Business information today is buried within multiple applications like sales, finance, and marketing. But good business decisions demand unified views of this data. Zoho offers a suite of tightly integrated cloud applications that can run an entire business, serving as a complete business operating system. But we also integrate with other apps.
Zapier is an integrated platform that connects applications and automates the flow of data between them. It allows business users to retrieve data from different systems, based on specific triggers.
Today, we are happy to announce that Zoho Projects has been added to this platform, allowing users to connect with more than 500 apps accessible from Zapier.
How it works
This is best explained through an example. Let’s say you’re managing a construction project within Zoho Projects. You want to automatically create a task that validates the invoice against your contracts and alerts your accounting department whenever you receive a supplier invoice in your Gmail account. You would create a Zap.
Using the ‘Make a New Zap’ wizard, you would set the new email as the ‘trigger’ and set up, ‘create new task’ within Zoho Projects as the ‘action’ for that trigger. You can also configure the Zoho and Gmail accounts you want to use in this wizard and make things clearer by using the subject of the mail as the name of the task.
This is a simple example of what a Zap can do. Each app in Zapier exposes its own sets of triggers and actions covering ways in which data can flow into and out of it. Filters provide finer control. Picking what you want from these is just a matter of a few clicks and the automation you need is ready.
Ways to link Zoho Projects
You can set Zoho Projects either as a trigger app, or an action app. In the above example, it acts as an action app. If you want to create, say an event in Google Calendar whenever a new milestone is created in Zoho Projects, then the later would act as a trigger app. You could choose the trigger or action as any of the following:
1. Create a new project
2. Create a new milestone
3. Create a new task list
4. Create a new task
5. Create a new bug
Here are a few sample Zaps for you to check out: