The Zoho Creator Depot - Turning ideas into Action

Recently, we introduced the idea of building a community for those interested in implementing applications with Zoho Creator. So as promised, we’ve built the Zoho Creator Depot site. We are planning to showcase applications in the Gallery and hold virtual meetings at least once a month. From now on, if you want to use Zoho Creator for your business and need some technical assistance or if you are skilled at developing Zoho Creator applications, consider joining the Zoho Creator Depot.

This community will function as a co-op for the benefit of all those involved and it will encourage collaboration and sharing of applications. If you see value in Zoho Creator as a platform for business applications, join us and help us move this forward, and by all means, send us your suggestions and comments.

April 26 Update

• Thanks to all of you who have registered to join the ZCD. We’ll get in touch with you shortly.

• We have received some positive feedback since introducing the idea, and based on some of your suggestions, we have decided to make the Zoho Creator Depot a part of this blog, rather than as an independent site. So here’s a link to the page we will use to register as well as request a service: Zoho Creator Depot Form

More Zoho Apps. Where’s the integration with Zoho Creator?

Today I saw the annoucement of Zoho Invoice , which prompted me to write this post.  As an owner of a small business, I am seriously considering Zoho as the productivity platform for my team. In my opinion, all of the Zoho apps are well designed, but before I start spending the time required to migrate my invoicing from Quickbooks Online, my contacts from Outlook, my Online Meetings from Gotomeeting, my conversations from Skype etc., I want to make sure I gain something from this effort.

Here’s what it would take for me to take the plunge.

1. Integrated data management. I need to be able to add  information once and use it in different contexts. Let’s take Contacts. Ideally, I would create a form in Zoho Creator (or copy an existing template) and that form would then be my template for adding Contacts for Customer Management (Zoho CRM), Invoicing (Zoho Invoice), Human Resources (Zoho People), etc.  In other words, I know what contact data is relevant to me and my team and I don’t have time to customize Contact forms in four different applications.
2. Document automation capabilities. I need a good way of packaging the data I have to share those with whom I interact.  Let’s take Service Agreements. Again, I would like to manage my data with Zoho Creator and have the ability to generate renewals as .pdf documents. Ideally, I would use Zoho Writer to create the document template, and assuming it had a (Mail) Merge feature, I could  generate these agreements automatically .
3. Data visualization tools.  I need an easy way to view my information as a calendar, a map, a timeline or a list, regardless, of its nature (sales, human resources, time management, etc.). Currently, I see that the Zoho apps mentioned above all have their own calendars, reports and graphs. Again, by having the data stored in Zoho Creator and tools for displaying the data, this too could be achieved.

I’m not talking about  Grand Unification Theory here. I am stressing the importance of having a unified repository of information that can be reused in different contexts and for multiple purposes and leveraging Zoho Creator as this repository seems to make sense.

Better Customer Retention with Zoho Creator and LetterMeLater

Jon Udell recently  wrote an interesting blog “Where can I subscribe to a running-shoe-replacement service ? “ which as I see it amounts to a simple way of fostering Customer Retention.

This is a business opportunity. If you’re a runner, spending $100 every six (or even three) months is infinitely preferable to injury. You’d think that shoe sellers would make it easy to do that, but they don’t. I’d happily authorize regular replacements, but nobody’s ever offered me that option.

His idea is applicable not only to athletic shoes, but to many other products and/or services that you just don’t keep track of and would gladly address when your provider sent you a friendly reminder. I can think of most of the house work I don’t do myself like termite treatment, gutter cleaning or air conditioning maintenance.

Jon writes again in Missing the cluetrain emphasizing the technology shortcomings of small businesses, so we decided to develop a solution to his problem (which I’ve captured with the cool online comic Pixton tool here) with Zoho Creator and LetterMeLater. 

If you want to try it, here’s the link:  Running Shoe Reminder . Be sure to sign up in LetterMeLater. This app will use the email you have associated with your Zoho Id to my gmail account to relay the message to LetterMeLater, which then forwards the message:

to the email you’ve specified in the form. It is currently set up to notify you 1 minute after you’ve entered the data, but surely you can envision this working at different intervals.

 This is the type of application we want to showcase in the Zoho Creator Depot.

Welcoming Gabriel

Those of you who visit this site directly might notice a new face in the sidebar. Although we have Lockworld to thank for some great posts about ZC and we were hoping to see more, Doug recently let it be known he was having difficulty finding time to post. Hence we invited a new face to LoZC and the face accepted — please welcome Gabriel Coch!

I’ll let Gabriel introduce himself through his own introductory post but I will point out that he’s one of those rare folk who combine technical acumen, business savvy, and a genuine desire to help people not only improve their daily lives through technology but also safeguard their communities.

In addition, Gabriel and I have been exploring over email and a couple phone conversations how we (we meaning us and YOU) can take ZC’s potential as a commercial business platform to “the next level”…though what that next level looks like is frankly unknown at this point. Part of Gabriel’s motivation for joining us, if I can presume to speak for him for just a moment, is to further this idea by harnessing a real ZC community.

I’m excited and hope you are too!

SSLick Feature Addition, Much Anticipated

After many desperate, impassioned complaints, I see on the ZC blog that there is now SSL Support in Zoho Creator.

Yep, more proof of Zoho’s remarkable commitment to and support of the customers.

Zynd in the Clowns

Awhile back someone in the Zoho Creator forum asked how to best design a ZC application and I wrote back to the effect that since there isn’t much design involved, it’s best just to suffer through the documentation and play with the interface until you get something close to what you thought you wanted. I’ll now amend that sentiment slightly by stating that it can’t hurt at least to try and write Deluge code that does not induce nausea.

Version 0.01 of Zyndafeed used a kludgy series of shows and hides in conjunction with 50 statically defined form fields to support up to 50 photo uploads. This worked OK from the outside but the implementation is embarrassing and in any case prompting the user with the option to fill out up to 50 text fields on one page is probably ridiculous in the first place.

Version 0.02 takes a different approach (and reduces signficantly the size of our Deluge script) by providing a separate form devoted to image uploads. A one-listing-to-many-photos relationship is established by inserting a listing’s unique_id as a non-unique identifier for rows in the Photos table. When it comes time to generate the feed, any image in the Photos table with a listing id that matches a listing’s unique id gets appended as a a child node. With this change not only are we providing Ted and the BuggyRocket customers with more flexibility (remember that we need to support at least 25 uploads per listing) but we’re also adhering closer to the DRY principle.

Design considerations when hacking out a Zoho application? It can’t hurt. In any case we’ll see what Mark thinks of this new version when he gets a chance to try it out and reply. Some ideas for more features include a monolithic view of listing data instead of views spread over 5 separate screens and some useful filters on whatever views are in place.

Zyndafeed Prototype

This incomplete version of Zyndafeed has some interesting characteristics, most of which aren’t particularly flattering, but at least we can fix the first two:

1. Photos in the wrong place (fix in next version)

Currently the form labeled New asks Ted how many photos he needs to upload (with a maximum of 50) and then dutifully renders only that number of upload fields for him to complete. Now that Mark has clarified the requirements to support a range beyond 25 photos, leaving them here is pretty ridiculous. In the next version we’ll break them out into their own form. We’ll also fix the 50 photo fields that are currently hindering attempts to edit the existing records in the Main view.

2. Photos published in XML feed (fix in next version)

We still need to render a new XML element for each photo before we have compliant custom XML feed. After we get #1 squared away this shouldn’t be a big deal.

3. Non-intuitive form behavior (won’t fix)

Even after we do make photos a separate part of the application, Ted may still suffer at the hands of some non-intuitive (albeit innocuous) application behavior — if he fills out a few photo fields at the bottom then later hides those fields, then submit the form, any data in those hidden image upload fields would still be sent.

4. Unfortunate code (won’t fix)

ZC’s simple back-end is sometimes a limitation. We’ve managed to commit more than a few unspeakable crimes against all that is holy in the land of law-abiding script writers:

1. The lack of dynamic field definition means that our only way of supporting up to 50 image upload fields is to statically define each field up front then show or hide the required number of fields as appropriate.
2. The lack of one-to-many relationships marches us down the ill-advised path of generating our own unique-ids.
3. Both the inability to add a new record from a script and the inability to update existing records (without also creating a new row) make our table “design” and the scripting required to maintain it unwieldy to the point where we hope we don’t have to maintain it too much. Oh well, at least part of any necessary maintenance can be done via the GUI and if it gets much more complicated we actually will check the source into Subversion.

I’ll update again when the next version is published; separate photo functionality and a complete XML feed should present something Ted could conceivably use to cover the listing entry duties of his job.

We’ll also take a look at how Zoho CRM might hook into the process Mark needs to enable.

Ted vs. Zoho Creator

This is the first post in a series detailing a real-world example of using Zoho Creator as a small business software platform.

Meet Ted

To simplify our early prototyping efforts for BuggyRocket we’ve brought in a customer service representative (CSR) named “Ted” — the affable, well-dressed, incredibly Web 2.0-savvy Ted. In his spare time Ted enjoys sipping lattes, practicing yoga, and skimming the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. Sometimes all at once. Hey don’t look at us, Mark hired him…

“Thanks for calling BuggyRocket. How can I help you?”

Ted of course is actually just our fictitious end user until one or more real BuggyRocket CSRs take the reins. He telecommutes for Mark via his own fictitious laptop and cellphone, usually either from home or a quiet coffee shop, and is the guy responsible for transforming into hard data all the faxes, phone calls, mailed letters, etc that BuggyRocket receives.

Putting Ted to Work

Ted pretty much has a job description already; Mark breathed life into it just by throwing out his rough ideas in the original post. So our first task toward putting Ted to work is probably to distill those rough ideas into a list of current assumptions so we can communicate them back to Mark (you are reading this Mark, right?) and make sure we’re on the same page:

• Customers
  1. often serviced through traditional mail, fax and phone, not email
  2. if they have a computer, often dial-up
• CSRs
  1. human beings who answer the phone (< -- Ted goes here...)
  2. need to be online to simplify the process
  3. too many will cut into profit margins (Ted is not cheap)
• Backend
  1. provides detailed forms to allow Ted to efficiently input data
  2. supports a database built up by virtue of Ted’s accumulative data entry
  3. needs to process customers’ payments
  4. converts the data into XML feeds or other formats and submits to seller sites on demand

Step One

As Mark mentioned in his last post, I already created one simple form that Ted could conceivably use to submit a new Real Estate listing. But it suffers from several drawbacks, not least of which is a detailed presentation crammed onto one long page. It’s really just our first step toward deploying a system Ted can reliably use to process, record, and publish all of BuggyRocket’s critical information.

In the next post we’ll clarify a high-level process model for moving the input (customer data) to the output (BuggyRocket’s database and seller web sites), as well as incorporate additional feedback from Mark. And perhaps Ted.

How Zoho Creator Can Help My On and Offline Business Pt.1

As we press ahead toward Web 3.0 it’s becoming more evident to me that there are vast segments of the population that are not riding the technology wave. They are still Web 1.0 or even Web No Point O. BuggyRocket will be the bridge to allow the offline seller to present their major asset, eg. Real Estate, Vehicle, Collectible, to the online world without having to be online themselves.

I’ve used Zoho Creator for form creation before and in reading the documentation a few months ago, it occurred to me that there’s something very powerful here! However, I don’t have the time, or really much interest in learning Deluge scripting to take advantage of it. My wish list is pretty big and there are some application tools that I would like to integrate into BuggyRocket that I hope can be accomplished with Zoho Creator and the Zoho Suite of applications. After contacting Zoho to see if they could recommend a “guru”, Raffic suggested I contact Pete Thomas. Thankfully I did because I’ve discovered that Zoho Creator can do everything and more that I imagined. Plus, Pete has already demonstrated his expertise with ZC for me on a contract basis.

Since my target market is primarily offline, I don’t want to invest a lot of time and money into a state of the art DB and flash-based, ajaxy kind of site. My audience, if they have a computer, is often on dial-up. These prospects are serviced through traditional mail, fax and phone, not email. But my telephone CSR’s need to be online to simplify the process. And, I need a strong site for prospective customers who are online. Folks who aren’t fearful of technology and want Web 2.0 functionality. So, I need to be able to consummate the transaction online from start to finish. ZC should allow me to accomplish this, I think.

Needing to serve the customer from all ends of the technology spectrum is the biggest hurdle. I personally am an early adopter, but my customers are late adopters - at best, or orphans (if you use the adoption analogy). The way that obstacle is addressed, is by providing human beings to answer the phone - the good old fashioned way. Humans cost money and having a lot of CSR’s could really cut into our profit margins, but my hope is that I could create a backend consisting of a series of detailed ZC forms that would be utilized to allow a CSR to efficiently input the data, build the database, and process payment. Then ultimately, convert the data into an XML feed or other script to greatly simplify my listing and design process.

That’s a simplified vision of how I’d like Pete, Alan and Doug show me, as an entrepreneur, how to get the most out of Zoho Creator. I’m eagerly looking forward to seeing what really can be done with this powerful application and appreciate the opportunity to be here in the Land of Zoho Creator!

Introducing BuggyRocket

I’m excited to give an LoZC welcome to Mark Galloway and his young company, BuggyRocket. I was introduced to Mark a few months ago when he needed a little contract work performed on his site and at some point during our discussions he foolishl^H^H^Hbravely agreed to be one of LoZC’s entrepreneurial guinea pigs. Wish him luck…

BuggyRocket’s mission statement is Harnessing the Power of the Internet Marketplace for Everyone Else!

If you visit the site you’ll see that BuggyRocket is focusing on the “65 million Americans at least 18 or over do not have an email address” but what’s most exciting to us here at LoZC is that we’re actually going to be working with Mark over the coming months to explore how Zoho Creator can help BuggyRocket fulfill its mission.

This will be a “trial by fire” approach to seeing if and what Zoho Creator can deliver to a single small business; we’ll get each application online as soon as Mark OKs it.

You might be thinking, How is Zoho Creator going to help a business focusing on people who are offline?, and it’s a good question. We’ll let Mark explain.

Mark is going to be an occasional guest contributor to LoZC as well; look for an upcoming post from him that delves into more detail about how BuggyRocket is interested in leveraging Zoho Creator and what he hopes LoZC can help him accomplish. As we go along and Mark finds time, he’ll hopefully be able to provide some status updates from his perspectve.

Welcome, Mark!