How to enroll into the New Custom Objects EAP

Is it possible to see current custom objects data in the new agent CO EAP? 

Hi @anton11 - The new objects are built in a completely new infrastructure, enabling us to build powerful integrations with other Zendesk support features like triggers while scaling for our customer needs. Hence the new custom objects will not automatically bring in the objects that you have already created in the current version. 

EDIT: It looks like most of my questions are included on the sign up form itself.  It would be good if that list was posted on this page to clarify the areas that aren't clear (and there are other details listed that aren't listed here).

Some questions about some of the items listed here: 

Permissions will not be available for EAP - What is the base level of permissions here?  Do agents get full CRUD? 

Account moves will be locked - What does this mean?

Custom object record list cannot be accessed by Light agents or contributors - Is this expected to change with GA?  We'd expect to be able to show custom objects to light agents in the future. 

@dan28 - Since that was a lot of text in the form, I just intended to call out the most important points in this article..

Permissions will not be available for EAP -> As we enable the feature tomorrow to the participants, Agents get full CRUD for any object created. They will also get a native UI when you create the object.. Having said that, we will be releasing Object level permission management on Custom objects for Custom Roles within this quarter itself to our EAP customers. The team is already half way through implementing it.

Account moves will be locked -> Some of our customers request for cross continent data migration to comply with data locality regulations. (this is an Account move).. As customers moved their data, their search experience on Custom objects would get impacted.. Hence we put this limitation.. However, we have a solution for this issue.. Let me work with the team and confirm that the solution is in place before I remove this limitation from the form

Custom object record list cannot be accessed by Light agents or contributors - The limitation is that list view is not visible to Light agents and Contributors.. They will be able to view the record details page.. Let's say there is a Store (custom object) associated with a Ticket through a Lookup field.. As a Light agent, when I get to the ticket, I can click on the Lookup field to view the details of the store.. This is similar to the experience for Light Agents and Contributors for Users and Org List view.. At this point, we are expecting this experience for GA as well.. Do you see any use cases that will get unblocked by Light agents not having access to the List view?

@ashwin11, thanks for clarifying on permissions and account moves.  As for light agents access, I think in general we'd be looking for light agents to see related records. I'm not sure if this use case would align with how you are thinking of a list of records for light agents. 

We are exploring a use case where we can link multiple note objects to an organization that are able to be created/read from the agent interface.  We would want a light agent to be able to view all related note objects.  I think we'd be okay with light agents not having access to a general list of these objects though without the context of the organization.  We were expecting to build an app to display these records to all agents, but if the organization's related tab would show all of the related records I think that would cover what we'd need from a light agent list view. 

Some other questions: 

• Will we have the option to search by metadata other than record name as part of GA?
• Will filtering/sorting be part of GA? In the example above, we are looking at an expiry date object to filter records out.  
• I mentioned organizations in the example above, will organizations/user lookup fields be supported here?  If so, to what extent?
• Will there be API access to this version of custom objects?  How would we manage these vs the existing custom objects? 

Hey @dan28! 
That sounds like a cool use case. Maybe you'd like to write it up as a tip, if it works out!? :) 

Good luck! Thanks! 

@dan28 - I agree with @jennifer16.. This does look like a cool use case.. 
To answer your questions. - Viewing list of related custom object records should be possible for a Light agent.

• Will we have the option to search by metadata other than record name as part of GA? - Yes, it would be available for GA (CC: @preethi12)
• Will filtering/sorting be part of GA? In the example above, we are looking at an expiry date object to filter records out.  - The Search API that we will release hopefully in this quarter will support sorting and filtering.. The Native UI may not have that right off the bat
• I mentioned organizations in the example above, will organizations/user lookup fields be supported here?  If so, to what extent? -  Lookup fields will be the future for creating relationships.. In your use case, you can create a "Note" Object.. And one of the fields will be a Lookup field which points to the Agent, another to the Requester and the 3rd one to the Organization.. When you get to the Organization, you can view all the notes created for that organization..
• Will there be API access to this version of custom objects?  How would we manage these vs the existing custom objects? - A whole new set of APIs will be available for the new custom objects.. I will share the details tomorrow once I enable the EAP.. These APIs will not work with the older version.. 

When looking at the Support page for Sunshine Events and Sunshine Profiles - this EAP is also linked up.

Does that mean that Profiles and Events are also on the roadmap to be integrated into the new Custom Objects experience?

Or are the new customer objects supposed to replace profiles and events?

Hi,

Will some of these functions be rolling out to Views? For example, in my business we have an Account Manager associated with each customer. We set the Account Manager via a User Lookup Field.

It would be amazing to to have the ability to have a View setup with the condition:

• Organisation Account Manager > (current user)

This would help give that Account Manager immediate visibility over their customers tickets.

@stephen32
You could achieve this functionality with the help of Triggers I believe.You could create a condition for Account Manager > AccManagerName  and then add a tag for "AccManagerName".

Then the Acc Manager could use the tag as a condition in a view. 
Only issue is, that you would need to create a Trigger for every single account Manager, but that is an issue in general with Trigger actions for lookup fields, what would help resolve this, would be to allow ticket_field and user_field placeholders in said trigger actions.

Hi @shayan11,

I as thinking of doing something similar, but I don't want to manage a heap of Triggers to achieve this and was hoping this EAP would help alleviate going that direction. I appreciate the thinking though! :)

@ashwin11 - is it possible to just enable the EAP on a Sandbox before pushing it to our live instance? I would like to understand if this will be able to directly resolve some problems we are currently experiencing on our Sandbox, before building things into the Live instance.

Hi @robert17 - Of course.. Thats what I would generally recommend as well.. Given that permissions are not yet ready (which we will be releasing this quarter), I would definitely recommend trying out the new custom objects in a Sandbox first. Sign up your Sandbox into the EAP and I can enable it for you

Hi @ashwin11,

Thanks for the feedback. I have put in an application - if it can only be enabled in the Sandbox, it would be appreciated.

Awesome.. Enabled it for you.

It isn't clear to me if we can get the data into Zendesk for related records.  Could custom objects be used in these use cases?

• Salesforce Account and all related Contacts
• Salesforce Account and all related Products Purchased

Or would custom objects only work to show the Salesforce Account data?

It can absolutely be used to build that relationships. In this instance, I have created an Object called Devices to capture all my company's devices.. And within each Device I have a lookup field which captures the user it is assigned to . When I go to John Doe's profile, I know exactly which devices have been assigned to this user. Similarly I have another custom object called License Assigments where I capture each license that has been assigned to a user. And when I get to the user, I know which licenses were assigned to John Doe.

@ashwin11 That is great to hear.  I'm assuming we can make that relationship to the Organization rather than the Contact as well .

Absolutely.. You can build any combination of relationships between your Tickets, Users, Organizations and Custom Objects..  It could be associating your product to your organization, defining an organization relationship (org -> org), associating your ticket to your product (ticket->product) etc.

Hi Ashwin,

Thanks for working on new and improved features for Zendesk.
Also glad to see that there is room for feedback.
I have some questions which I can seem to figure out.

A bit of background, Sparkly has 15 apps in your marketplace and over 7000 customers. The (legacy) custom objects record use is in the Millions-range.

a) Is there a way to hide an object in agent UI?
We have a few hundred customers relying on the (legacy) Custom Objects, as it stand they do not want to have these available in the ticket property list. 

b) Most accounts have some sort of light agent access (for finance people that do not work daily in Zendesk), they only can CRUD on a single type of custom object, will this stay possible?

c) A few customer have over a million records, where are the jobs endpoints for the new custom objects?

d) The apps need to backward compatible. Will the customers be able to use Custom Objects and legacy custom objects side-by-side?

e) Searching for custom object records doesn't seem possible like with legacy custom objects. This makes it impossible for our apps to use the new custom objects, when having larger data entries. When will this become available?

f) Is there a feature parity table somewhere?

Thanks for answering :)

Hi Sparkly team - Thank you for reaching out. I did reference you in my talk yesterday for a community event around Platform features.

a) Let's take an example of one of your apps - Voucher code - You want to store the voucher code in a custom object and relate it to a customer. But what you dont want to happen is for the voucher code to be shown in the Agent UI. Natively there are a few places where this data will show up:
1) List view of all the discount coupons created
2) When you get to John Doe's profile, you will see the related discount coupons that John Doe was assigned under the Related tab
There is a work around where you can provide no permissions for your agents and run custom objects read and update using the Admin logins. Permissions is a capability that will be available mid august, but it will only be available for Enterprise plans. And Light agents will have read only access.

However, I also received some feedback from other customers to support the capability of disabling custom object list view - which could alleviate a lot of your issues. I am looking into that option at this point.

Would love to discuss more specific details with you.

b) As of now we are only enabling read only access for Light Agents in our first release. 

c) We are looking to have asynchronous bulk APIs to support bulk view/edit/create/delete. 

d)For any customer who is already using Legacy version, they will continue to get it until we go through a formal sunsetting process. Any customer who is eligible for the new custom objects and hasn't used it, will only get the new custom objects when we go GA.. However, if you have customers who still need the legacy custom objects, you can definitely request for it through a service request and we can enable it for your customer. 

e) We will soon be releasing a Search API that will have a lot more capabilities around search and filtering. The new search will run across all text fields in a custom object and will also have enhanced filter options

f) The new custom objects will not be having Nested object structure. We currently do not have Array types in the radar at this point. You currently do not have integration with guide and sell at this point. Also, you will not be able to reuse object keys even after the object is deleted. We dont have an official page with the feature parity laid out at this point. However, I'd be happy to answer any follow up questions

Hi Ashwin,

Thanks for responding.

a) Voucher Code use and why an unlinked Custom Objects needs to be able to exist.

The use case of Voucher Code is rather simple, an agent provides a code to the customer dependent on how they manage this. The code is unique comes from an available custom object in a particular category. Once used, it's moved to another custom object. Light agent sometimes also do this for internal notes.

Agent (and admins) do not want to link these type of objects to a customer or a ticket. They just need it to be used once, and then add in the comment on a ticket. A single ticket can have 0 or many of these added. These codes especially do no need to show-up on the related tab of a user, because then any person that has access to that, could see the code.

b) Would it be possible to discuss a solution that works for this use case too?
Especially since our customers are (already) advised to switch to this EAP?

c) I think this is rather important before GA. Or should we start building migrations on the single type endpoints? 

d) Does this mean that the GA will have 100% feature parity with the (legacy) custom objects? Or does it simply mean some apps/features will no longer work?

e) Eager to learn about it :)

f) Okay, I'm waiting for the official feature parity table then :)

Again, thanks for taking the time to listen and respond 👍🏻

Hey @shayan11

Responding to a couple of questions above: 

• Does that mean that Profiles and Events are also on the roadmap to be integrated into the new Custom Objects experience?

Could you share more about how profiles and events could be integrated with custom objects?

• Or are the new customer objects supposed to replace profiles and events?

No, profiles and events remain as separate services available to customers.