Zoho Creator Lounge

The purpose of the Resource Booking application featured here is to conveniently manage appointments and schedules, and can be extended to managing bookings for resources.

If a doctor would use this application to manage appointments with his patients, he would specify the days and time during which he would be available, and the number of appointments he'd handle during each time-slot. This booking form can be embedded on the doctor's website. This enables the patients to book appointments online, based on the doctor's availability. When the number of appointments specified by the doctor is reached, booking is disabled for that time slot.

The patients are requested to enter their email address during booking. The application can be expanded to deliver automated email notifications to both parties.

Try this application. You are also free to customize it as you want. As we have always said, the limit is what you put on it.

Cross-posted from Zoho Blogs

Every business can benefit from custom software applications, regardless of the service or product it offers. However, if you are a small business, spending on the right applications is particularly crucial due to a tighter IT budget and being more vulnerable in the dynamic corporate world. This could lead to conflict about whether you should spend on generic desktop software or custom web software.

To resolve this conflict, we look at the key performance indicators of any business: the data about its customer-practices and business process management. What the organization has learned about its customers and how effectively it uses this data to provide better and relevant solutions to its users is what keeps them on the charts. In such data-centric times, an organization's data is distributed across various inevitable software solutions it uses: CRM, accounting applications, project management, inventory management and resource allocation, support ticket management, enterprise resource planning, revenue, expense and commission trackers and much more. That means multiple copies of data are stored at multiple locations, leading to ineffective usage of resources. What if all the data pertaining to your customers could be stored at a central location, and all the custom software applications you use could access the data relevant to them? What if all these software solutions could communicate with one another, effortlessly?

Well, this is possible if the applications are from the same vendor and hosted online. But it is more about picking from the lot, those applications that best suit your business. Why insist on appropriate ones, and not generic ones? Because not all businesses are run alike. Each has unique use-cases, and thus needs unique applications for each requirement. Generic software applications are almost always full of compromises. You end up paying for more than what you actually use. This is one good reason why you should consider building your tools, yourself. Building custom applications using web application building platforms is more beneficial than settling for ready-made software. Customization not only costs a lot less, but it also speaks your language. Not all of us are programmers, after all. What stops you now? Get started with custom business apps today!

Cross-posted from Zoho Blogs.

Recently, there was this CRM Conference at NY that was held on the 10th of this month. Zoho was a platinum sponsor of the event which brought many CRM users and vendors together. Though it was an all-CRM Conference, we were looking forward to hearing about Zoho Creator, because they get along very well together. This is what we got.

Charlie Isaacs is a Zoho Creator enthusiast who is with Alcatel-Lucent; a social media strategist for Genesys Labs . When asked how Zoho Creator simplified his requirement, he had something unique to say.

He prototypes using Zoho Creator. Hear him out:

Whenever he gets a new idea for a project, he prefers a prototype to propose his plan . He says, and we agree, that a prototype is almost always more compelling than a 20-page document. Charlie takes advantage of Zoho Creator; he builds form-based solutions. The advantage Zoho Creator has over MySQL, he says, is that MySQL doesn't allow the association of a form on the front-end.

There is always Oracle and MySQL, but to get something up and running, quick-and-dirty, Zoho Creator is there for me.

Charlie also spoke about his mobile application that was very interesting. He is using this application to read QR codes which are looked up in a Zoho Creator database. It returns information like UPC codes. Based on that, he dynamically constructs the menu on the handheld application.

Those are two very new use-cases of Zoho Creator that we have come across. Glad that it takes him only an hour with Zoho Creator to complete the prototypes, against the 8 to 10 hours without it.

If you've been using Zoho Creator regularly, you would have noticed that enhancements and new feature additions are constantly happening.. Our recent update contains some noteworthy new additions that we are sure you'd love to use. Here are the details.

Accept Payments and Donations - Introducing the Payment Module:

Zoho Creator now includes a payment module integrated with PayPal Gateway. Using the payment module in your applications, you can collect payments and donations from your customers. You simply have to create a dedicated form - the payments form and tie it up with your PayPal account. Your customers can pay using their PayPal accounts or credit cards once they have placed their order.

You can also collect donations using the payment forms. Donations can be collected on a one time or recurring basis. Accepting donations will be taken care of the payments form with a slight modification - they will be marked as donation forms and will be handled accordingly in PayPal as well.
Payment and donation forms can also be embedded in your websites and reach out to your audience in a more effective manner. Read more here .

Share seamlessly within your organization - Organization Level Sharing:

For users deploying custom built Zoho Creator applications across the different departments in their organization, there couldn’t be better news. Organizational Level Sharing lets you share applications to all the users in an organization without having to explicitly type out each person's email id. For any organization, there will be a dedicated workspace and a verified administrator. The administrator can nominate developers and users for that workspace. Developers can create applications in the workspace and share it within the organization while the users can access the applications shared to them.

An extension of the organization level sharing, is the domain level sharing. This type of sharing lets users, share an application to any user with the same domain email id. For ex: A user with a Zillum Inc email id as his registered id in Zoho Creator can share his application to anyone across the globe having a Zillium Inc id.

And while you are checking out these new enhancements.. do spare a thought for our Sharing Interface, that has undergone a complete image makeover.. Head over here for more details.

Import Google Forms:

Google Docs users can now import their forms from Google Docs and build full fledged business applications around their forms. When you import your form from Google Docs, Zoho Creator will import all the data present in the Google Form and also create a basic skeleton application. You can then modify your application to include all the workflow and business rules that you need. Read all about it here .

As always, these are just the highlights.. There are more enhancements, big and small, making their way into the platform each day. Do try out these and let us know how you like them. And oh.. don’t forget to keep an eye out for the newer ones as well.

And spread the word too...

Premise:

The Playwrights' Center focuses on both supporting playwrights and promoting new plays to theaters across the country. Significantly, they offer over $200,000 in fellowships to writers and theater artists each year. They also organize workshops where playwrights can get together with actors and directors to see their script at work, and manage several other programs that help playwrights get connected and build their careers. As they work closely with theaters, actors, directors, and writers, they have an advantage when it comes to advocating for artists and promoting them.

Flashback:

Way back in 1971, five playwrights were seeking professional assistance and support. The Playwrights' Center was founded by these five writers to help them secure productions of their plays, and later expanded to offer multiple forms of support and professional assistance. Since then, it has served as a launch-pad for numerous artists and currently serves over 1,100 member playwrights, making it one of the largest and most comprehensive play-writing centers in the country.

Lead:

Tom Borger is the Communications Associate there, who is responsible for social media coverage, as well as print and electronic communications. He was the person who set Zoho Creator up for the Playwrights' Center. He spoke to us about why and how they got started.

Action:

The Playwrights’ Center wanted to track the careers of writers who had benefited from their programs. Knowing where each of their playwrights’ plays had been produced, as well as what honors and awards that playwright had received, would help them promote and advocate for the playwright. The Playwrights’ Center also wanted to measure their own effectiveness. This data would go to funders and donors interested in the impact of the Center’s work.

The extensive documentation was gratifying to have; there were so many examples, and the message boards were full of other people's experiences.

The problem was that they had theaters, productions, awards, and past development to track, in addition to playwrights. Also, a play would often have more than one playwright. When a play was selected, all artists associated with that play needed to be populated in the respective fields, and vice versa. Handling these complex branches of data on spreadsheets was the last thing they wanted to do because it led to multiple versions of the same data. So, Tom decided to build a new database using Zoho Creator.

Credits:

The very few times I ran into snags, I emailed support and heard back really quickly. That was impressive because all that was for a user who wasn't even paying; I was doing all this on a free account.

Tom is now set for the next step; publicizing the applications on their website using a JSON feed. He also suggests that the number of specific scenarios addressed on our community-forum should keep growing in order to guide new users. That, we will do.

And, personally, loved using Pixlr for editing the images.

Guest post by Mark Thurman of Credible Systems:

Credible Systems joined the Zoho Alliance Partner Program 2 years ago, with Zoho Creator as their main focus, and later expanded their scope to include Zoho CRM, Zoho Reports, & Zoho Projects. Founded in early 2009 by Mark Thurman and Sarah Treanor, Credible Systems is a consultancy focused on helping organizations of all sizes and types, leverage the growing power of cloud-computing. Their clients range from schools and SME's to much larger enterprises. Here is how Mark sees it all:

The Client:

We were approached by a European-wide consultancy to assist them with extending the functionality of Zoho CRM. The client provides a broad range of business consultancy services to blue chip organization across Europe.

The Problem:

Their need was to effectively track the utilization of resources across their various clients and projects. Of course, a spreadsheet solution could have sufficed as a short-term solution. But we had our doubts about it being a scalable, long-term solution, keeping in mind the client's growing operations. An external third-party solution would cause an additional problem of duplicating all data, inevitably leading to differences between the two sets.

Zoho Creator would be a fine solution for such a problem in any case, but its recent integration with Zoho CRM made it the perfect solution. Zoho Creator, it seems, has something for everybody .

The Implementation:

We created a custom database application that allows the user to import opportunity details directly from Zoho CRM, based upon certain criteria. For instance, only those with a status of "Closed Won" are brought into Zoho Creator. Using Deluge script, we then provided methods for

* Creating sub-projects for each opportunity
* Assign a unique Project ID * Relate the project to specific internal business units for project work and administration
* Expose relevant CRM data for the selected opportunity

And with reports generated from within Zoho Creator, they were able to

compare planned and actually delivered values for an opportunity against the estimated Opportunity Value in CRM
chart the utilization level for a specific resource, business unit or entire company against a threshold for a specific time period
create calendar views of resource allocation providing consolidated information at a glance

The Next Step:

We intend to use Zoho Creator for Google Apps, combined with Zoho CRM's sync with Google Contacts and Calendar . By this, we can provide resource utilization calendars within Google Apps, for the data residing in Zoho CRM.

When an Activity is created, we can provide a function to 'write' the Activity details to Zoho CRM as an 'Event'.

* Create custom calendar views in Zoho CRM for 'All Events' and 'My Events' * Set up CRM calendar sync with Google Apps calendars
* Then 'All Events' and 'My Events' CRM calendars will be visible on Google Calendar too.

Resource planning using Zoho Creator has allowed them to see how much resource is currently planned against each project, and how much they can possibly expand, thus enabling them to manage available resources effectively.

I have events on a schedule that would be great for people to be able to accept or decline the invitation by email click on link and accept or decline without logon, any ideas?

You surely can do this.

If you are using an event invitation form on Zoho Creator and want to know who will attend, RSVP can be implemented in the notification email.

This sample application has two forms; an Invite form to submit the email addresses of invitees, and a stateless form to update their status. If I am hosting my birthday party, I would love to invite you. In that case, I will submit your name and email address in the Invite form. The application will then trigger the automatic email notification to you.

I would have specified the venue, date and time of the celebration in the email. Additionally, I would have put three links, Yes, No and Maybe. If you can make it to my birthday party, you would click on "Yes". It would direct you to the stateless form, and as it loads, Zoho Creator would update the Invite form with your availability, "Yes" in this case.

The hyperlink to the option "Yes" is,

https://creator.zoho.com/zoho.adminuserid/app-name/form-perma/form-name/recid=<%=ID%>&status=Yes

Similarly, for No and Maybe.

The script executed in OnLoad function of the stateless form is,

fetch = invite[ID == input.recid.toLong()];
fetch.status=input.status;

The application featured here has been deliberately kept simple. You can add to it, as much detail as you require. Most importantly, with Zoho Creator's endless possibilities, this is certainly not the only way to implement it. You are welcome to come up with an innovative implementation and share it with the community.

Ever since its launch, Zoho Creator for Google Apps has been providing successful solutions to many. While our users have been building databases on their own, we've been busy figuring out how we could better the integration; importing and sharing, to be precise. These enhancements have already been enabled to all users via Google Apps. Others can expect it very soon.

Importing Spreadsheets directly from Google Docs:

Importing spreadsheets into Zoho Creator has been one of the much-loved features. Taking that higher is the capability of importing directly from Google Docs. As with regular import, here too, you can either import into an existing application or create a new application during data import.

i) Create new application:

In the "Create new application" window, you'll see the option, "From GDocs". We list all your spreadsheets from Google Docs, allowing you to pick one for import.

ii) Import spreadsheet into an existing application:

You can import your spreadsheets from GDocs into an existing application too. Access the Zoho Creator application into which you want to import, and select "Import Data". Here too, GDocs is listed as a source. You can specify the file on the drop-down box.

Sharing your application with everyone in your organization:

Sharing with users is very elementary in Zoho Creator. Unless you didn't want to share your application with every member of your organization, which previously had to be done by specifying individual email addresses of all your employees. Not anymore.

Check the box that says "include all domain-users", and the module of your application will be shared to every email address in the same domain as yours. For example, if your email address is yourname@abc.com, and you check this box, your application will be shared with anyone who logs in with the email address of suffix, "@abc.com".

For all about Zoho Creator for Google Apps, visit our help center . Or, write to us for personalized help. And, if you are glad to have found Zoho Creator, help others by reviewing us.

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Cross-posted from Zoho Blogs.

A while ago, we came up with the first step towards integrating two of our most loved and discussed services - Zoho Creator and Zoho CRM. Today we are taking the next step towards an even more tighter integration between the two.

While the first cut , with dedicated Deluge tasks, was more for the tech-savvy users, this time around it's for all of us .. Yes drag and drop lovers, this time you are in for the party too.

We have introduced a new field, Zoho CRM. As the name suggests, this field looks up CRM modules and adds them as fields in the forms that you create. Sounds familiar? Well it had to. This field is a clone of our Look up field. But then, it differs in one main aspect – the basic functionality. Simply add this field to your forms/situated apps and pull out CRM data instantly. A few tiny deluge tricks later.. You would have pulled out all relevant info that you need about the module.

And that’s not all. In the view, the value for this field is displayed as a hyperlink. Clicking on that link, presents you a summary page of the Module from Zoho CRM. Also the value of this field, just like any other field, can also be used as input for Deluge tasks.

Here's video that takes you through the tech specs of this integration. Go on and get started on your next business app situated around CRM Modules. Zoho CRM folks.. Welcome to Zoho Creator .. :)

Psssttt: Keep watching this space! A bigger and better announcement in the same vein is on its way.

Everyday, many people use our migration tool to convert their spreadsheets into fully functional online database applications. So, I thought of adding something to it that would make a difference.

Primarily, using the migration tool, you could import spreadsheets of xls format only. That was until last week when we announced it's compatibility with xlsx formats.

In addition to that comes multiple-sheet support. Previously, even if the workbook you were importing had multiple sheets, only the first sheet would be imported into Zoho Creator. To import the second, you had to reorder it and import again. But now, you can choose from the many sheets, which one to import.

The migration tool is available for download here.

How the tool works:

1. Download and execute the tool.
2. From File menu, select the type of file you wish to import; MS Access databases or spreadsheets.
3. Locate the file on your computer.
4. All columns in the file will be listed along with the field type. Modify them if needed.
5. After making the required modifications, select "Upload to Zoho Creator Application" from File menu. Here, you can either create a new application with the data you import, or add them to an existing application.

To use the tool, you will be prompted for login credentials. Use your Zoho user name and password to login to the tool. We are very eager to know how it works, just as we are to help you migrate. Would you let us know, anyway?

Join the Creators on facebook & twitter

Zoho Creator Lounge

Resource management and appointment scheduling with Zoho Creator

Custom application development for small businesses

Prototyping with Zoho Creator, Quick and Dirty: A Video

Zoho Creator rolls out Payments Module, Organizational Sharing and Google Forms Import

Zoho Creator and The Playwright's Center - The plot thickens

Zoho Creator - Zoho CRM Integration : A success story by Credible Systems

RSVP with Zoho Creator application

Zoho Creator for Google Apps: afterparty

Zoho Creator - Zoho CRM Integration - What's new and what to look forward to..

Migration from spreadsheet just got better