Inviting customers to the portal.  We are trying to make this as easy as possible for our customers to gain access.  We already know their email address, it makes no sense for them to have to re-enter this in another page.  The only way to invite them is by using the 'private' setting and adding them so that they receive an invite.  However, even though we know their name, we can't use it as the portal has no entry that holds their name.  The default email invite refers to a random username created by Zoho that is not like their name and only confusing.  Thus we have to remove their name and greet them in the email without using their name.

Solution - allow customers in the customer portal to be from a defined form in ZC or from Zoho CRM.

The only way to have access to invite a customer to the customer portal is if you have developer access.  This means that an administrator in the business (who we do not want to have developer rights to our system) cannot invite customers to the customer portal.  I cannot understand why ZC has been implemented in this way.  Surely, the customer portal should be enabled to allow the developer to define a role that has the access to the inviting of customers to the customer portal?

Solution 1 - allow user roles to be defined that can invite customers to the customer portal

Solution 2 - open up the API to allow us to write workflows to invite customers to the customer portal  (Best Solution!)

Zoho has very recently increased the security requirements on passwords for the customer portal.  Where we could previously create simple passwords (eg test1234), now they have to have special characters, lower and upper case letters and cannot have sequential characters/ numbers.  This change was completely unnecessary for our implementation.  It would be far better to let the administrator/ developer define the security policy for passwords.

Solution - let the developer define the security requirements for passwords in the customer portal

We have created a page for the customer portal to allow customers to see the information on their project and complete actions (eg approvals and payment).  This was done in HTML and CSS.  There was no way to hide the main menu at the top.  The only solution was to code it so that it was hidden behind the info on the page - this is quite a weak solution (if the page loads slowly, the customer can identify that there is a menu in the background). 

Solution - make the menu completely  customisable to the point that it can be hidden