Zoho CRM: Introducing the first native integrations in your CRM's sandbox - Zoho Survey & Zoho Social

Sandboxes offer a safe way to replicate production environments, allowing for risk-free testing, training, and refining processes before making actual changes. One glaring omission in Zoho CRM's sandbox is integration support, which would make testing with production data and deploying integrations much easier. 

To begin the journey of addressing this gap, we are adding support for Zoho Survey and Zoho Social in CRM's sandbox feature. These would be the first native integrations being supported in the sandbox and we are on track for adding support for other native integrations in the future.

How to approach sandbox integrations?

In general, users can use the sandbox to test their integrations and then, deploy them to the production environment. Once deployed, the integration will be moved to the production environment and completely removed from the sandbox. So, updating the integration through sandbox is not possible. 

Test and deploy Zoho Survey in CRM's sandbox 

Integrating Zoho Survey in the sandbox is just like how you'd integrate it in the real production setup. You can practice sending surveys to customers without actually sending emails, find any issues, and train new sales reps before deploying it for real. 

Test and deploy Zoho Social in CRM's sandbox 

With the Social integration, you can monitor your brand's conversations, add new leads from your social media pages or handles, automate responses with social workflow rules, and so on. Before doing this for real, you can integrate a CRM sandbox with Zoho Social. Now, you can test out the tool with dummy accounts, get familiar with the Social tab, and fine tune your processes. Once you're happy with the integration, you can quickly deploy it to the production environment. Users with the social integration permissions (Social Admin and Personal Social Profiles) and Manage sandbox permissions will be able to deploy the integration to the production environment. 

 

Points to remember

Since your Zoho Survey/Social account can be connected to only one CRM account at a time (production or sandbox) , please note the following points: 

• Use the sandbox to test out a fresh Zoho Survey/Social integration. 
  
• When the integration is deployed to the production environment, it will be deleted from the sandbox account. 
  
• An existing Zoho Survey/Social integration in the production environment will not be copied to the sandbox during sandbox creation or rebuild. 
  
• If you have an existing Zoho Survey/Social integration in the production environment, you can integrate another Survey/Social account in a sandbox. This helps you try Survey/Social or train employees in a safe environment. 
  

Limitation 

Please note that you will not be able to deploy any changes to the production environment as long as the existing integration is linked with it. To do so, you'd have to deactivate the existing integration in the production environment. 

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