What?
An article to ensure I never spend this long on such a request again. The brief is: "Follow up when a lead is created and not converted within 1 day send an email and notification to sales person everyday for 3 days then escalate to a specified user".

Why?
Sorry Zoho! I tried using the interface to set up a workflow or any other mechanisms within ZohoCRM that allowed me to set up a daily reminder to the lead record owner but to no avail. An assignment rule wouldn't work in this case as it had to be the lead owner (there is no owner at assignment rule stage). A workflow email notification doesn't do the popup on the CRM as well. A workflow notify by email didn't give the option to remind daily... only weekly or monthly.

Spent a while trying not to use code but here we are. Code is our friend.

How?
So we'll run a workflow that triggers on the creation of a lead and runs a function which will simultaneously create a task with a reminder both on popup and email which repeats every day until an end date.

We then carry out the last bit of the brief with a separate workflow that runs exactly 4 days after the lead creation time and assigns it to the specified user (full name of user was given in the brief but removed here for privacy).

Finally, we delete any of these tasks when they get transferred to the contact record.

What?
This is an article just repeating a script from the Zoho Kaizen series allowing a confirmation box (something lacking in Zoho Creator - but that every app outside of Zoho has) as well as a popup to email from CRM with a rich-text interface.

Why?
The use-case here is non-existent. It's more of a play around to see what can be achieved and how much this can be customized. The task I've set for myself is as follows:

• Trigger if the contact record has a tickbox called "Extra Confidential" ticked/checked=true
• Popup a confirmation box to proceed or cancel.
• Popup the email from CRM mailer with the to email address, bcc, subject and message content already populated.

How?
The example from the Kaizen series uses a record with canvas mode applied; but I wanted to try it without a canvas to see if we can have this functionality using the out-of-the-box ZohoCRM.

What?
This is an article detailing the client script to fix any fields which exceed their decimal places limit in ZohoCRM.

Why?
So we have a customer that has some decimal fields on the products module that are calculated and will sometimes return numbers with more than 6 decimal places. As this is more than specified on the ZohoCRM field properties, as soon as the staff user tries to save the record, they will get a validation error on the decimal field even if that's not the field that is being changed:

Decimal places for the Unit Price field should be less than or equal to 6

.

How?
The workaround for staff is to round this up manually and then save the record. But this can be an annoying overhead, especially if it can be auto-corrected with a client script.

What?
This is an article to show you how to, using Deluge code, generate all the email signatures in the user profile in ZohoCRM.

Why?
To simplify the on-boarding process. A client of ours has a rather rich HTML email signature with a profile photo included. When sending an email from CRM, they want CRM to include this rich signature (different per user) at the bottom of the email message.

How?
So there are a few issues with displaying images which would have other solutions, such as hosting the images on a web-server, or converting to a base64 or an SVG. ZohoCRM signatures seem to be unable to handle a lot of code or long URLs such as a base64 source URL for an image.

What?
An example of code using the new API call "Module Record Count" with some criteria.

Why?
At time of print, I couldn't find an example of how to use this API call with search filters or criteria. Not sure about the rest of you, but I've been using this for pagination purposes and for the system to work out how many pages or loops in total it would need to do.

How?
Here's a couple of working examples I use in production systems:

What?
A super quick article on how to pre-select the pipeline on deal creation within CRM based on the department specified on a user's profile.

Why?
A client asked that when staff create a deal/opportunity record in CRM, the pipeline is automatically pre-selected based on the user.

How?
So there's a bit of a pre-amble for setting up the fields, we'll then use a client script to automatically read the user's record, retrieve the department, and set the correct pipeline option.

What?
This is an article documenting how to remove the block on changes to a system field in ZohoCRM.

Why?
Our use-case today is that a customer wanted to map the Postal Code or Zip from a Lead record to an opportunity (or Deal) record. If you are using custom fields, then just ensure that the data type and field lengths match. In this case, they are system fields for the Postal Code which out-of-the-box differ in length so they do not list the postal code on the deal record to be listed in the "Lead Conversion Mapping" page.

In the Leads module, the Zip field is 30 characters; in the deal module, the Zip field is 20 characters... but we need these to match if we want to map them in the "Lead Conversion Mapping" page.

How?
This is a bit of a hack and most likely not recommended... but it is a workaround I have used and that worked when converting a lead to a deal. Note that this hack doesn't work on the system field label name (I tried) just on the length field. Use the translations file to change system field labels

What?
A super quick article on getting the business hours set in ZohoCRM.

Why?
When creating a booking system in ZohoCreator, I want to enter the default working shift for an employee either existing or that has been added to the system based on the business hours set at the organization level in ZohoCRM.

How?
Using an invokeURL, the key here is you'll find them in the settings; so check that your connection has the scope to access both Organization details (ZohoCRM.org.READ is enough - perhaps optional) and access to Settings (ZohoCRM.settings.READ). I'm calling mine "mycrmconnection".