Zoho Announcement on CRM Activities Module Changes
Zoho has announced, as seen below, significant changes to the CRM fuctions for Calls/Tasks and Meetings... generally considered "activities" in the CRM. As we saw it, the Activities Module in Zoho CRM was a convenient umbrella, that grouped together Calls Meetings and Tasks. https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/community/topic/deprecating-activities-module
This upcoming change will impact Views/Reports and Dashboard representations of these metrics and may require updates in your CRM. Note that there will be no loss of data as Zoho executes on this change, but if you previously had any reports or dashboard views that were pointed to the Activities Module, those will need to be re-built and pointed to the individual Tasks, Meetings or Calls modules.
Feel free to contact us at help@zohelpers.com if you have further questions on how to manage this System change, outlined below by Zoho.
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Deprecating Activities Module
Activities module split into Calls, Meetings, and Tasks modules was released to all customers by Jan 2022. Customers who signed up Zoho CRM before that release would have the Activities module along with Calls, Meetings and Tasks modules. Now, we are going to deprecate the Activities module by Nov 1, 2023. We'd like to reiterate the multitude of benefits of using the Tasks, Meetings and Calls modules individually over the Activities module.
The previous set up posed hindrance in materializing a few enhancements planned for the Calls, Meeting and Tasks modules. By having them as individual modules, we will be able to address those technical difficulties and rollout the enhancements at the earliest.
Why the split?
Calls, meetings and tasks have their own unique functions and do not have any fields in common amongst them. When you apply a filter operation or add columns in the list view, there is no common fields amongst the tasks, meetings and calls so the operations are performed standalone. For example, when you apply a filter with task fields, only the task will be displayed—not meetings or calls. So having unrelated tasks, meetings and calls in the Activities module does not have any meaningful operations. The sheer variety of fields and functions unique to each other makes activities module ineffective for practical use and also stands complex in giving new enhancements.
Due to the uniqueness of tasks, meetings and calls, we are unable to operate them in the same module. But, Zoho CRM understands that there are places where it's necessary to display them all together, like the open activities, closed activities related lists and Calendar. So in Zoho CRM, you can still see calls, meetings, and tasks from one place wherever necessary. Overall, we would like to retell that the need to see them together as a module is not necessary as there is no real use case.
What are the benefits?
The inclusion of the calls, meetings, and tasks module has the following benefits:
- Users can perform mass actions for calls, meetings, a tasks modules, individually.
- Administrators can configure separate data sharing settings for each module.
- Profile permissions - Can provide individual permissions for each of the modules
When will the deprecation take place?
The deprecation of the Activities module will take place by November 1, 2023. We hope you have enough time to move your operations and configurations from the Activities module to the new modules. Zoho CRM will display a banner to remind you of the deprecation of the Activities module until deprecation. This banner will be displayed until the deprecation. Alongside this banner, we plan to show an alert message for all components linked to the Activities module that are slated for deprecation.This alert message aims to facilitate straightforward identification of the components affected by the deprecation.
Activities deprecation banner
The banner will display the list of modules that will be affected by the deprecation of the Activities module, which are as follows:
- Reports
- Dashboards
- Home page components
- Motivator components
Clicking on these hyperlinked modules will redirect you to the corresponding modules, where you can manually transfer content to the Tasks, Meetings, or Calls modules, accordingly.
Activities deprecation alert
Apart from the banner, a small alert pop-up will also be displayed for all components associated with the Activities module.
Things to do before the deprecation
After the Activities module is completely deprecated, the components associated with the Activities module will also be deprecated, so it's important that you make the necessary changes outlined below.
Moving your operations
With the forthcoming deprecation of activities and their related components, it will be necessary for end users to recreate these components within the Calls, Meetings, and Tasks modules. The following components currently associated with the Activities module will need to be recreated:
- Reports associated with Activities module
- Dashboards associated with Activities module
- Home page component associated with Activities module
- Motivator components associated with Activities module
Please note that the migration process will require manual recreation of each view, as it is not feasible for us to automate the migration.
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