Disclosure: I work at Skyfall Labs, an official Zoho Partner, so I have a commercial interest. The facts below are from Zoho's own help pages, linked at the end; advice is labelled as advice. Originally published on skyfallhq.net.
Many teams edit their live Zoho CRM directly, break a workflow or layout, and then spend days untangling it. Zoho offers a sandbox for testing configuration first. This post covers what Zoho's pages say about it.
What the sandbox is for
Zoho says CRM admins can create multiple sandboxes in one account to test different configurations independently. It lists four types: Configuration (testing and deploying CRM configurations using your data), Sample Data (system-generated sample data), Partial Data (partial production data and configurations) and Full Data (end-to-end testing with complete production data and configurations). Check the live page for exactly what each type carries over.
Which editions have it
Zoho's edition guide lists Sandbox under Enterprise. The sandbox page says sandbox is available in Enterprise and Ultimate trial editions, and that a Full Data sandbox is available only for Ultimate edition users with 10 GB data storage. It lists different numbers of each sandbox type for Enterprise and Ultimate, so read the current table for your edition.
Deploying to production
Zoho's deployment page describes the route: open Setup, Data Administration, Sandbox, choose the sandbox, select everything in the change set for a full deployment or specific components for a partial one, click Deploy Changes to Production, then review qualified and conflicted changes on the Start Deployment page and fix any conflicts before proceeding. Users need the Manage Sandbox permission to deploy.
Zoho lists items that can be deployed, including profiles, roles, data sharing settings, automation, customization, workflow rules, Blueprint, templates, webforms and tags.
What does not carry across
- Records added, imported or created in the sandbox cannot be deployed to production, and data changes made in the sandbox cannot be deployed.
- Zoho says sandbox does not currently support Scoring Rules.
- Configurations assigned to or associated with a developer cannot be deployed to production.
- Emails sent from the sandbox, including those triggered by workflow rules or Blueprints, are not delivered to recipients, though they appear in the record's Email related list.
- Updating a field in sandbox and deploying overwrites the existing field properties in production.
- Conflicting changes (overriding names, exceeding feature limits, missing parent items) block deployment until fixed.
A safer routine (practical advice)
This routine is advice, not vendor documentation.
- Make one logical change per deployment so any problem is easy to trace.
- Write down what you changed and why before you deploy, using the change set as the checklist.
- Test with a real user's profile and role where you can, not only as an administrator.
- Treat features the sandbox does not support, such as scoring rules, as live-edit items and make them carefully, outside business hours.
- If your edition has no sandbox, keep notes of your current configuration and make changes one at a time with a plan to reverse each.
