Welcome back to The Zoho Report! In this episode, we're covering five updates out of Zoho CRM: a brand new way to design your CRM homepage, AI agents that operate as proper CRM users, improvements to Map Dependency, an expansion to Connected Records, and a new component builder for developers to watch.
Let's dive in.
1.Canvas Home View
Zoho CRM now lets you design your own homepage using Canvas, the same drag-and-drop builder you might already use for custom record and list views.
You can pull together a wide range of components including record list views, CRM reports, and dashboard components. It also supports advanced components such as rich text, quick links, and the combined open activities component that was previously exclusive to the Classic View.
What you need to know:
- Requires Manage Customisation permission to create Home Views
- Each organisation can create up to 50 Home Views
- Canvas Home View is supported in Sandbox so you can build and test before deploying to production
- Available across all editions: Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate
2. Zia Agents: Digital Employees
Zoho has introduced a new way to deploy Zia Agents in CRM: as Digital Employees.
Previously, when you deployed a Zia Agent, it worked through connections, which means any actions it took were logged under the user that authorised the connection. That makes it difficult to separate agent activity from human activity in your audit trail.
Digital Employees change that. When you deploy an agent as a Digital Employee, it gets its own user account in Zoho CRM, complete with its own profile permissions and role, just like anLy other team member.
Importantly, you don't need to purchase a user licence to add a Digital Employee to your account. You only pay for LLM (Large Language Models) usage. If you're using Zoho's own model, that's free up to 30 million tokens per month.
There's also a new Agent Store where you can browse pre-configured agents that are ready to deploy, with instructions and tools already built in removing a significant amount of setup work.
Availability:
- Zia Agents in Zoho CRM: Enterprise and above, US and India data centres
- Digital Employees: Currently supported on standalone CRM plans only - hopefully Zoho One support is coming soon
3. Map Dependency Field Enhancement
Map Dependency has been around for a long time, but the configuration experience was very dated and frustrating to use. That's changed with a fresh round of improvements.
Map Dependency now has its own dedicated tab in the Module Configuration view, rather than being buried inside layout settings. And during setup, selecting child options is now much more straightforward; simply click the values you want to make available when a parent field is selected.
Important: This feature is currently in early access. To enable it, send an email to Zoho Support.
4. Connected Records - Now Supporting Org Modules
If you're using Zoho CRM For Everyone, Connected Records has received a useful expansion.
Previously, Connected Records only worked with Team Modules and Custom Modules. Now you can also associate standard Org Modules — such as Deals, Accounts, and Contacts — directly from the Module Layout page.
The module list is also now split into two clear sections: Configured Modules (those you've actively associated) and Other Modules (those that aren't yet connected). This makes it much easier to see at a glance what's linked and what isn't.
Availability and limits:
- Available for all editions in Zoho CRM For Everyone
- Maximum of 30 module associations per module
4. SlyteUI - One for Developers to Watch
If your team builds custom interfaces inside Zoho CRM, SlyteUI is a new component builder worth keeping an eye on.
SlyteUI is trying to blend low-code simplicity with pro-code flexibility, letting developers create embeddable components and interactive pages directly within CRM. Importantly, components render directly into the CRM interface rather than through iframes, so they behave like native parts of the page.
Highlights:
- 60+ ready-to-use UI components via Design Lab
- Built-in IDE to design, code, preview, and publish
- Automatically inherits Zoho CRM's look and feel
Stay Updated
That's it for Episode 10 of The Zoho Report! We hope these updates help you work smarter with your Zoho applications.
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