Zoho CRM sandbox: how to test changes before they hit your team

What the sandbox is

Zoho describes the sandbox as an isolated environment to test and validate business cases, and says an account can hold several sandboxes so teams can test independently. Internal users and outside developers can take part in testing outside the live CRM. Sandbox environments show a bright orange ribbon with the sandbox title, so people can tell it from production.

Source: Zoho Help: Sandbox overview, Zoho CRM Help: Creating and using sandbox

Sandbox types

Zoho's page lists four types: Configuration, Sample Data, Partial Data and Full Data. It gives counts per edition (Enterprise and Ultimate differ) and says Full Data is available only for Ultimate, starting with 10 GB of storage and rebuildable once every 30 days. Check the current table for your edition before planning.

Source: Zoho CRM Help: Creating and using sandbox

What deploys, and what does not

Zoho's deployment article says you can deploy everything in the change set or only items you select. A dependency check shows which items are qualified and which conflict, for example a field whose parent module is missing in production. Conflicting changes are held back until fixed.

Only configuration moves. Records added to the sandbox cannot be deployed to production. Scoring Rules are listed as not supported in the sandbox, and deployment support is not available for any integration.

Source: Zoho CRM Help: Deploy sandbox

Gotchas Zoho documents

Emails from the sandbox, including those triggered by workflow rules or blueprints, are not delivered to recipients; they appear only in the record's Email related list. Deploying a changed field overwrites the production field's properties, and Zoho's own example is a field mandatory in sandbox but unique in production. Deluge functions, client scripts and custom buttons are updated to production IDs and URLs only for Partial or Full Data sandboxes with records copied from production.

Source: Zoho CRM Help: Deploy sandbox

A change process (practical advice)

This section is advice from experience, not vendor documentation.

• Write down the change and the expected result before building it.
• Build it in the sandbox, then test with the real user roles, not just an admin account.
• Review the change set and the dependency check, and deploy in small batches so a problem is easy to trace.
• Re-check anything integration-related in production by hand, since integrations do not deploy.
• Tell the team what changed and keep a one-line log of it.

When to get help

If your CRM is business-critical and heavily customised, a partner can set up the process and run the first few deployments with you. Because Skyfall Labs is a Zoho Partner, weigh our view with that interest in mind.