1. Zoho CRM: Rename System Fields
Zoho CRM administrators have long had to live with a limitation that sounds minor but causes a surprising amount of friction: the labels on system-defined fields were completely locked. You could customise almost everything else about a layout, but if a built-in field label didn't match your business terminology, you were stuck with it.
2. Zoho CRM: Mirror Component
Zoho CRM has introduced a new concept to layouts: Components. The first to be released is the Mirror Component, and it's a genuinely useful addition for teams working across related records.
There are some constraints worth understanding before you start building with it:
- Read-only: Mirror Components display data only. You can't edit the related record's fields through the component.
- Layout-specific: They're tied to a specific layout and won't appear in list views.
- Not available in automation: Mirror Components can't be referenced in workflows, layout rules, validation rules, or used in filters and view criteria.
That last point is worth keeping in mind during implementation. The component is purely a display tool. For teams that primarily need to reduce the back-and-forth of navigating between related records, it does exactly what it promises.
3. Zoho CRM: Merge Tags in Workflow Field Updates (Unannounced)
This one hasn't been officially announced by Zoho yet, but we've spotted it live in the Australian data centre: merge tags are now available inside workflow field update actions in Zoho CRM.
Previously, dynamically populating a field with values from the same record during a workflow required building a custom function in Deluge. For something that should be a straightforward configuration task, that was a significant overhead.
With merge tags supported natively in field update actions, you can now reference record values directly within the action itself. It brings field updates in line with what's already been possible in email templates and other areas of CRM for some time.
We're expecting an official Zoho announcement shortly. In the meantime, if you're on the Australian data centre, it may already be available in your account.
4. Zoho Flow: Notes, If-Else Blocks, Tags and Custom Notifications
Zoho Flow has launched a series of improvements in one update, and while none of them are dramatic on their own, together they meaningfully improve the experience of building and managing flows at scale.
Notes
You can now annotate individual steps in the flow builder with short notes explaining the logic behind them. This might sound like a small thing, but anyone who has returned to a complex flow weeks later, or handed one over to a colleague, knows how quickly the reasoning behind a step becomes unclear. Notes solve this directly, without requiring external documentation.
If-Else Block
The new If-Else block is a streamlined alternative to the existing Decision block. Where the Decision block handles more complex branching, the If-Else block is designed for straightforward true/false conditions. You can combine conditions with AND or OR logic, and the simpler interface makes it faster to set up for common use cases.
Tags
Tags let you apply custom labels and colours to flows and folders (categories like "marketing", "finance", or "support"). As a Flow library grows, filtering and locating the right flow becomes increasingly difficult. Tags give you a lightweight way to organise and search across your automation library.
Custom Notifications
Previously, notification behaviour in Zoho Flow was fairly blunt. The new Custom Notifications feature gives you control over who receives alerts and under what conditions, so high-frequency, low-priority failures don't create noise for the whole team, while genuinely critical issues still reach the right people immediately.
Stay Updated
That's it for Episode 9 of The Zoho Report! We hope these updates help you work smarter with your Zoho applications.
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