The Zoho Community has a few Reasons to Celebrate

Many of you have probably read the post about Zoho reaching 1 million users, which is a testament to the good work from the folks at Aventnet. In addition to this, the soon-to-be released Zoho Creator 3.0, is another good reason for us, the members of the Zoho Creator community to cheer. I say this based on the recent demo I received of the upcoming product.

Here are my top three improvements to the platform:

• It is now very easy to customize views with html code.
• There are many opportunities available  to create Mashups (with other Zoho apps and others).
• Connections to other systems (via XML) won’t require use of the API.

These platform improvements are excellent, but I am mostly excited about the new way they have devised to make it easy for developers and users to meet, test and showcase or purchase applications. We tried to start something like this at LoZC but just didn’t have the bandwidth to get it done.

I applaud how Zoho has focused  on building a solid platform and how its people are helping the user community push it forward. It may just be time for Sridhar to get in front of the large audience (at the upcoming party) and start yelling Developers, Developers, Developers. Now that would be amusing.

Linking two Zoho Creator Views

For those of you interested in learning how the Closings application works (previous post), here it is. This application has a   Summary View that displays all the data associated with a Real Estate transaction, but not the contact details for all the people that play a role in it (Client, Attorney, Lender). It is important for the user to have quick access to all the contact information from within this view, so the way to accomplish this is by creating a hyperlink from the Closings Summary view to a specific contact record (again, using a Summary view from Contacts). The steps are:

1.  Add hidden text fields in the Closings form to store unique IDs for each contact (i.e. ClientId, AttorneyId, Loan_OfficerId).

Name
(
displayname = "Client:"
type = picklist
values = Contacts[Category == "Client"].Full_Name
on user input
{
Client = Contacts [Full_Name == input.Name];
input.ClientId = Client.ID.toString();
}
)

2. Add a Formula field for each of the contacts (i.e. Client Details, Attorney Details, Lender Details) with the following code:

href="http://www.creator.zoho.com/gabrielcoch/view/33/record/+ ClientId +" target="_blank">Client Details

This shows up as a hyperlink on the Closings Summary view, which upon clicking  it, will open another window with contact details of the Client.

This isn’t technically a subview, but it is a workaround that enables you to link two (or more) views, which is a subject that comes about frequently in the Zoho Creator Forum.

Tracking Real Estate Transactions

In this post I describe how a small Real Estate Law firm improved they way they do their work considerably when the started using Zoho Creator.

This firm helps their customers with the legal work associated with purchasing or selling properties. The process (i.e. Property Closings) involves among others, keeping track of the status, key participants (i.e. Client, Loan Officer, Attorney for the other side) and whether or not the required information has been obtained in order to complete the transaction.  Preferably, all the information must be in one place. Lastly, it is important for anyone in the firm to have access to this information, regardless of their location.

They had different systems in place for managing their contacts and keeping track of the Closings and found they were spending too much time retyping contact details in their tracking systems, forgetting about sending emails automatically when a milestone had been reached and they had no way of accessing the information while away from their office.

Let’s take a closer look. The application includes two main Forms (New Closing, New Contact) and three different views (View Closings, View Contacts, Client Details, and specifically:

•  Contact Form that includes the details of the main person as well as a related contact. In the case of the Client, the related contact is always the Spouse; for the Loan Officer, the Processor is always the related contact; therefore that relationship is automatically populated. In this context, the Contact Category (i.e. Client, Attorney, Loan Officer) is required.
• Closings Form that contains all the information that must be tracked. Each Closing record actually points to three different contacts (i.e. Client, Attorney Other Side and Loan Officer). Only the names of people in each specific category are displayed as options, hence the need for having a category for each contact.
• Closing View, showing (in a Summary View) all the details of of the Closing.  It is worth noting if the user needs to find the details of any of the people listed in the Closing, he or she can do so by clicking the hyperlink (Client, Attorney or Lender details), which will open a new window with their contact information.

Aside from this, there’s a function that sends a boiler plate email automatically at different times during the process and a couple more bells and whistles, but the basics are shown here. And as you can probably tell from my previous post, the information needs of this entity with regards to contacts clearly differs from what one would expect.

If there is any interest in understanding “what’s under the hood” of this application, vote below and I’ll share the tips and tricks with you.

How important is your list of contacts?

I am resuming my contribution to this blog by addressing a subject that is critical to me and one that continues to be a headache to manage. My Contacts are without a doubt the most valuable information I maintain and need for different purposes, including messaging, project tracking, marketing and sales and invoicing. Unfortunately, I don’t have a master contact list accessible across the different applications I use (MS Office Groove, Outlook, Skype, Zoho CRM, Gmail, MSN Messenger, Quickbooks Online and other). More than likely I am not alone here.

This unresolved issue has led me to think about using Zoho Creator as my Master Contact Manager. Here are some of my reasons:

1. Control over the Form design. I can design and modify the Contact Form to fit my current/future needs. Some systems have too much information and some others don’t have enough and modifying them isn’t that easy.
2. Integration with other ZC Apps.  The Customer Retention post is a good example. Linking ZC apps is very easy to accomplish.
3. Many filtering and export options. There are many ways of filtering the data, which is very helpful for multiple reasons, including exporting subsets of data to other apps. Ideally, I would like to automate this process, but I don’t know of a clean method yet.
4. Selective Information Sharing. I determine what contacts I want to make available to others by creating a shared view, rather than maintaining different databases.
5. Embedding Contacts in other web apps.  It is useful for me to have the list of people involved in a project (and their information) embedded in a project blog or wiki.

In my next post, I will describe an application that tracks the details of a Real Estate Closing, which involves multiple contacts (i.e. Buyer, Agent, Attorney and Lender). Stay tuned.