The CRM Zen Show Episode 280 – OOO La La!

Zoho News

• India PSA Michaung Cyclone Impact: Zoho Cliq BCP Update
  • A major cyclone impacted Chennai last week and over the weekend.  We hope everyone is okay and wish you a speedy recovery from the damage Michaung caused.
• Zoho Creator Upcoming December’23 Updates
  • A nice batch of upcoming updates, including more Zia enhancements with OpenA, backup expiration that was exclusive to C6 is now available for C5, some new tools for support tickets, and create your own custom API.
• Bigin December’23 Updates
  • A few enhancements this month focused on email features and settings.
• Zoho Writer Merge Templates
  • Following up on part 2 of the merge template updates, a handful of great enhancements to merge templates have been added.
• Zoho Calendar Q4 Updates
  • ZCalendar can now auto-suggest a slot and OOO sync with Zoho Mail.  
• Trident Adds Ability To Upload Attachments To WorkDrive Widget
  • Trident now allows easy attachment uploads to the WorkDrive widget, featuring a dedicated upload option and drag-and-drop functionality with certain permissions and limitations.
•  Zoho Sprints iOS version(v1.2.16) Update
  • The latest iOS version of Zoho Sprints introduces features like following/unfollowing items, an activity stream, converting sub-items to items, managing users, and an in-app subscription upgrade option.
• Zoho Backstage November’23 Updates
  • Some very specific HIPPA complaint updates, so if you run events that you need to capture personal health information, now you can.
• Zoho Desk Adds Sequential Assignment For Tickets
  • This helps give a better gauge of who is performing better in your organization.

Implementation of the Week

• Zoho Billing (Subscriptions) Improved Integration to Zoho CRM using Zoho Analytics
  • In this implementation, our goal was to sync additional Billings data into CRM Account records
  • To accomplish this, we first set up custom tables in Zoho Analytics to summarize Subscription data for each Account
  • Then, we set up an additional table to only show Accounts where the data in Subscriptions is different from the data previously synced to CRM
  • Lastly, we set up a scheduled function to check this table every day and push the updated Subscription data to CRM Accounts

Code Share of the Week

• Update Invoice Recipients on a Subscription in Zoho Billing 
  • In a Zoho Billing subscription’s edit page, there are contacts with checkboxes below the customer name. These are the contact persons on the customer associated with the subscription. Whoever has the box next their name/email checked will receive the invoices associated to that subscription every billing cycle. 
  • This code snippet is how you can check those boxes via API. In the first API call, we get the list of all contact persons associated to the customer. Then, we sort through each, and if a contact person matches with our <condition> set in our “if” statement, we add the contactperson_id to a map, then to a list. Then we pass that list in as a parameter to our second API call, which updates the contact persons linked to the subscription. Whichever contact persons we define in this list will have their boxes checked in Zoho Billing on the related subscription record.

This Week’s Read

• The Best AI Chatbots in 2024
  • Who knew that there were this many ChatGPT alternatives? This is a great article if you are looking for a ChatGPT alternative.

New On Zenatta

• Zenatta Blogs
  • End-of-Year System Review for Zoho CRM
    • Want to start off the New Year with a clean CRM?  Our team put together a quick list of things to check and clean up for 2024.

Tips and Tricks

• How To Create Popup Forms In Zoho Creator
  • In this tutorial, Alex shares two essential methods to implement pop-up forms in your Zoho Creator application.