Zoho Recruit: Now with Improved Access Permissions and Data Migration

Here's a couple of enhancements from Zoho Recruit.

Access Permissions to view Client and Client Contact details

The relationship between Recruiters and Clients is the key to run a successful Recruitment Agency. Therefore, it is vital to protect all your clients' data from unauthorized access. Zoho Recruit - Applicant Tracking System now comes with Role based and User based permissions, which allows the Recruiter Admin restrict user access to Clients' and Client Contacts' data. Grant your teammates access to this data only when required.

Data Migration

Transferring your data from one source to another takes a lot of time and effort. Recruitment data from other Applicant Tracking Systems can now be moved into your Zoho Recruit account efficiently. You can choose from below the method that suits you best, for migrating your data to Zoho Recruit:

1. Import data from XLS, CSV and TSV formats - Using this method, you can import upto 1000 records at one shot.
2. Import data from DOC, DOCX, PDF, RTF, TXT, HTML and ZIP formats - This method helps you automatically parse upto 200 to 300 files at a time.
   
3. Migration tool - This method helps you to migrate huge data from any platform into your Zoho Recruit account, courtesy our integration with Rchilli.

Zoho Docs Gets A Fresh New Look And Feel

You probably must have noticed the changes in the

Zoho Docs UI by now.Zoho've completely redesigned Zoho's user interface with a fresh new look to improve navigation and to easily manage your's documents in the cloud. The new Zoho Docs UI has a cleaner, sleeker interface that will make it easier for you to navigate through yZoho's Folders, Workspaces etc.

Let us look in detail at what is new in this update

Easy-to-use Navigation

The new navigation system is simple and intuitive. It focuses on things that users do most often like say, going to a specific folder, workspace or group.

Drag-and-Drop Files

Uploading files to Zoho Docs just got easier. You can now upload files by just dragging and dropping them from your desktop on to the desired folders in the "Personal Folders" section. You can also drag multiple files at once. There are no plugins needed for this feature to work. This new feature uses HTML5 and so will work in browsers that support HTML5, like Firefox 3.6+ and Chrome 6+. 

Attach From Zoho Docs

Zoho love listening to Zoho's customers and quite a number of you had told us that finding documents when using Zoho Mail's

Attach from Zoho Docs

 was not flexible enough. Zoho have now provided more options to easily find and attach the documents from Zoho Docs.

Other Enhancements

1. 
   
   If you have documents shared to you, which are not relevant to you anymore, you can use the new
   
   Remove Share 
   
   option to remove the sharing. An email notification will be sent to the author of the shared document.
   
   
2. 
   
   Using the
   
   Unsubscribe
   
   option, you now have control on what Workspaces you would want to view in your Workspace section.
   
   
3. 
   
   You can now email documents present in Workspaces using the
   
   Send Mail
   
   option.
   
   

Collaborate in Zoho CRM with IM and Group Chat

Zoho CRM just got a couple new cool features: integrated IM and group chat. This, along with our CRM+Mail integration means that if you are a serious CRM user, you need not leave the same browser tab to accomplish all you need to do.

Instant Messaging (1-on-1 Chat)
A sales rep might want to quickly check some technical information with his pre-sales/technical-sales counterpart. Or maybe he is checking for availability. Or the sales rep might want to check with his manager about approval for some special deal.

These are the kinds of situations that the instant messaging in Zoho CRM addresses. Instant Messaging in Zoho CRM works just like you'd expect, and if you already use other Zoho products, you'll be familiar with it already. You can check if any of your contacts are online and instantly chat with them from the bar at the bottom of the screen. And of course that chat window stays with you as you navigate throughout your CRM system.

Chat Topics/Group Chat

In addition to 1-on-1 instant messaging, we are also introducing Group Chat and Chat Topics for Zoho CRM. This means that you can setup different topics inside your organization - for example, a chat topic for the Western sales region. Or a topic for all the people involved in that key customer account. You can then invite multiple people to that chat topic, and they will all be able to collaborate in real-time without having to leave their CRM screen. 

One additional benefit of the group chat, is that chat users who were not online during a particular discussion can catch-up about the discussion when they log back in.

Explore Zoho Reports

Formula Column
In addition to the base columns a table has, you can add a new column with a custom formula based on one or more of the table's other
columns. For example, say you have two columns for 'Sales' and 'Cost'.
You can define a custom formula 'Sales' - 'Cost' and add it as a formula column called 'Profit'. That's a simple example with the
difference function. There are a lot more functions listed based on type
- Date, Numeric, String, Aggregate, Statistical and General. Let's see
examples from each of these function sets.

Date: You can manipulate values of a given date column.

Example:
Let's say you have a column that has date values like 2011-01-01
12:30:48 (or say Jan 30, 2011). And you want to have a column that lists the corresponding day of the week. You can define the formula as weekday("Date").

    

Let's see another scenario for a date specific formula column. Say you want the number of days between a lead coming in and the sale getting closed. Or say, the number of days it takes to close a support ticket.  The formula to be used would be datediff("Date1", "Date2").

   

Numeric: Numeric formulas ranging from absolute value to mod to log to exponential to trigonometric functions like sin-cos-tan are all handled here.

Example
: Let's say you have some test data values in three columns and you want to list the greatest value of each row. You can define the formula as greatest("Column1","Column2","Column3")

  

String:
This type of formula functions deal with text values (known as 'string'in programmer lingo). Knowing the length of a given string, string concantenation (joining of two textual values), finding a substring, upper/lower case conversions etc are all dealt with here.

Example:
Here's a scenario. In one of the Date functions above, we saw weekday(date). What if you want only the first three characters of the weekday to be displayed? You can define the formula column like
left(weekday("Date"), 3)

    

Aggregate & Statistical : Functions like count, sum, average, variance, standard deviation, mean, median, mode etc

Example:
Suppose you want to calculate the column's average and find the difference for each row. You can have the formula as Column1 - Avg ("Column1"). Or say you want to calculate the percentage of a sale value to overall sales. The formula will be ("Sales"/Sum("Sales"))*100

   

General: If and ifnull functions.
Example:
There are instances where you won't like to have a null value. In such
a case you can have a formula defined something like ifnull(null, 0). All
cells with null values will get replaced by zero. Consider another scenario. Say different product categories attract different taxes. We can calculate the tax with the formula if("Product Category"='Stationery', "Sales"*0.05, "Sales*0.08). This calculates the sales tax for Stationery as 5% and for other product categories as 8%. We can even have nested if conditions. Like if("Product Category"='Stationery', "Sales"*0.05, if("Product Category"='Furniture',"Sales"*0.10,"Sales"*0.08))

   

Cricket World Cup Tracking with Zoho

Do you follow Cricket?
If you do, you must certainly be excited about the ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 that is going on right now.

So to help you follow all the action, we've quickly tossed up a Zoho Sheet that gives you a full view of the tournament. You can see the schedule, teams, group standings, and of course, statistics.

http://sheet.zoho.com/public/zohosheet/world-cup-tracker

For a hot spot on a particular day's match and the Group Standings, you can embed the following snippets in your website/blog:


Today's Match Snippet:

<iframe src='http://sheet.zoho.com/publishrange.do?id=8d056b549340aec604ca138274ab4312' frameborder='0' style='height:102px;width:288px' scrolling='auto' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0'>&nbsp;</iframe> Preview:

Group Standings Snippet:

<iframe src='http://sheet.zoho.com/publishrange.do?id=3ec08d610d7338e242d44f96071cef1e' frameborder='0' style='height:511px;width:432px' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0' scrolling='auto'> </iframe> Preview: Enjoy!

Installing Trixbox Remote Server

have been using Trixbox for a while and I think it is time to have documented how to install it without CD using a VPS.

First, Trixbox is a set of tools that help you to maintain Asterisk.
Asterisk is opensource PBX software. It allows you to have VOIP extensions using your network connections. For my case, I have deployed 5 extensions in 5 different location in 3 countries with no long distance charge. Moreover, I can use my VOIP extension anywhere as long as I have Internet connection.

I started to use Trixbox at home using virtual machine running on Citrix Xen, however with time you realize that your phone system needs to be reliable and keeping it at home makes that task complicated (power outage, hardware problems). So I decided to move it to a data center.
Trixbox installation at home was pretty simple task since you can get de ISO image and burn a CD. But the big question was how I can install it on server running Centos 5.3 (32 bits)*

Note: I have installed Trixbox on Centos 5.3 (64bit), however Trixbox was designed to work on 32bit so you will probably have some issues with libraries since the path on Trixbox has bee set up to /usr/lib instead of /usr/lib64.

Choosing Hosting provider. My current installation is running with Godaddy , the service has been excellent and the price is ok ($30 a month for 256Mb, 20GB server) however I found a hosting provider RackUnlimited that can provide you the same for only $8 a month. At this point, I have a server with RackUnlimited and I am going to show the process of installing Trixbox.

Installation Process

1- Login on the server and make sure you have all the basic tools that you need. RackUlimited provide me with a very slim version Centos 5.3 so I had to install some packages.

# yum -y install vim-minimal sudo postfix

Also I like to install webmin ...so I grabbed the RPM form webmin.com and I installed it.

2- Install essentials packages for Trixbox.

#yum -y install mysql mysql-server mysql-devel

MySQL database

#yum -y install httpd memcached php php-pear php-mysql
# pear install DB

Apache Server and PHP packages

Now we I have server with a LAMP enviroments

3- Add the Trixbox repo

#vi /etc/yum.repos.d/trixbox.repo

[trixbox]
name=trixbox RPM Repository for CentOS and RHEL
baseurl=http://yum.trixbox.org/centos/$releasever/RPMS/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

#yum clean all

4- Install asterisk

#yum install asterisk
#mkdir /etc/asterisk
#cp /etc/asterisk-1.4.21.2_samples/ /etc/asterisk

5- Start all services.

#/etc/init.d/mysql start
#/etc/init.d/httpd start
#/etc/init.d/memcached start
#/etc/ini.d/asterisk start

6- Install Trixbox scripts.

#yum install tbm-pbxconfig

7- Create Databases and users.

#mysqladmin create asterisk
#mysqladmin create asteriskcdrdb
#mysql asterisk < /usr/src/tbm-pbxconfig/SQL/newinstall.sql
#mysql asteriskcdrdb < /usr/src/tbm-pbxconfig/SQL/cdr_mysql_table.sql

#mysql

mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON asteriskcdrdb.* TO asteriskuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'amp109';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)

mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON asterisk.* TO asteriskuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'amp109';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

8- Install all Trixbox packages

#yum groupinstall Trixboxcore

9- Installing the amportal

#/usr/src/tbm-pbxconfig/install_amp

Accept the default values.

After this is done restart MySQL, Apache, memcached , and amportal.

10- Authentication for web interface

#mkdir -p /usr/local/apache/passwd/
#touch /usr/local/apache/passwd/wwwpasswd
#passwd-maint

user: maint
pass: ******

Finally you can access the Web interface.

http://serverip/

Note:
Time on Xen VMs is restricted by Dom0, so if you want to change the time in your VM you will have to do the following.

#echo 1 > /proc/sys/xen/independent_wallclock

to leave it perm do the following

#vi /etc/sysctl.conf
add
xen.independent_wallclock = 1

Change the timezone

#cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime

However you can install yo modify the time zone

#yum -y install system-config-date
#system-config-date

Adding G729 Codec .....

G729 is a voice compression protocol designed by Digium.G729 is capable of using very little bandwidth with good voice quality (8K). You can buy a license for this codec from Digium or use a free version (free version is not considered very stable).

This guy made a pretty good job showing how to use G729.
http://nigglingaspirations.blogspot.com/2009/10/installing-free-g729-codec-on-trixbox.html

Installing FREE PBX in Centos

http://www.freepbx.org/support/documentation/installation/install-process-for-centos-5-1