Kaizen #151: Leveraging ZDK CLI with VCS to reuse components across different Zoho CRM orgs

Hello everyone!

Welcome back! In this week's Kaizen Series post, we will explore how to leverage ZDK CLI (Zoho Development Kit CLI) with a VCS (Version Control System) to reuse components across different Zoho CRM orgs.

Consider the scenario of a large industrial equipment manufacturer,  Zylker Manufacturing. Smith is the Zoho Partner responsible for customizing Zoho CRM for Zylker Manufacturing. Zylker Manufacturing's sales team recently transitioned to Zoho CRM, and they are looking for a widget based visual representation to represent the team's performance. Individual sales reps and managers want to see how close they are to meeting their target, compare performance across team members, and identify areas for improvement.  

Smith discusses this requirement with a fellow Zoho Partner, Olivia, and gets to know that her team has already developed an internal dashboard widget for the same requirement. Olivia agrees to share the widget with Smith.

Olivia has a team of developers who use ZDK CLI to develop each of their CRM use case specific customization and to interact with their CRM environment. They track & host those customization codes separately in their Github repositories.

   To share the logic of the widget with Smith, Olivia shares her Github repository corresponding to Team Performance tracking widget based dashboard. `https://github.com/OliviaConsulting/dashboard.git`. Smith forks this repository to his own GitHub repository `https://github.com/zylkermanufacturing/dashboard.git`. Note that these GitHub repositories do not exist and are mentioned for illustrative purposes only.

Flow depiction of component sharing between different Zoho CRM orgs

Olivia's GitHub repository

Smith clones the forked repository to his local machine.

Inside the `dashboard` folder Smith logins to the ZDK CLI using zdk auth:login command.

The zdk org:status command displays the list of modified files.

Smith then pushes the changes to his crm environment  using zdk org:push command. He can then try out the widget from his crm environment after associating.

Similar to widgets, ZDK CLI with VCS can also be used to reuse Profiles, Roles, Modules, Fields, and Layouts as well. 

For the current beta release, ZDK CLI will exclusively be available for Sandbox environment and will not be operational in Production environments. 

Using ZDK CLI with a version control system ensures better collaboration, accurate change tracking, and facilitates reusing components across different CRM orgs. 

We hope you found this post useful. We will meet you next week with another interesting topic!

If you have any questions, let us know in the comment section.

Happy Exploring!

Further Reading : ZDK Documentation                                                                                                                                                      

Previous Kaizen Post : Track and Monitor Activities in Zoho CRM using the Export Audit Log API

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