The CRM Zen Show Episode 408 – The Old UI Is Officially On Borrowed Time

Zoho News

Zoho CRM: Old UI Retires July 15

July 15th is the hard cutoff for the old Zoho CRM interface, and while the change itself isn’t dramatic, there’s one thing worth doing before the deadline: review your user profiles. The new UI surfaces a visible plus button that leads directly into workflow and automation configuration, so anyone on a standard profile who shouldn’t be touching those settings will absolutely find it. Tightening up profiles is quick and easy, but easy to overlook if you’ve been coasting on the fact that most users never went hunting through Settings. Beyond that, the new UI has genuinely earned its place at this point, with dark mode, inline grid editing, on-the-fly chart generation, and a back-end architecture that opens the door to features that just weren’t possible in the old layout.

Zoho CRM: April Community Digest

The big highlight from this month’s digest that slipped past earlier coverage: you can now rename system-defined field labels directly in CRM, no more routing through the language translation tool as a workaround. API names can also be changed, so if you have Deluge functions referencing those field names, take a look at those scripts before making any updates. The digest also rounds up several other updates including CRM and Desk integration support in sandbox, connected records now supporting org modules, and MCP support for Zoho CRM.

Zoho CRM Plus: Expanding Sales, Marketing, and Support Capabilities

CRM Plus 3.0 adds a meaningful wave of marketing tools to the bundle, including marketing automation, webinars, PageSense, Backstage, and Brand Studio, which is a multi-channel campaign planner with AI-driven content suggestions for coordinating email, social, and event campaigns end to end. Current CRM Plus customers will be migrated in phases, so watch for an email from Zoho with the specifics for your account.

Zoho Creator: DataBridge Connects Private Databases to Creator Apps

DataBridge, which has lived inside Zoho Analytics for a while, now pipes local database data directly into Creator apps. The idea is that you install a small application on a device running your local server, configure it to point at your Creator application, and set up a regular sync. It’s the same setup process that’s been used for Analytics connections with things like QuickBooks Desktop (which has no API), but now the data can flow into Creator forms and reports instead. Initial support covers Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP, and Zen, with more sources expected to follow.

Zoho Bigin: AI Features Come to the Web App

Bigin gets the AI treatment on the web app, with email writing assistance, smart deal summaries that pull from emails, WhatsApp threads, and notes, plus Zia agents including a reply assistant and a churn analyzer. MCP support and built-in phone AI for Apple and Android were already in place, so this rounds out the toolkit nicely for Bigin users who’ve been waiting on the web experience to catch up.

Zoho Payments: Manage Payment Links, Refunds, and Payouts with MCP

Zoho Payments now has an MCP server, covering payment session creation, refund processing, payment link management, customer record interactions, and payout tracking. As with any MCP tool that has write permissions, read-only is the smart place to start while you get comfortable with how your AI agent handles the data before granting it the ability to act.

Zoho CRM: Projects Move Into Teamspaces

Zoho Projects can now be added directly to a CRM Teamspace and accessed from the module list, rather than having to navigate to an individual Account or Contact record and dig into its related list to find the linked project.

Zoho Creator: Older Browsers and Weak API Ciphers Being Retired

As of June 30, 2026, Zoho Creator will stop supporting weak TLS cipher suites, so anyone accessing Creator through an older browser or an outdated API client should upgrade before that date. You can check if your setup is affected by visiting tlstest.zoho.com/api and looking for “Strong cipher” in the result.

Zoho Analytics: Handling for CRM Ultimate Customers

Zoho has updated how Analytics is provisioned for CRM Ultimate customers who also hold a standalone Analytics subscription, preserving higher-tier editions rather than overwriting them, and clarifying that the bundled Analytics is scoped to CRM data only. If you want to connect other Zoho services to that Analytics instance, you’ll need to purchase add-ons or upgrade your Analytics edition separately.

Zoho Apptics: Richer Push Notifications

Apptics now supports image carousels with up to five images, live countdown timers, rich text formatting, email-based test targeting, and improved audience segmentation and conversion tracking for push notifications.

Zoho Desk: Mobile App Adds RTL, WhatsApp Mass Messaging, and Subtabs

The Zoho Desk Android and iOS apps added RTL support for Arabic and Hebrew, the ability to send broadcast WhatsApp messages to ticket contacts via mass action, and a full suite of Contact and Account subtabs on mobile that now match the depth of the web experience.

Zoho Desk: iOS App Adds Ticket Filters and Timeline View

The Zoho Desk iOS app now supports saved ticket filters for the ticket module and a full customer ticket timeline accessible directly from the Ticket Details page, showing all tickets submitted by a contact organized by account.

Code Share of the Week

Force Fulfill Line Items on a Zoho Inventory Sales Order via API

If you’re shipping out of a third-party platform like ShipStation or AfterShip and don’t need to go through Inventory’s full package-and-ship workflow, this snippet marks specific sales order line items as fulfilled via API without creating a package or shipment record. You can selectively target only certain line items, which is especially useful when a non-physical item like a shipping and handling charge (created as a product rather than a shipping line) would otherwise keep the entire sales order stuck open indefinitely. The function takes your Inventory org ID, the sales order ID (typically passed in as an input argument from a workflow trigger), and your Zoho Inventory connection, then loops through line items and force-fulfills any that match your criteria. Two things to watch: exclude any line items already marked as shipped or the API call will throw an error, and stick to physical goods since attempting to force-fulfill a service item will also fail. This snippet is available free over at Club Zenatta.

This Week’s Blog

What is Zoho MCP? A Complete Guide to Model Context Protocol for Zoho

A thorough guide to getting started with Zoho’s MCP integration, covering what MCP is, how to set it up in Claude, which tools to actually turn on (not all 999 of them), and how to provide enough context about your custom modules and architecture to make it practically useful rather than just a novelty.

Tips and Tricks

Zoho Books Reconciliation Tutorial

Nicole walks through a full Books reconciliation from start to finish using synthetic data pushed through real bank feeds, including the important distinction that matching bank feed transactions to invoices and actually reconciling your accounts are two separate steps that are easy to conflate.

How to Set Up and Use Zoho MCP

A step-by-step walkthrough of building a Zoho CRM MCP server in Claude, picking a focused subset of tools (search records over get records), writing good instructions, and seeing it put to work creating tasks against overdue deals in real time.

This Week’s Quizzes

• Monday Quiz: Why are Zia Agents managed in a dedicated platform rather than as a standard module within Zoho CRM?
• Wednesday Quiz: When testing the Zoho Desk integration in a Zoho CRM sandbox, how is data handled in the integrated Zoho Desk account?