Zoho CRM

The next thing we are working on the UI front is - unified visuals in detailed view for all themes. This unified visuals will help in more readability and reduce page clutter.  Additionally we are analyzing the User management module in Zoho CRM. Our focus is to simplify the subscription purchase and managing users in the CRM system. Will post more details later. :-)

- Rajesh

 Time to show a preview of the small visual update for all detailed views in all modules. To improve readability and maintain a "clear" visual we removed all colors. The group headers will be "BOLD" and black in color. The labels will be in Gray and "Required fields" will be in BOLD Gray. We are evaluating this design and hopefully this should get through in a week or so.

- Rajesh

Recently we have set up web-form in one of our customers' blog (hosted by Blogger.com). This form is mainly used to capture the contact information for his mailing list.

 I am having trouble with a form I created, getting it to show right on my blog. I created a newsletter subscription form. When I add it on my site it doesn't display properly and I don't know what I am doing wrong. Can you send me instructions please?

We successfully embedded the web-form in his Blog within a few hours. Later, we thought this to be an interesting use case of our Web-form in a real-time scenario.

How to embed Zoho CRM - Web Form in Blogger.com?

1. Generate Web Form for Leads/Contacts/Cases module
2. In Blogger.com embed the Web Form code using Gadgets

To understand this easily here’s a Zoho Show presentation, which will tell you how it works:

Please do share your experience!
We will be happy to create more tutorials based on your business scenarios!





Rina

Setup - the crucial module in Zoho CRM has been given a minor face lift.. The face lift includes a categorization to the left side tree. We have introduced General, Tools and CRM Modules. Screenshot sample shown below.


General - is where you find the essential tools to setup and jumpstart Zoho CRM.
Tools - is where you find everything you need for user management, workflow and others
CRM Modules - The complete collection of links to setup all CRM modules.


Screenshot :




We believe this face lift will certainly reduce the number of scrolls, and give a better visual appeal than before. Let us know what you feel.

- Rajesh

Online software sales are set to increase in 2009 according to Gartner. This is in line with the fact that people are thinking in terms of getting more efficient, more mileage out of whatever software they have or in worst cases, looking out for low-cost, affordable, efficient alternatives.

Even as hardware sales decline, Gartner predicts that online software-as-a-service sales will rise by more than 20 percent in 2009.
 
The sales value is billed at around $10bn .The growth areas are those which have common processes and hence in the horizontal applications space - that would mean those who have global, distributed teams will have a big say in the future. They would benefit by moving to an online collaboration envirionment similar to Zoho.

The SAAS space has seen max growth in the last couple of years - ironically, it also has coincided with the worst economic times in living memory!
However, this purge will help move toward more rational software pricing and will benefit the end users by giving them choices at affordable rates - which they did not have in a useful format for quite sometime.

Factors that impede adoption of SAAS include the following -

• Data security concerns
• Competitive differentiation,
• Scalability and
• Vendor longevity

Shankar

At Zoho CRM, we constantly focus our efforts towards making things Zimple (Zoho + Simple)-- pardon me for the usage. The smooth SSO transition for Zoho CRM is another example of this Zimplicity -- oops!

Restructuring and zimplifying the Zoho CRM wiki content shall be an added feather to our caps. Not that we will have achieved something for ourselves but we will have surely done one more GOOD thing for all our ardent customers and those who visit our wiki (http://zohocrm.wiki.zoho.com) for reference.

As a first step to this zimplified online help we have restructured the Customizing Zoho CRM page. Outline of the restructured page is seen below. Click on it to see the product customization page.


P.S. You can also download the Zoho CRM - Product Customization (PDF) document.

Starting with Copy Customization (the new feature introduced recently) we will be introducing a "How it works" section in all major modules. This is a 3 part comic-style explanatory splash which will give a brief idea about the current module / feature.

Given below is a screenshot of HIW shown in Copy Customization page. :-)




- Rajesh Sundaram

Previously while accessing Zoho services, users had the liberty of accessing all the Zoho Apps (except Zoho CRM) with a single User name and password. With this release, Zoho CRM becomes a part of Zoho SSO. This means users once created within the Zoho CRM need not create a different account (User name and password) for accessing other Zoho services and vice versa.

To know more on this refer : SSO Transition Guide

Victor