The CRM Zen Show Episode 250 – Zilly Zonka And The Project Factory

Zoho News

• Zoho Projects Introduces Project Automation
  • We’ve been waiting for this for a long time.  There were some workarounds to do this in the past, but a great update to see it now native inside Projects.
• Zoho Creator May’23 Updates
  • A handful of updates, including limit increases to CSV files and portal time-out options.
• Zoho CRM Unused Formula Fields No Longer Computed
  • If you are running formulas with fields that are hidden, you will want to watch our explanation on the show.
• OpenAI for SalesIQ
  • It’s not a news week anymore without another AI update.  This week’s for SalesIQ is superslick and can be used directly into your bots.
• Finance Suite Updates
  • Zoho Books May’23 Updates
    • New payment module and report customization.
  • Zoho Payroll April’23 Updates
    • US users can now specify a non-taxable earning.
  • Zoho Inventory May’23 Updates
    • New “Enable tax override for purchase transactions” was added.
  • Zoho Expense April’23 Updates
    • A new milage type for vehicles using GPS was added.
• Zoho CRM April’23 Community Digest
  • In case you missed it, here is everything that happened last month for Zoho CRM.
• Zoho Desk April’23 Update Round-up
  • And Desk.
• Bigin iOS v1.7.0 and Bigin Mac App v1.5 Updates
  • Always great seeing these Bigin updates constantly improving the mobile experience.
• Zoho Desk iOS Mobile App v2.7
  • Accounts and Contacts modules are now viewable from the iOS mobile app.
• Zoho Sprint Android App v1.2.3
  • Signup forms are now supported.
    

Implementation of the Week

• Customized Data Validation Rules in Zoho Creator
  • In this implementation, our goal was to create a robust system of field validation within Zoho Creator to normalize over 60 unique fields requiring specific formatting based on the US State of the Customer
  • Our goal was to avoid hard-coding the formatting into our Deluge function, as this makes it difficult for our client to adjust the format if need be
  • To accomplish this, we first created a “States” module where we can store the necessary formatting for different field types based for each applicable US State
  • Then, we wrote our validation function in Deluge to reference this module (searching on the associated US State to the specific customer) to return the correct formatting
  • Lastly, our function reformats the data accordingly and overwrites the unformatted values entered by the user into the form

Code Share of the Week

• Replacing Parentheses in a Zoho CRM Search Records query 
  • The zoho.crm.searchRecords() is a great tool when you just need to quickly get a list of records based on an equals, starts_with, greater_than or lesser_than criteria.
  • If you have more than one criterion, you group your criteria in pairs using open and close parentheses. However, one thing the documentation does not think to warn you about is that if your search value contains parentheses, then it gets confused about whether or not it’s looking at a new criterion, and it poops out.

This Week’s Read

• The Top AI Art Generators In 2023
  • This list is spot on, and if you use Canva, did you know Canva also has its own AI art generator?

New On Zenatta

• Zenatta Blogs
  • Embracing GDPR Compliance in Email Marketing with Zoho Campaigns 
    • Though it isn’t a requirement in the US, it is still an excellent practice to familiarize yourself with, and if you do business in the EU, make sure you are compliant.

Tips and Tricks

• Easy Pick List Management With Zoho CRM’s Global Sets
  • Last month Zoho released Global Sets for Zoho CRM.  In this week’s tutorial, Tyler guides you through step-by-step how to use and configure this new feature.