News Highlights
- Zoho Announcements Hub: One central spot pulling new announcements from across every Zoho app, with filter checkboxes for the apps you actually use.
- Zoho Inventory: A loaded couple of months bringing purchase returns, partial replenishments, sales channel number syncing, and a new Walmart integration.
- Zoho People: Zia goes agentic, reading an uploaded document to file a leave request with the right type, dates, and attachment.
- Zoho Analytics: Geo maps that auto-zoom to your user filter, KPI backgrounds that flash green or red, and Ask Zia showing its thinking.
Zoho News
Zoho: Announcements Hub
Zoho built a single hub that pulls new announcements from across every app into one spot, with colorful summary cards up top and checkboxes to filter down to just the apps you actually use. Greg’s read: it’s Zoho’s best attempt at making the Zenatta newsletter obsolete, but we’re not too worried.
Zoho Analytics: May 2026 Feature Updates
May’s wrap-up packs geo maps that auto-zoom to your user filter, KPI widget backgrounds that flash big green or big red on comparison indicators, dual-axis independent sorting, Ask Zia now showing its thinking process and exportable response cards, plus bumped model diagram limits (800 tables, 2,000 relations).
Zoho Cliq: REST APIs v3
For the developers, Cliq’s REST APIs jump from v2 to v3, cleaning up pagination and naming inconsistencies and making the whole chat surface programmable, creating chats, forking conversations, managing pins and folders, mostly so AI agents and MCP can drive Cliq the way a person would in the UI.
Zoho Bookings: Email Blocklist
Spam and serial no-shows hitting your bookings page now meet an email blocklist, where you can block a single address or an entire domain, the kind of thing that feels like it should have shipped on day one.
Zoho POS: May 2026 Updates
POS settings finally get the search bar you see elsewhere in Zoho, digging into sub-settings and not just top labels, plus a documents area to store and reuse files like product images or a closing checklist, all signs POS is falling in line with the rest of the finance apps.
Zoho Inventory: April & May 2026 Updates
A loaded couple of months for Inventory: a dedicated purchase returns module, partial replenishments, syncing sales order and invoice numbers straight from Shopify and other channels, a new Walmart integration for the US edition, location-based price lists, and admins finally able to see and manage everyone’s custom reports.
Zoho People: New AI-Powered HR with Zia
Zia goes agentic inside Zoho People, reading an uploaded doc like a medical certificate to file a leave request with the right type, dates, and attachment, or helping a manager find who has the skills and availability for a job. Landon’s wish: an AI tag on those records so approvers know to double-check the work.
Zoho Publish: AI-Powered Review Keywords
Publish, Zoho’s review and listing manager, now uses AI to pull keywords and themes out of your reviews, color-coding what people love green and what they complain about red, so high-volume or multi-location businesses can focus on trends instead of chasing one angry one-off.
Zoho CRM: Updated Analytics Handling for Ultimate Customers
Zoho changed how Analytics is provisioned for CRM Ultimate customers who also hold a standalone Analytics subscription, so it’s worth checking how the change affects your setup.
Zoho Bigin: New AI Features and Zia Agents
Bigin picks up a fresh batch of AI features and Zia agents, bringing the agentic, multi-step automation spreading across Zoho to the lightweight CRM.
Zoho Projects: WhatsApp Business Integration
Zoho Projects adds a WhatsApp Business integration so teams can push project updates and notifications to clients and members over WhatsApp.
Zoho Bigin: Global Search for Apple Devices
Bigin’s Apple apps get global search, letting iPhone and Mac users find records across the app from one search bar.
Zoho Recruit: Indeed Disposition Sync
Zoho Recruit is rolling out disposition sync for Indeed, keeping candidate status updates aligned between Recruit and the job board.
Zoho Social: The Social Wall May 2026
Zoho Social’s monthly Social Wall rounds up May’s feature updates for the social management tool.
Zoho Mail: Mobile Classification Labels
The Zoho Mail Android and iOS apps add classification labels so you can organize and flag messages right from your phone.
Zoho Mail: Incoming Email Settings
New incoming email settings give Zoho Mail admins more control over what reaches their users’ inboxes.
Code Share of the Week
Create a Custom Button in Zoho Desk via API using Deluge
This one comes from Greg helping a developer who needed the same URL-opening button on a Desk client with twelve departments, and rather than building it by hand twelve times, he found you can create custom buttons programmatically through the Desk API. The main prerequisite is a connection with the Desk.settings.all scope, then your request body names the button, assigns it to a department, and sets the module, profile IDs, isEnabled to true, the location (right now there’s only the “more actions” detail section), the visibility type, and the action itself, either an invoke URL or an already-existing function. To roll it out across every department, generate the list of department IDs and run a for-each loop creating one button per department, then POST to the custom buttons endpoint. Flip that same call to a GET and you’ll get back a list of every custom button in your system and what each one does, handy metadata when you need it. Worth running in a sandbox or test department first before you loop it across a live org.
This Week’s Blog
Complete Payroll – Case Study
Big shoutout to Richard White and the team at Complete Payroll, an HR, payroll, and time-and-attendance company we helped migrate onto Zoho. The build connected their isolved payroll data through Analytics with a daily sync function, linked Zoho Desk tickets to the right CRM account owners, stood up a Zoho Creator quoting app fed from the CRM, and tied HubSpot in through Zoho Flow with embedded Analytics reports on the CRM home screen.
Tips and Tricks
Zoho CRM Plus 3.0 || New Release
Tyler walks through CRM Plus 3.0, which folds in apps like Backstage, marketing automation, and landing pages, plus his favorite, Brand Studio, for running email, social, webinars, and events from one hub.
Use AI to Build Emails in Zoho Campaigns
Wayne shows how he uses an AI assistant like Claude to generate clean HTML and CSS emails, branding and all, that drop straight into Zoho Campaigns without wrestling with the drag-and-drop builder.
This Week’s Quizzes
- Monday Quiz: What change was made to the fixed_groupby() function in the March 2026 update?
- Wednesday Quiz: In the custom approval workflow, what is the primary function of the “Approvals” custom module?
Ready to Level Up Your Zoho Implementation?
From advanced Deluge automation to comprehensive process design, our team of experts is here to help.
Book a Free Consultation