify fields, and more) combine with profile-based execution so each team sees only what's relevant, and an interactive preview lets you test a rule per profile before it goes live.

Custom buttons can now be created, arranged, and removed directly from the element palette in the layout editor, instead of a separate settings page. On the Records page, buttons follow your layout order, and you can pin and sort the ones you use most.

When Manuel tried to put "leads with no open tasks" (the potentially abandoned ones no pipeline wants to lose) onto a dashboard, he couldn't get it to work through the chart setup or by building a report first. Building on an earlier list-view filter approach from @Hugh Marshall, @Sunderjan shared the dashboard workaround: create a report with Leads as the primary module and Tasks as the child, choose the Inclusive relationship so leads with and without tasks both appear, filter where Task Subject is empty, then build a chart from the result.

If you track deal progress with a status dropdown, keeping a separate percentage field in sync manually is easy to forget and easy to get wrong. @Valeria needed her Quotes subform to handle this automatically, and @Bhoomi Joshi walked her through a formula field using nested If and Contains functions that maps each dropdown option to its matching percentage the moment it changes. Valeria's verdict: "That is exactly what I needed!"

Every returning guest has preferences, history, and special requests already sitting in CRM. This Kaizen puts that data to work by building an AI-powered room recommendation assistant using CRM Widgets, Catalyst, and a Zia Agent that reviews the guest profile, evaluates available rooms, and returns a recommendation in seconds, right inside the Contact record.

A milestone edition and a useful one. Queries in Zoho CRM just went from read-only to write-enabled, meaning you can now update records directly through a Query without needing a Custom Function or Client Script. This Kaizen walks through auto-assigning the right field engineer to a service request based on zone, specialization, and workload, all triggered inside a Blueprint transition.

That's July Part 1 wrapped up!

Got a favorite from this edition or something we missed? Drop it in the comments. We'd love to hear from you. Part 2 is on the way!