I do believe Zoho is moving to unified everything, and tasks will be the game-changer. You hear Zoho talking about their "stack" - the way that Analytics is being built into every app, is probably the first way they're doing that now. At Zoholics Sydney, they talk about "product as a feature". So like analytics is a feature within every product, I think tasks will be a feature within every product, which means every new product they build they won't have to build a new tasks module, they just plug-in the "task" component of the stack. How you can see that might be architected can be seen in the Unified tasks view in Mail Tasks, where they leverage certain commonatlities - task titles, due dates, assignees, etc, to aggregate them together but additional app specific data is built on top of that core. So from a database perspective they necessarily need to create a task table that suits everything, each of the additional task features (and associated tables) you get in Projects/Desk etc, just needs to reference that core.
Unfortunately the expand/collapse of the menu on CRM for Everyone is really funky. If works fine just in modules, you collapse it and then the menu popus up and then goes back to collapse. However, when you want to change to analytics the dynamic expanding menu doesn't work, so the system goes back to expand. Which means you can't just be in collapse mode the whole time, you have to keep selecting the collapse option every time you change between the left hand items. Annoying.
I do believe Zoho is moving to unified everything, and tasks will be the game-changer. You hear Zoho talking about their "stack" - the way that Analytics is being built into every app, is probably the first way they're doing that now. At Zoholics Sydney, they talk about "product as a feature". So like analytics is a feature within every product, I think tasks will be a feature within every product, which means every new product they build they won't have to build a new tasks module, they just plug-in the "task" component of the stack. How you can see that might be architected can be seen in the Unified tasks view in Mail Tasks, where they leverage certain commonatlities - task titles, due dates, assignees, etc, to aggregate them together but additional app specific data is built on top of that core. So from a database perspective they necessarily need to create a task table that suits everything, each of the additional task features (and associated tables) you get in Projects/Desk etc, just needs to reference that core.
Unfortunately the expand/collapse of the menu on CRM for Everyone is really funky. If works fine just in modules, you collapse it and then the menu popus up and then goes back to collapse. However, when you want to change to analytics the dynamic expanding menu doesn't work, so the system goes back to expand. Which means you can't just be in collapse mode the whole time, you have to keep selecting the collapse option every time you change between the left hand items. Annoying.