Zoho Creator Upcoming Updates — March 2023

Hello all!

Zoho Creator continues to rapidly develop new features and functionalities to help you solve your business challenges. We'll never cease working to amaze you with incredible new updates. And today, we're announcing a neat range of features coming up in March.

Form drafts
Vertical subforms
Creator Extensions
Zia Help Assistant
Screen Record by Quartz in Zia Help Assistant
Activity-based user filter

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Form drafts

Sometimes, your users may find it difficult to finish filling in a form containing a large number of fields. It may take them significant amounts of time, as they don't have all details available at hand—or they could be interrupted and lose the opportunity to complete the form.

In such cases, your users will appreciate it if they can save the partially filled forms and then come back later and resume working on them without any data loss. With this in mind, we'll be launching the Save as Draft feature, which allows users to save up to 3 drafts for each form, for a period of 15 days.

Where can I enable it?

Navigate to the required Form -> Form Properties -> Save Draft section. Then tick the checkbox beside Enable users to save form as draft and resume editing later option.

What should my users do?

While filling in the form, they'll see a Save as Draft button. Clicking on it will save the progress they've made up to that moment.

The View drafts option will list their saved drafts. Click on the required draft to continue editing it and then submit the form.

How do I benefit?

The Save as Draft feature, apart from reducing the hassle for your users, also helps in lessening the risk or impact of accidental data loss.

Applicable for: C5, C6

Availability: All DCs

Released on: 05-Jul-23

Reference: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/forms/form-drafts/articles/saving-a-form-as-a-draft

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Vertical subforms

Subforms are an invaluable part of Forms, as they enable you to collect and visualize line items in a form. Taking it up a notch, we'll now be introducing the possibility of displaying a subform as a popup, with vertical listing of its fields.

Consequently, with the introduction of the new popup option, we'll be adding a new section,View type, within the Field Properties pane of subforms. Further, the existing method of displaying subforms has been christened Grid in the View type section, and it'll be the default option going forward. The vertical listing of subforms as popups are called List.

Where can I enable it?

Navigate to the required Form -> Subform -> Field properties -> View type. Here choose the List option.

How do I benefit?

By displaying subforms as popups, you can simplify the tedious process of filling in forms with a large number of fields, thereby achieving a superior user experience during data entry processes.

Applicable for: C5, C6

Availability: All DCs

Released on: 17-Apr-23

Reference:
https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/forms/add-and-manage-fields/articles/understand-popup-subform

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Creator Extensions

With the aim of enhancing the versatility and extensibility of Zoho Creator, we've come up with a brand new functionality called Creator Extensions . This will open up the possibility of building and delivering Creator components as independent add-ons known as extensions , which can be distributed to other Zoho Creator users who can then install and use them in their applications. Extensions enable the delivery of a customized range of functionalities which are not available by default in Creator.

Note: In the initial phases, only widgets can be offered as extensions. More components will be added later.

Working with extensions

Get started by building a widget, then turn it into an extension in Sigma, test it out, and publish it. You can choose to distribute it publically on Zoho Marketplace, where it will be available for all. Later, you can add enhancements and publish new versions.

The lifecycle of an extension

How do I benefit?

You can use our low-code platform to turn your breakthrough ideas into profitable endeavours by building powerful extensions and selling them on Zoho Marketplace. All the while, you can easily manage the entire lifecycle of these extensions.

Applicable for: C6

Availability: All DCs

Released on: 23-May-23

Reference: Building an Extension and Install and Manage Extensions

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Zia Help Assistant

Zoho Creator's no-nonsense approach to low-code development, the robustness of the platform's performance, and recent big-ticket investments into AI has been well appreciated by all.

With that in mind, we've come up with a very intuitive new assistant, whose AI-assisted guidance will help upskill your command of Creator and learn more with contextual help. Further, this new, powerful, and all-encompassing help widget will show the entire range of options available to assist you.

Zia - Our very own AI assistant will scan the entire knowledge base and auto suggest relevant help articles based on your current screen. Say you're in the Solutions section—Zia will list off the articles explaining the procedure to create different solutions (Applications, BI & Analytics, and Integration Flows). Being powered by an advanced NLP engine, Zia has the ability to understand your questions, identify patterns, and suggest the best answers to deliver the assistance you need.

Contact - You'll get a list of our common toll-free support phone numbers. Call us at the number shown for your country and get support over the phone.

Chat - Live chat is a faster and more convenient way to get in touch with our support team. Get instant responses to aid you with your questions.

Support - Use this option to send questions/feedback to support via email. Additionally, from here you can also allow the support team to access your app and help you out. Finally, you can also use the Screen Record option to send us a video recording of the issue you are facing. More details on the Screen Record feature is given further below in this post.

How do I access it?

Just click on the Help option present in the bottom toolbar of Zoho Creator.
Then choose the support option you prefer and proceed.

How do I benefit?

Apart from an improved and seamless support experience, the widget will help you get faster resolution, which can improve your business performance and productivity.

Applicable for: C6

Availability: All DCs

Released on: 11-May-23

Reference: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/others/zia-help-assistant/articles/zia-help-assistant

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Screen Record in Zia Help Assistant

Pushing the boundaries of contemporary support tools, we'll be launching Screen Record by Quartz, an error debugging and virtual diagnostic tool. This privacy-first tool will be introduced as a built-in functionality within Zoho Creator, and will be incorporated within the new Zia Help Assistant.

There may be certain cases that can be better conveyed to our support team via a video rather than other options. Instead of writing it all out, you can just record your screen, replicate the issue, and send the video to us without breaking a sweat.

What it means for you

The tool doesn't stop at just letting you record your screen. It comes with an easy video editor which provides quick provisions to further describe your issues, like adding annotations, augmenting a recording with voice overlays, and much more. Most importantly, for privacy purposes, you can trim the video or blur out sensitive portions of the recording to hide important data (like email addresses, etc).

What it means for us

Apart from providing visuals to our support team, this tool is powerful enough to collect, upon you granting consent, relevant data—like client-side and server-side diagnostic metrics, application logs, and network diagnostics—to help us understand the issue better and pinpoint the problem at hand more swiftly.

How does it benefit you?

You can now promptly convey the issue you are facing using Screen Record by Quartz and get accelerated ticket resolution times with no compromise on your privacy, security, or productivity.

Applicable for: C6

Availability: US, EU, AU and IN

Release on: 11-May-23

Reference:
https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/others/zia-help-assistant/articles/introducing-quartz-for-creator

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Activity-based user filter

Users logging in to their accounts may seem like a trivial everyday occurrence. But keeping track of user login activities enables an organization to monitor behavior exhibited by its users, and helps in performing analysis and bulk actions on users for smoother user management.

Further adding on to the existing filter options (based on application and user status) under Users, we'll be adding a new option, based on Last login.

How to do it?

Navigate to Users-> Filter . Then click on Last access and choose the required filter criteria from the dropdown.

How do I benefit?

The filter can help you monitor and audit users based on their login activity in your account, and get actionable information to accelerate the user management process.

Applicable for: C5, C6

Availability: All DCs

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We'll notify you as these features are rolled out. In the meantime, let us know what you think about these updates in the comments below!

That's all we have for March! We'll be back soon with another set of updates.

Regards,

Zoho Creator Team

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