Good day, new to Coda. I am thinking of signing up for the Enterprise level service, mainly to integrate Outlook Calendar, Mail and Zoom. As Coda will not do demonstrations for companies with fewer than 200 members, I am unable to get first-hand knowledge of how those integrations work, and if they will meet our needs.
I am hoping someone with experience with these integrations can answer the following questions:
- Can one create a task, meeting, or similar event, and have that populate a team members calendar (or have an invite sent to team members so they can add it to their calendar)? If yes, how does this work in practice? Does doing so mean the task resides in both Coda and within the individual’s calendar?
- Would updating or deleting a task, meeting, etc., delete the calendar invite? Would these updates be registered if executed in Coda? In Outlook? (e.g., if a person declines a meeting or task invite in Outlook, would, and if so, how, is this be expressed in Coda?
- Can team member’s calendars appear in Coda?
- How does sending mail from within Coda (as I understand one is able to do) work in practice? What are the steps? I’ve played with some features where one needs to fiddle with formula windows to make those types of integrations work, which would not be user friendly for most of my team members. (Of course, I could be doing something wrong, and I”m referring in particular to PDF printing packs, if that helps.)
- How does the Zoom integration work in practice? What steps does one need to take to schedule a Zoom meeting in Coda, and how is this data collected in Coda? (I know it resides in a table, and the Enterprise subscription refreshes table data regularly, but I am unclear in practice how this work, looks, and feels for users). I am trying to determine if the process would be more efficient than our current practice.
More generally, what is your experience with MS Outlook integrations? Zoom integrations? Where have you experienced issues and what works exceptionally well? What are some best practices, in your experience?
Thanks so much!
Hi Mark,
welcome to Coda and to the community!
The Enterprise plan is expensive, that is the reason they will only demo to larger companies… But I am 99% certain you don’t need it.
There are several packs in the Gallery that will allow you to integrate Outlook Mail and Outlook calendar with Coda. They are free if you have the Enterprise pack, and various prices (max $30 per month) depending on the plan level you are on and which pack you select.
The basic way in which they work is
- to import the data into Coda into a table - you can then create views of the tables, e.g. to have a page for a project, with all the mails relating to that project.
- as you mentioned, they provide formulas to send emails or calendar invites. I have never used the calendar in this way. For the email, I create a table, with columns for the addressee, the subject and the text body. (You could also use the Compose column type if you wanted to compose complex text bodies.) Then I have a button column that will send the email when clicked. That button column is put together by the maker, so that the users do not need to use the formulas.
I have not integrated Zoom with Coda, but there are several packs in the gallery that will assist with various aspects. The listing for the Zoom pack in the Coda gallery includes several example docs of how other people have used Coda and Zoom integration.
In general, the integration with packs are good. Refresh of the sync tables can be set daily, hourly, or to be done manually. (Depending on your plan level). The pain points will depend on your specific implementation.
But, it’s just a ramble,
Rambling Pete
BTW, you can also integrate with Teams, and with Azure.
@Piet_Strydom — Thank you so much for your quick reply. This may help you or others advise.
I am currently on the free plan evaluating Coda against Notion; but I believe we have chosen Coda, so we now need to choose a plan.
We are a team of six and I would be the only doc maker, at least for the next year or so. So, at 30/month for the Outlook pack (non-Enterprise), it just seems logical to just select Enterprise. As we plan to add (non-creator) team members, or even possibly clients, having more control over access to information may also prove useful. As we will likely have some client data, the SSO and SOC 2 feature, plus extra support, Enterprise seems best. But I will explore more carefully based on your recommendations. I’m also a bit leery of limited sync time, as during our busy months, things can move fast. As a comparison, we currently pay $720 a year for Airtable. We won’t need AT with Coda, so it amounts to the same annual cost if I am on the only doc creator.
A few followup questions for you, if you don’t mind.
- Is the “mail table” you mentioned easy for anyone to use? For example, could one expand a row, enter email, subject, message, and hit the “Send” button, or is there more to it? Could the “to” email be pulled from a “Contacts” table? Can one enter more than one email address in a single cell, or does one need a separate column for each? Could the email table be a form, making it more obvious for users what to do? (With the table being another view?)
- Why have you not used the calendar invites? Is this due to ease of use, reliability, overall usefulness? Maybe I am assuming it would be more valuable than it is in practice? I guess I’m thinking my team would benefit from at least seeing my calendar, with all my availability.
- As for Zoom: do you not use Zoom, or was there some other consideration that might be valuable to know about?
- If you have experience with the SSO, SOC 2, finer grained access control functions, and want to share your experience, or recommendations, please do!
Coda Software Pricing 2024 - Get the Lowest Price & Never Overpay says that the average Enterprise plan is $30 000. Even if they over-estimate by more than an order of magnitude, saving $30 a month is not going to be worthwhile. If the SSO and SOC is worth that much, yes, then go ahead.
- There will need to be two tables, one sync table for the sync to Outlook, and another to prepare emails to be sent. The Outlook sync table has some standard columns, you can, and will , add additional columns to classify emails, mark them as complete, etc. Exactly how you do that will depend on how you currently use Outlook, your folder structures, etc.
The send emails definitely should be a table, I go into some details in my previous comment.
2, I have had no need to bring my calendar into Coda. yes, your team could see your calendar in Coda, but they can also do so in Outlook. I do see a benefit if you wanted to make your calendar visible to your customers.
- My employer runs a Microsoft shop, we use Teams.
- No experience.
P
Enterprise starts at $5600/yr for 5 makers fyi
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Most users of Coda do not need to be makers, which I’m guessing for most companies will be confined to their IT department heads and a handful of creatives, so $30,000 seems like a stretch as an average.
That said, re: the Outlook pack, we found that it did not work for our needs due to its present incompatibility with on-premises exchange servers. Maybe that will change, but for now we’ve had to forgo the integration.
Re: Zoom, the integration is excellent although a little constrained. We have been able to set up notifications on dedicated channels triggered by key actions/ buttons in the system. It’s taken a few of our most complex interdepartmental processes from chaos to streamlined. Highly recommended.
Hope this helps.
Excellent, thank you! We don’t have self-hosted Exchange servers, but gives me something to check on with our IT support.
That is their estimate of ENTERPRISE costs.