Introduction

Custom Solutions Platform enables you to effortlessly transform your industry expertise into ready-to-deploy multi-platform cloud applications. This is achieved by harnessing the power of our low-code platform Zoho Creator, along with custom configuration options such as custom pricing, APIs, portal, and so on. You can build applications (called custom solutions) in a sandbox mode, test them in a testing environment to ensure full functionality, and then publish it for your clients. These solutions will act as stand-alone SaaS web applications to which your clients can subscribe.

Basic Terminology

• Custom Solution: An independent SaaS with the capability of serving multiple clients. Build an application using Zoho Creator, define custom configurations such as pricing, and release your custom solution.
• Environments: Isolated spaces where you can build, test, and deploy your solution. Each environment will have a different purpose. There are three environments available for you:
  1. Sandbox Environment: An environment where the development of the application happens, without affecting the other environments.
  2. Stage Environment: It is a pre-production environment (testing environment) where you can publish your sandbox changes as a version, and test your solution. You must add stage accounts (testing accounts) to test your solution.
  3. Production Environment: This is the environment in which your clients will access your solution. If your changes have been tested in stage environment and are ready to go to clients, then you can publish the stage version to production environment.
• Version: Version refers to a set of changes that are collectively published to the Stage environment (and subsequently moved to production.
• Clients: Customers who use your solution. This only includes customers subscribing to your service, and not the users inside their accounts.