Let us look at the possible issues an external user who is trying to join Cliq might face and the solution to help them have seamless collaboration with Cliq.
Case 1: A user whose account is registered in a different DC invites a non-Zoho user to access Cliq.
A user from India, registered in the US DC, invites an external contact from India. The external user, accessing Cliq from an Indian IP address, accepts the invite and gets registered in the IN DC. As a result, communication between them becomes restricted due to their accounts being in different data centers.
Solution:
You can delete your account from the IN DC.
Create an account (https://www.zoho.com/r/signup.html) and select the country as "United States" to register in US DC.
Now, you will be able to communicate with the user as an external user.
Case 2: A non-Zoho user tries to join the company of the user who has sent an external user invite as an internal user.
A user sends an external user invite to a non-Zoho user. The non-Zoho user accepts the invite and creates a Zoho account. While trying to use Cliq, they are asked to "Join an existing organization" or "Setup your own business". The user selects "Join an existing organization" and enters the email ID of the person who invited them. This means that the user is trying to join as an internal user of the organization.
Solution:
External users should be part of an organization or setup an organization to be able to collaborate with users.
A user wants to send a contact invite to an external user or add them to an external channel, but the external user's mail ID isn't shown in the suggestions.
Solution:
The user should check if their role has permission to chat with an external user or create an external channel. The user should also check if the org admin has disabled the policy to chat with external users.
The admin can enable the following to give access to the user:
Navigate to the Admin Panel > Permissions.
Select Roles, and under Direct Messages, check if "Send Message" option is enabled for external users. Under Conversations, check if "Use" option is enabled for external channels.
Select Policies and enable "Allow chat with users who are not a part of this organization."
Case 4: A Cliq user is not able to join an external network.
A user tries to join an external network upon invite but receives an error response and is not able to join. This would be because the admin has disabled the policy to join external networks of other organizations.
Solution:
The admin can enable the following to give access to the organization.
Navigate to the Admin Panel > Permissions > Policies.
Enable "Allow users to access networks created by other organization."
Case 5: An external channel is not available while creating a channel.
A user wants to create an external channel but is not able to see the option. This is due to the following cases:
The user has a free plan.
The Create External Channel option is disabled for the user's role.
External channel option disabled under channels.
Solution:
The admin can enable the following to give access to the user:
Your admin can make you a paid plan user.
Navigate to the Admin Panel > Permissions. Select Roles and check if the "Create" option is enabled for external channels.
Navigate to Admin Panel > Configurations > Conversations and enable External channels in Channels.