 OK, welcome to another technical tutorial video of my newly set up YouTube channel, just want to check the mic level here. Basically I'm just explaining today vTiger, just a workflow I implemented in vTiger. vTiger is one of the open source CRMs that are out there. So basically this is something you can host on your own server, whether that's an on-prem server or cloud server. I was using it for many years and then went into SAS CRM land. My business for those curious is technical, well not technical, but really working for technical clients. So writing services, specifically thought leadership, hopefully the website will look a bit different by the next time I make one of these. That's what I do and I always like to do stuff that scales and that uses automation wherever possible and try to cut down on grunt work. So certainly one grunt work activity I engage in is doing stuff that does not scale, as you say. Now some people say do stuff that doesn't scale, that's a motto I kind of have always been on the other side of the motto, which means that my systems tends to get better as I get busier. I like to kind of think of these things before the fact. So recently I built out this, documented this in my blog, I have a blog post up here about creating a custom module in Zoho to send clients work. So I have a few clients that I'm doing articles for and articles are the kind of most basic modular projects in my service offering and these to me seem like the most logical ones to build out a basic automation for. So what I did is this. I set up a few workflow rules to just kind of reflect the workflow and save myself from sending out these emails saying your article's ready, there's been a delay, this is a new date. So I created three. I've done this project before in VTiger, but this is just to show, this is just to show the functionality I'm replicating. One was article status updates. So that's when I created statuses saying system capture in progress, draft one, draft two, etc., telling them basically where their article is in my workflow, new delivery date is, if the delivery date that I set, the estimated delivery date changes, that'll tell them, you know, your article is delayed, your article, etc., and file delivery would be the one that says your article's ready, click the link to download it. So that I can use to avoid having to send attachments if I'm doing stuff like Google Drive shares, or sending it through, I use another open source document management system projects and the name was just evading me for a second. So I can use projects and put that in their account, get the public link, and drop that link into this workflow. So it's a custom module in Zoho, and I'll just explain why I'm interested, why I was interested in doing this in VTiger, because VTiger didn't work with my old host. They did not like it, and as a result I left it, and this new host, I'm using a host called Virotech Systems on their reseller hosting plan, Virotech.net, I highly, highly recommend them, they've been fantastic so far. So they, no problems using VTiger with Virotech, haven't run into any issues with cron jobs and stuff like that, so really keeping Zoho going, I'm paying 45 bucks a month for it, just to have this little workflow seems a bit stupid to me. Very easy to spend hundreds of dollars on SaaS services every month, and you know, if you have one, I would say a CRM is absolutely useful, if you have a whole team of people working on accounts, lead generation and stuff like that and a lot of accounts, but for this workload to send stuff to three or four clients just seems a bit unnecessary. So the point I'm saying is that the custom modules, if you are looking at that, just be aware that it's only on the enterprise tier, that's their top tier of the CRM that costs 45 dollars a month. By all means, if you're working with a lot of clients and you're using this module tens of times per day, it would certainly be useful and it did work nicely. So I built out this custom module in Zoho, I then filled it up with the fields I talked about, the download URL, expected, delivery date, these are all custom fields. Now I created a lookup to the account level of Zoho, and that's where I created another custom entity called account manager email. So what I do basically is for each account I am setting up, this is just a lookup, I create an account manager email, so that would be a Google group in which I add myself, it's a Google group so you're automatically added. So this is a really nice way, most CRMs have this functionality of BCCing you on client communications, I think implementing it this way at this level is a little bit more elegant because you don't rely on what the CRM has, what the ERP has in order to get those notifications. Everything sent to this account management email, you get a copy of. So this is just something I picked up, you see PR agencies do this all the time, they'll have an email address for their client, then it'll go to the client and all the account manager and the associate account manager, etc. So that's how this works and I created a lookup to an associated account. These are the workflow rules I showed earlier and this is the logic that they work to in Zoho, so basically whenever they feel the article status I update that, so long as it doesn't contain delivered because that's a separate workflow, system capture is something I use myself when basically I have a feel that I want to create entities, articles in the CRM and I don't want those to start sending email notifications, so that is why I added one of my pick list values as system capture and pick list is the VTiger terminology, it's called something else in Zoho, so that's what that is there for and suppressed client notification, this would be for when if it's again, if it's something that I don't want to send to the client by means of these notifications, that is what I will use. So that's like kind of a block you could say and this condition checks for that block being not selected and if it is selected obviously this will prevent the workflow from going further and then it sends out those emails, so this was what I did, these are the emails, this is like the kind of raw appearance, I then put that into a template just you know greeting the account and then telling them that the article has been finished and you can download it by clicking the link, it's extremely simple but it was effective and this is just my little system, how it looked in real life in Zoho, you can see the article name, the download link, this could be basically just this is just a save sending attachments and stuff like that, so cool script, usually I'm doing this actually as a Google drive, you know creating a shareable link, project send is another nice open source script, that's what you're into, you host it again on your server and you can drop deliverables into a client account, configure them to actually sorry probably but not to have notifications because you'll notify them this way and put the download link there, so that's another way to do this and as I said this once it's associated with an account that look up in Zoho will send it to the account manager email and not that custom field I set up and not all the other ones and then in current status I populated it was just about every conceivable status a project I'm working on could have, ranging from brief decline, additional information needed, draft for etc and that was it, so then they got these lovely emails and this worked great but I said given as I said that I'm subscribing to Zoho just to get this functionality, let's see if we could get this running in vTiger, so I'm going to now drop over to this screen, my vTiger setup so it's not as elegant I will be honest, if you go into our CRM settings here, look into modules, this I did not do this by creating a new module what I did was build it on top of tasks if I can find tasks, project tasks, so what I did was as follows, so at the organization level, this is just obviously a test account called Daniel Industries, this primary email is where I'm putting in those account manager emails, so that's an email for the organization and what I did then was I created these custom fields, my Zoho skills are going blank on me, module layouts and fields, so within tasks because tasks seem to me to be the most obvious related field, this is designed for capturing really stuff like client deliverables and projects and tasks as the name suggests, so I created again a bunch of custom fields within tasks and I'm kind of just hiding all these default ones with more or less the same information that I had in Zoho, your download URL, article title, brief, I haven't quite finished putting in all these fields because I'm just seeing if this is really gonna actually, it does work but if it's something I want to stick with, so that was it, so I have and then article status is, sorry, article stage actually should be in this group and that is basically it, so let me just see if I can figure out a way to save this because I have been, this layout is a little bit buggy, but anyway, so those are where I created the modules and then in Zoho this functionality is located within workflows, so if you go into automation and you go into the third one, scheduler is a good place to check that your cron jobs are running as they should be and workflows is where you can create the actual workflows, so VTiger comes with a bunch of these default workflows which have all disabled, they're designed for really typical CRM use cases, in other words telling people you can see send email to user when notify owner is true, I don't want any of the default built in stuff, I've just turned on, I've just created the same three, so let me just duplicate this tab and let's take a look at, for example, article delivery and I'll just show quickly, then I'll just wrap this up to show how you can achieve the same functionality more or less in Zoho, sorry, in VTiger as you can in Zoho, so this is the one that I was using, that I'm using for article delivery and it's very simple, I don't have the suppressed thing, I just have when the article stage has changed to delivers that the workflow actions are, you can update fields, you can create new records, custom functions or an SMS task, I just have this email and as you can see, I put myself in BCC but as I said, that's not really necessary given the fact that this is typically, this is calling from and if I can just go into this template, this is calling from account, the account level email, sorry, organization, so related to, so basically it knows what the top level, the organization level is and then you can just create their organization name, so I can say dear, etc, I could also create a different entity within the organization for a salutation, so that it wouldn't just say dear, you might want to say dear, blah blah, account management team and that's it and you can basically build a custom, so let me just show you this, you can put a custom field as the link, so this is, I created one of the fields that I created was the field for download URL and I can put download here and overlay that as a hyperlink and just put protocol to other and put in copy and paste the custom field identifier, cf is for custom field, into URL and click OK and that will make that hyperlink a denotable one and again this is kind of pre formatting so you can by all means upload a nice HTML template into your source view and just pull in all this information there as well, that's basically it, I'll just show you one more before I end this, the user just one, a couple more fields, so the article status update, I have three conditions actually on this one and these you put them in the first one, all conditions must be met and not in the second one, so you have all or any options for the workflow condition setting, this one article stage is not system entry, as I said I don't trigger it when I just capture them, it triggers whenever the article stage has changed but that article stage cannot be delivered in order than that, they don't get duplicate notifications because this delivered workflow will send and that's where as I said they have currently put this very basic skeleton template as well, so that's it this was basically the process of creating some workflows in vTiger CRM hosted on my own website in order to send deliverable updates to clients you can achieve this in other CRMs, cloud hosted CRMs managed by a third-party provider but you know if you're you might just like self-hosted CRMs or might have another reason but this is how that workflow can be achieved, hope this was of some use, always feedback is good, this is my website danielrosehill.co.il, you can complete a contact form and get in touch with me, so until next time