You wouldn’t think that exporting contacts from an online CRM would be difficult however when I went to export ZOHO contacts, it sure went out of their way to! I also found trying to update them (via the web interface) time consuming and frustrating. I wrote an API call that automated the exporting of contacts from my account.
The below video documents how the API call automated my export ZOHO contacts and then builds a hyperlink which allows me to easily link back to an individual record. API / Web services are similar to but different than web scraping in that the API call allows you to be very specific with your query and doesn’t return all the HTML content (which greatly increases the size of the payload)
Export ZOHO contacts
You might find this Kindle book interesting if you’re migrating your database to the cloud.
