Zoho Creator 5 introduces a new sharing model for how Users and the Customer Portal are managed within an application. To move onto this improved model, Zoho is rolling out an upgrade that needs to be run individually for each app in your account that is still on the older C4 sharing model. Before the upgrade is confirmed, you are shown a preview of exactly how your existing permissions and configurations will be mapped across to Creator 5, giving you the chance to review everything before committing.

Before you start: eligibility

There is one prerequisite for the upgrade: any inactive profiles within the account must be removed first. An account with inactive profiles still present is not eligible to upgrade until they have been cleared out.

How to upgrade Users and Customer Portal to C5

1. Open Account Setup. Navigate to the Account Setup page.
2. Go to Updates. Under General, click Updates.
3. Start the upgrade. On the Updates page, find the Users and Customer Portal upgrade and click Get Started next to it.
4. Review your apps. You will see a list of applications in your account that are still on the C4 sharing model.
5. Upgrade or notify. For apps where you are the app admin, an Upgrade button is shown. For apps owned by someone else, a Notify button appears instead, which emails the app admin to let them know the upgrade is pending.
6. Check the status. Each app shows a status of Not Initiated or In Progress. Once an app's upgrade is complete, it disappears from the list. You can filter the list by status (Not Initiated or In Progress) or by ownership (Owned by Me or Owned by Others).
7. Open the app. Go to the required app and click Upgrade.
8. Start the upgrade from Settings. You will land on the Users section under that app's Settings page. Click Upgrade in the top banner to begin.
9. Confirm you understand. A confirmation pop-up appears. Click I Understand, Proceed to continue.
10. Review the C5 preview. You will be shown a preview of how Users and the Customer Portal will look in C5, and can confirm the upgrade once you are satisfied with it.

While reviewing the preview, note that all shared users and profile-based users from C4 are mapped to newly created permission sets in C5. A Permission Details document is available for each user, setting out their C4 permissions alongside their new C5 permissions, and an Export and Send Permission Details option can produce this document for all users at once. The Customer Portal page shows the equivalent list of customers and their new permissions. You cannot make any changes to Users or the Customer Portal until the upgrade has been confirmed, and once confirmed, Users and the Customer Portal are both upgraded together at the same time.

Restrictions while the upgrade is in progress

Once you click Upgrade to begin the process, a set of temporary restrictions apply until the upgrade is confirmed:

• You cannot carry out any operations in the Users or Customer Portal sections until the upgrade is confirmed.
• You can view permissions and configurations in both the old version and the C5 preview, but you cannot modify them during this period.
• The following Deluge tasks are skipped and will not run while the upgrade is in progress: assignUserInProfile for app users, deleteUser for app users, assignUserInProfile for portal users, deleteUser for portal users, and the share and unshare statements.
• User management actions for the app carried out through Zoho One or Zoho Directory will not work.
• New users cannot sign up to the Customer Portal, and existing users cannot change their email address, until the upgrade is complete.

What changes once the upgrade is complete

Some behaviour in C4 works differently, or no longer applies, once an app has moved to C5:

• Each user's C4 permissions, whether they were a shared user or mapped to a profile, are evaluated and mapped to a corresponding permission set in C5. Users who shared the same profile in C4 can end up in different C5 permission sets if their individual Restrict Visibility settings differed, so it is worth checking every permission set created during the preview.
• If a component was shared directly with a user in C4 using the Share option, without any profile assigned, that user is assigned the CEO role after the upgrade.
• Certain permissions previously governed by Restricted Visibility are granted by default in C5 wherever the related base permission already existed: Add Record if the user could already add records, Duplicate Record if they could add records, Bulk Edit if they could edit records, Import if the form's Import permission was enabled, Export/Print if the form's Export permission was enabled, and Search if they already had access to view the relevant report.
• C5 does not support sharing application components with individual users directly. Access is granted only through permission sets, which is why the Share and Unshare Deluge tasks stop working after the upgrade. Instead, you will need to create new permission sets in C5 with the equivalent access and assign users to them using the Assign Profile to App User Deluge task.
• A default Customer permission set, granting view access to all forms, pages, and reports in the application, is created automatically for the Customer Portal as part of the upgrade. You can review and adjust this default permission set once the upgrade has been confirmed.