Creator roadmap for the rest of 2022

Creator roadmap for the rest of 2022

Hi everyone,

Hope you're all good!

Thanks for continuing to make this community engaging and informative.

Today we'd like to share with you our plans for the near future of Creator.  We always strive to strike a good balance of features and enhancements to cater to the different segments of the Creator audience. While we've got some exciting features lined-up that you've been expecting from us, we're also thrilled to announce that there are a few surprises and some key market differentiators as well!

The following roadmap gives you the gist of what's coming up, and more details about each feature will be posted here as we close on the various release dates.

Read on to know about the features planned to be rolled out during
Quarter 3, 2022.

AR library
We're delighted to announce that we'll soon be bringing augmented reality (AR) in Zoho Creator! The AR library enables you to set up an immersive augmented reality experience for your users. An application can have 3D objects in its AR library, which can be accessed via AR fields and annotated in the real world using compatible iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. This real-time digital interaction provides better data visualization and enhances end-user experiences, providing you with exciting new business opportunities.

Released on: Sep-2022

Company logo
Your apps will soon be able to better reflect your company image with customized branding details. With this feature, a
company logo and favicon can be uploaded and will be displayed when you access your application in live.

Released on: Oct-2022

Theme colors
The color scheme of an application not only makes it more attractive but also keeps it distinct from your portfolio of other apps. With this update, you'll be able to select a color of your own choice for your application theme, to make them visually more appealing and maintain branding guidelines across apps.

Released on: Oct-2022

Application fonts
Font choice plays an important role in the readability and aesthetics of an application and determines the brand perception. With this update, you'll be able to choose fonts from a predefined list, as a part of theme customization.  You can also choose different fonts for different form factors, like web, mobile, and tablet.

Released on: Oct-2022
Reference: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/applications/articles/set-theme-for-your-application#Choose_Font

Push notifications
Notifications are the modern-day solution to keep your users informed and engaged. Push notifications are a powerful means to reach your app users anytime, whether or not they are in your app, to capture their attention and reengage them. Creator notifications are undergoing a major makeover to support real-time notifications for approval workflows, blueprint workflows, and record comments across web, mobile, and tablet devices.


Form titles
Interaction with forms can become more meaningful when we have contextual information. We're going to introduce form titles that'll enable you to set different display titles for the two primary actions in a form — adding a record and editing a record.  

Released on: Aug-2022


Dark mode for Android
Yes, you heard it right! We're going to extend dark mode support to Android apps. Dark mode, which is great for low-light situations and is easier on your eyes, will be automatically enabled based on your default system settings.  

Released on: Sep-2022

Blueprint analytics
Understanding the performance of a
blueprint workflow and gaining insights to optimize its efficiency is a key aspect of every business management process. We'll soon be introducing blueprint analytics to provide vital information like average time taken per blueprint, average time taken per stage/transition, total number of transition occurrences, etc., to give complete insights into your apps' blueprints.




Custom connectors
Prebuilt services available in Connections help you seamlessly integrate your Creator application with various other cloud services. In certain scenarios, organizations might have unique requirements that would require usage of other third-party connectors, not supported by Creator. Such integrations can be achieved by adding them via custom connectors.


To know about the features planned to be rolled out during
Quarter 4, 2022, scroll further!

Custom AI models
AI fields in Creator make your applications smarter by utilizing advanced machine learning techniques. Custom AI models can help your applications become more intelligent using custom-trained OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and object detection algorithms, based on the images you upload.  Custom-trained OCR makes predictions and processes written text from digital images into machine-readable text.

Released on: Feb-2023
Reference: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/microservices/ai-modeler/articles/understand-ai-modeler#Model_Types


Pop-up subforms
Vertical scrolling is conventional and intuitive when working with subforms that contain numerous fields. This feature will open a subform in a pop-up while adding and editing a row, which ensures better user experience and space management.    

List-type subforms
We're introducing a table-like subform without inline inputs, which looks similar to our list report. This is suitable for subforms, that you expect to experience less-frequent modifications and have a large number of line items.

Subform custom sorting
Using this feature, users can manually reorder the row sequence of a subform, while adding and editing records. This feature is great for use cases beyond field-based ordering, when the fields in the subform need to be sorted in a specific order.

Form cache
At times, a user might close the browser window or navigate to another component accidentally while filling in a form. To avoid data loss in these scenarios, we'll be storing the form data temporarily, so that users can continue from where they were when they accidentally left the form.

Blueprint Deluge tasks
Programmatic controls for blueprint workflows help automate business processes. We'll be introducing Deluge tasks to change the stages and transitions of a blueprint. Also, blueprints will be automatically initiated for records added through Deluge.

User connections
Workflows involving connections will soon prompt user authentication when accessing applications in live. This will help identify the exact user using the third-party services, and permissions will be applied based on that service.

Extensions
Zoho Marketplace is a unified platform that hosts low-code apps published by developers that can be utilized by clients on multiple platforms. In the Marketplace, you can now publish one or more app components, which can be installed into existing applications. For the first phase, widgets can be published and installed into an existing application.

Early 2023 releases

We are excited to announce a few of our features that are expected to be launched early next year!
    
Canvas builder
We'll be introducing a Canvas builder for creating flexible and visually appealing detail views of reports. In the initial phase, this builder will be supported only in the web interface.

Subforms in stateless forms
With this update, you'll be able to add subforms in stateless forms. Since stateless forms don't store any data, users can use subform insert row, clear row, and access field Deluge tasks to manage subform data.

Advanced email analytics
Gaining insights about emails sent from your apps can help complete the email notification life cycle. To achieve this,  we'll be introducing advanced email analytics that'll inform you about delivery status, enable recipient activity tracking, and provide you with a detailed log to improve email performance powered by Zoho ZeptoMail.

OTP login
Portal users who don't have email addresses will be able to use their phone number as an alternate method for signing up and signing in, with OTP-based authentication.

Login template
Creator offers a default and robust design for each of the customer portal pages, which you can further customize using the portal page designer. With this update, we'll be supporting prebuilt templates and additional customization controls for portal login, signup, and reset passwords pages.

Deluge editor
Similar to your application IDE, intuitive error messages will be shown in the Deluge editor while scripting itself i.e. before saving your script.  Apart from this,
customizing keyboard shortcuts, full screen mode and a few other enhancements are on the way.

App installation setup
Installing applications from the marketplace requires basic information to guide/setup the user configurations.  For example, this includes selecting the timezone, date format etc., Using predefined configurations before publishing apps to marketplace will help users during the installation process.



We appreciate that you have all been patient with us. It's your continued support and understanding that motivates us to keep pushing our boundaries and add exciting new features.  Also, we are aware that some of your requests were not fulfilled at this time, but please be assured that we are still working on them.

We hope this announcement post will help you in planning your upcoming projects and apps in advance. Finally, please note that there could be small changes to the scope of these features and release timelines, but we're committed and confident that we'll be able to deliver on all the exciting updates we've announced.

Wait! This isn't the complete list. We have even more surprises cooking in our labs, and can’t wait to share all of that with you! So stay tuned and keep watching this space for updates. Meanwhile, do keep using Creator and keep the feedback coming!
 
Prakash,
Product Management,
The Zoho Creator team.




    • Recent Topics

    • Candidate Assessments, no workflows.

      I have an issue where I would like to trigger a workflow based on a candidate assessment being completed. Sometimes a returning candidate will complete a second assessment, on completion the status of the candidate will be updated to "Unqualified" if
    • Mail Merge in Zoho Desk

      Hello Team, Do we have an option of mail merge within Zoho Desk like we have in Zoho CRM? We have a requirement to generate some pdf file in the form of mail merge doc from the ticket.
    • Workdrive backup and default storage selection

      Hi community, I have been informed by Zoho that workdrive will be the default storage mechanism for crm and projects. These 2 Apps seem to have different design on how they interact with workdrive for storage. 1. Crm: seems to have files saves at the
    • Zoho vault filling in a form it's not supposed to fill in

      Hey there, I have a problem with ZOHO Vault autofill. In a software package, we have these options: For some reason zoho vault always replaces what's in the top option and fills a 2fa password in there, and then saves that value.. Meaning whatever was
    • Zoho Booking Integration with Desk

      Just wanting to share something in case it helps someone else who may run into a similar use case as we did. Issue: Currently, the Zoho Booking integration with desk will drop a comment into the ticket when a customer books a time, however it won't change
    • Let us view and export the full price books data from CRM

      I quote out of CRM, some of my clients have specialised pricing for specific products - therefore we use Price Books to manage these special prices. I can only see the breakdown of the products listed in the price book and the specialised pricing for
    • Syncing calendar with Google Calendar doesn't work when events are sent to auto repeat

      Hi... The ZOHO CRM -- GOOGLE CALENDAR sync is broken. If I create a single event on either side, sync works, but if I create an event with auto repeat on either side it doesn't work. Furthermore, events created before the sync don't show up in the calendar.
    • Organization wide Account and Contacts Visibility/Sharing Capabilities?

      Has anyone figured out a way to make visibility or sharing of Accounts and Contacts to be available across the entire organization without having to have every individual user edit their Sharing permissions? For our sales folks they need to be able to
    • Notification of Interaction Assignment

      If a user is assigned an interaction, they should be notified via email. These are almost useless because if I assign an interaction for someone to respond to, they dont know that I assigned it to them without me telling them or them logging in and discovering
    • Countries List Global Set- Complete with Phone Country Code and Continent.

      Dear Zoho Team I saw your recent addition to the Global Sets regarding the Countries list and states. While working on it, why didn't you also add things like Continent and Phone Country Code? Also, some ISO codes from some Countries/regions are mis
    • Custom Display Field for Lookup Dropdowns in Zoho CRM

      Could Zoho CRM support changing the display field in lookup dropdowns, like Zoho Creator does? This would make it much easier to select the right record by showing a more useful field instead of only the default one. It would improve speed, clarity, and
    • Message as bot

      I would like to be able to send a Cliq message truly as a bot. the current implementation of this function, while it sends the message as a bot it sends that message inside a chat from the user how authenticated the flow cliq connection instead of directly
    • Books <-> CRM synchronisation with custom Fields

      Hello, We are synchronising Books Customers with CRM Accounts. In CRM Accounts I set up last year a "segments" multiselect field shown below In Books, I set up a custom multi-select field with the same value as in the CRM And set up the synchronisation inside Books. Want to synchronise the Books Segments with the CRM Segments, but the later doesn't exist, and another non-existing is there ?! First, I don't understand where the field Segmentation is coming from. Second, I set CRM Segmentation to sync
    • Trouble with using Apostrophe in Name of Customers and Vendors

      We have had an ongoing issue with how the system recognizes an apostrophe in the name of customers and vendors. The search will not return any results for a name that includes the mark; ie one of our vendors names is "L'Heritage" and when entering the
    • Recording overpayment?

      So a customer just overpaid me and how do I record this? I can't enter an amount that is higher than the invoice amount. Eg. Invoice is $195 and he sent $200. He's a reccuring customer so is there a way to record so that he has a $5 advance for future invoice?
    • Introducing the New Zoho Assist Quick Support Plugin

      We are thrilled to announce the new Zoho Assist Quick Support Plugin, the upgraded and enhanced version of the Zoho Assist Customer Plugin. This new plugin allows organizations and IT administrators to deploy it directly onto their customers’ devices,
    • Automate your signing workflows with Zoho Sign + n8n

      Hello! We're excited to announce that Zoho Sign is now available as a community node on n8n, a popular open-source workflow automation platform used by tens of thousands of teams worldwide. n8n lets you connect apps, APIs, and services through a visual
    • Ask the Experts 27: Onboarding and managing support reps

      Hello everyone, We are back with our Ask the Experts (ATE) series for 2026. This year, we bring experts to help you address customer support challenges using Zoho Desk. For our first ATE, we are getting into the human side of customer support. "Every
    • Retainer invoice in Zoho Finance modlue

      Hello, Is there a way of creating retainer invoices in the Zoho Finance module? If not can I request this is considered for future updates please.
    • Spotlight #27: Embed visual collaboration Spaces in your presentations using the Vani add-on

      Hello everyone! This month’s spotlight feature is the Vani add-on for Zoho Show. Every time you pause your presentation to open another tab or pull up supporting material, you lose a bit of momentum. At Zoho Show, we design features that keep everything
    • CRM

      Is anyone else experiencing this issue? Our company is not moving out of using Gmail's web app. It just has more features and is a better email program than Zoho Mail. Gmail has an extension (Zoho CRM for Gmail) that we're using but we've found some serious
    • Good news! Calendar in Zoho CRM gets a face lift

      Dear Customers, We are delighted to unveil the revamped calendar UI in Zoho CRM. With a complete visual overhaul aligned with CRM for Everyone, the calendar now offers a more intuitive and flexible scheduling experience. What’s new? Distinguish activities
    • Global Search / Command Palette in Live App

      Zoho Creator applications can contain many forms, reports, pages, and dashboards. While navigation inside the app is smooth, users still need to move through multiple menus or screens to find specific records or open particular modules. Currently, in
    • New 2026 Application Themes

      Love the new themes - shame you can't get a little more granular with the colours, ie 3 different colours so one for the dropdown menu background. Also, I did have our logo above the application name but it appears you can't change logo placement position
    • Smarter appointment allocation with round-robin distribution

      Greetings from the Zoho Bookings team! We’re excited to introduce the Appointment Distribution feature, a new way to decide how appointments are assigned among users. By default, appointments are distributed evenly across all event types, but this enhancement
    • A2P 10DLC Opt-in Rejection Issue with Zoho Creator Public Form

      Hi everyone, I’m working on an A2P 10DLC SMS campaign and running into repeated rejections due to opt-in issues. I’m using Zoho Creator for the registration flow. The form is public (no login required). Users enter their phone number and there is an unchecked
    • Make Quick Edits to Images Before Attaching

      Hello everyone, We have enhanced how attachments are handled in tickets to help agents preview and share files more efficiently in Zoho Desk. Agents can preview image attachments before adding them to tickets and edit them using attachment annotator.
    • 3/18 オンライン勉強会のお知らせ Zoho ワークアウト (無料)

      ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。コミュニティチームの中野です。 3月開催のZoho ワークアウトの開催が決定しましたのでご案内します。 今回はZoomにて、オンライン開催します。 ▶︎参加登録はこちら(無料) https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/BoNTN7zYR8OvOPGShqBY0A ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Zoho ワークアウトとは? Zoho ユーザー同士で交流しながら、サービスに関する疑問や不明点の解消を目指すイベントです。
    • Extend color coding to custom picklist fields

      Objectively, Projects has the best UI of any Zoho app — clean, intuitive, and never feels bloated. Big props to whoever owns the design. Feature request: color coding for custom picklist field values in field customization. You've already done it in two
    • New in Office Integrator: In-sheet text translation

      Hi users, We're pleased to introduce translation capability in the spreadsheet editor in Zoho Office Integrator. This allows you to translate the text in your spreadsheet's cells into 70+ languages from within your web app. Office Integrator's spreadsheet
    • Streamline email communication with Out of Office configuration

      Managing user communication effectively is the key to ensuring timely responses and consistent messaging. However, when users are unavailable, the absence of an Out of Office response can lead to delays and missed expectations. Managing these settings
    • Changing settings for auto logoff

      I've noticed that when I haven't used Cliq for a while, I have to re-enter my password. That is really clumsy, especially if you have a complicated password. Because it won't be filled in automatically. Is there a way to change that behaviour? We are
    • A few Issues when using "Pay Bill via Check"

      We have quite a bit of issues with how paying for Bills via Check works. Would love some feedback from the Zoho team in case we are doing something incorrectly. 1. When we go from a vendor and select "Pay Bill via Check" option, we see ALL the outstanding
    • Prevent tracking users from specific countries

      Currently, I’m receiving many bot visits from the United States and Malaysia. I would like these visits not to be recorded in SalesIQ. I already enabled the option to exclude traffic from cloud service providers, but I’m still receiving bot visits. Ideally,
    • My client requires me to have custom pdf file names to except payment for invoices, how can I customize this before emailing.

      Hello! I love the program so far but there are a few things that are standing in the way. I hope you guys can code them in so I can keep the program for years to come. My client requires I customize the pdf file names I send in for billing. Can you please
    • Edit Project Number?

      Hi all: We just signed up for a trial of zoho one, which includes ZoHo Projects. We've noticed there was a 'dummy project' preloaded in projects to help familiarize yourself with the software. We've created a couple of our own projects now but noticed since the dummy project was preloaded, our projects start with number 2 then 3, sequentially. Since it seems we will be keeping zoho past the trial, If we delete the dummy project, how do we get our own projects renumbered, beginning with 1? We'd like
    • Download pricebook products & details - not just pricebook creation date & name

      We're looking to download a copy of a pricebook and its associated products & book prices (as we have several offices in different countries selling the same products), however, when using the export feature under Data administration it only gives me
    • 554 5.1.1 – Mail sending blocked for the domain(s): [gmail.com]

      Here's your corrected text: Hello, I hope you are doing well. I was unable to send a message and received the following error: "554 5.1.1 – Mail sending blocked for the domain(s): [gmail.com]" I tried to send and deliver an email but got this error. I
    • Outgoing Mail Blocked – Suspicious Login Activity (Need Clarification and Solution)

      Hello, I’m currently facing an issue where my Zoho Mail account has been blocked due to “suspicious login activity,” and outgoing emails are restricted. Here are the details shown: Block type: Outgoing mail blocked Reason: Suspicious login activity A
    • Assign Meeting in records

      It would be nice to be able to "call and assing" meetings from a record, for example from a Deal. Right now - calendar is synced with CRM - meetings show in calendar - you can go in each meeting and assign it to a record It would be nice to be able to
    • Next Page