Zoho Creator for Your Domain

Overview

Create a Zoho Creator domain account to collaborate, communicate and share your custom built Zoho Creator applications across the different departments in your organization. The domain account offers a dedicated workspace and a verified administrator for managing your applications. The administrator can nominate developers and users for that workspace. Developers can create applications in the workspace and share it within the organization while the users can access the applications shared to them.

Account Types

Zoho Creator Personal account:

A personal account is used to create and manage personal applications. The personal account can be created with any email address, such as the email address you have with your organization, or with any web mail address (@yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, etc.

Zoho Creator Domain account:

A domain account is used to create and manage custom built applications across the different departments in your organization. It is created with the @my-domain.com email address.

Verify domain ownership

You must verify your domain before we can activate Zoho Creator services for your domain. You can verify your domain in any of several ways, depending on which is most convenient.

CNAME method

The steps to create a CNAME record with your domain host is given below. The instructions may be slightly different for each host.

1. Sign-in to Zoho Creator and select Settings -> My Account from your Home page.
2. Select the Account Type as "Domain Account"
3. Select the CNAME method to verify your domain ownership by creating a CNAME record with your domain hosting service.
4. Sign in to your domain hosting service and locate the DNS management page. For help, contact your domain host directly.
5. Create your new CNAME record by entering a Host Name/Alias and Value/Destination as shown below.
   

   CName (Host Name)	Value
   zc<name>	creator.zoho.com

6. Your DNS providers can take upto 24 hours (which may be even less) to update the CNAME entry from their side.
7. Once the CNAME entry is Active in your DNS, click on the Verify and Save button displayed below the "CNAME method" option.
8. If CNAME verification is successful, we'll activate your Zoho Creator account as a domain account.

HTML method

Uploading an HTML file to your domain's web server is one way to verify domain ownership and activate your domain account. Please find the steps given below to do this:

1. Sign-in to Zoho Creator and select Settings -> My Account from your Home page.
2. Select the Account Type as "Domain Account"
3. Select the HTML method to verify your domain ownership by uploading an HTML file to your domain's web server.
4. Open a text editor (wordpad/notepad), copy the verification code provided by Zoho Creator into the text editor and save the file as "verifyforzoho.html".
   Verification code : zc<name>
5. Please note that the file should contain only the code and no html tags.
6. Upload the file "verifyforzoho.html" in to the root folder (top-level folder) of your domain's website.
   http://your_domain.com/verifyforzoho.html
7. Open any browser window and go to the address of the uploaded file on your website, as in http://your_domain.com/verifyforzoho.html. (Be sure to replace your_domain.com with your actual domain name.)
8. If the file uploaded correctly, you'll see the string of characters that you uploaded in your browser.
9. Return to the verification instructions in your Zoho Creator Account Settings page.
10. Click the Verify and Save button displayed below the "HTML method" option. This prompts Zoho Creator to check for this HTML file at the same address you viewed it. Once we find the file, we'll activate the account as a domain account.

Contact Support

If you have failed to verify your domain with the CNAME or the HTML methods, you can always send a mail to support [at] zohocreator [dot] com, so that we can help you with verifying your domain ownership. Do send us along a screenshot of the DNS management console page from your hosting provider so that we can assist you accordingly.

Customizing Domain URL

Once your domain is verified you can customize your domain URL. To customize the domain URL, follow the steps mentioned below

1. Go to Zoho Creator Home page.
2. Select "Domain Customization" on the left.
3. Type your "Sub-domain" in the "Custom URL" field.
4. Click "Save".
5. Login to your domain from DNS.
6. Go to "Manage Domains" and map the sub-domain with the host name/ip "customer-creator.zoho.com".
7. Save the changes made.

Now you can access Zoho Creator with the Customized URL

Zoho Creator Home Page

Admin Home page

The administrator who logs in to Zoho Creator using the domain account will be able to create new applications in the domain, access all applications in the domain, manage users, upload logo, backup applications, view and change subscription plans. A screen-shot of the Admin home page is given below.

Developer Home page

A shared user with role as "developer" will be able to create and access his applications from the My Apps link, access shared applications from the Shared Apps link displayed on the left-side of the Home page.

User Home page

Shared users with role as "user" will be able to access only applications shared by the administrator, from the Shared Apps link displayed on the left-side of the Home page.

Sharing

The administrator who creates the Zoho Creator domain account will be able to share the application,

• with individual users and groups,
• with all domain users
• make public to all visitors over the web
• with external users, outside of his domain.

Please refer Sharing for more information.