New Zoho Knowledge Base integration not working?

[Sylvio5FB7]

With the new RoboHelp update (2020.4.173), Adobe introduced support for Zoho Knowledge Base output and the ability to create publish profiles that would publish contents directly to Zoho KB.

Unfortunately, despite many hours of testing and tinkering and back-and-forth communications with both Zoho and Adobe support, I was never able to make this work. During my many interactions with Zoho support, I was told something quite worrying by one of the second level analysts at Zoho Support (I'm paraphrasing here):

"RoboHelp seems to have no place for you to enter your ClientID and Client Secret, which is required in addition to your Zoho credentials before RH can make any API calls to Zoho KB. I don't see how this integration to Zoho KB could work if you can't enter these anywhere in RoboHelp."

I guess  the first thing I should ask is whether anyone managed to get this integration working despite what the Zoho Support analyst told me?

Detailed steps to reproduce the issue:

I’m essentially following the instructions from here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/robohelp/user-guide.html/robohelp/using/publish-zoho.ug.html

In the instructions above, the part that is problematic is the one about creating a “Publish Profile”, here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/robohelp/user-guide.html/robohelp/using/publish-zoho.ug.html#configure_publi...

Here are the detailed steps:

1. In RoboHelp, click the Edit menu and select the Publish Profiles option.
2. Create a new publish profile by clicking the + symbol.
3. In Server Type, select Zoho Knowledge Base.
4. In “Name”, enter the name of the profile you wish to create.
5. In Site URL, I copied the URL of our Zoho Knowledge Base site.
6. After that, I click “Login”. I was asked for my Zoho credentials, which I have put in. I was asked for my Zoho Username, Zoho password as well as the number provided by my authenticator app.
7. Once this is all said and done, I get an error message from Zoho saying: “Invalid Client – Client ID passed does not exist”.

This outcome seems to line up with what I was told by the Zoho support analyst. According to Zoho Support, the error message “Invalid Client – Client ID passed does not exist” means exactly what it says. Robohelp is either passing a generic (invalid) client ID used during development, or is simply not passing that value at all. It is also important to understand that the Client ID is something totally different from Zoho login credentials, which consists of an e-mail address used as a username and a password.

Any help on this matter would be much appreciated!

[Peter Grainge]

It's late here so for now I will suggest looking at the appropriate topic in the RoboHelp Tour on my site. If that doesn't help, post back and I will pick it up tomorrow. 

________________________________________________________
See www.grainge.org for free Authoring and RoboHelp Information

[Sylvio5FB7]

Thank you Peter!

I did check your site for extra insights, unfortunetely it does not help with the issue I'm having.

As it is now, following the instructions from either RoboHelp's online Help or from your site yield exactly the same results. I'm basically stuck at creating the publish profile, so I can't move on to configure the output preset.

[Peter Grainge]

I have reached out to someone who may be able to help.

________________________________________________________
See www.grainge.org for free Authoring and RoboHelp Information

[Mekala Raja Sekhar5CA0]

Hi @Sylvio5FB7,

We acknowledge the issue you are facing regarding publishing to Zoho, with Update 4 of RoboHelp. This seems to be a domain-specific issue and we will be fixing this in the next update (Update 5).

Thank you for bringing it to our notice.

[Sylvio5FB7]

@Mekala Raja Sekhar5CA0,

Thank you for the information.

Now, do you have an ETA for RoboHelp Update 5?

After all, this is a feature that was advertized with Update 4, but now we know that it cannot be used outside of India (on the zoho.in domain). As we now know, the integration doesn't work on the North-American domain (zoho.com), and the issue is most likely affecting other Zoho domains as well.

[Vivek Kumar]

Hi Sylvio,

We sincerely apologize for the issue. Next week we plan to have it ready as part of beta build. Would you be interesed in trying it out? Update 5 date is yet to be finalized but it is atleast a month away.

Thanks,

Vivek

[Peter Grainge]

@Sylvio5FB7 The update 5 beta is available now. If you want to try it, click on Vivek Kumar's image below and message him.

If you are concerned about using a beta version, you could install it on a separate machine and generate from a copy of your project.

________________________________________________________
See www.grainge.org for free Authoring and RoboHelp Information

[Peter Grainge]

CORRECTION

There is a beta version of Update 5 but for technical reasons it does not contain the Zoho fix. That will be in the next drop. I will post here when it is available.

________________________________________________________
See www.grainge.org for free Authoring and RoboHelp Information

[Sylvio5FB7]

Thank you for all your involvement in this matter. This is much appreciated! I sent a PM to Vivek stating my interest in testing a beta release.

I would definitely be up to try any beta release of Update 5 which contains the Zoho fix. (Albeit on a separate PC or VM with a test project)

Being a former QA analyst for a software company, I know my way around software testing and bug reporting! Also the fact that I have a real use-case for this integration keeps me highly motivated to see this through.

[Sylvio5FB7 · Accepted solution]

Hi!

This is just to let everyone know that Update #5 addresses the Zoho Integration issues mentioned in this thread. Update #5 goes much further though. During development and testing of Update #5, other issues with Zoho integration were identified and fixed, so I'm happy to report that we now have a great working solution. We can now publish and update articles through RoboHelp in a matter of seconds and it's great!

I would say that using this integration cuts publishing time by about 80%, when you compare having to edit/reformat articles directly in the Zoho UI after importing individual Word docs.

[Vivek Kumar]

Thanks Sylvio for posting the update. It was a pleasure working with you during the beta phase. Your inputs were immensely valueable to the team in making the product better. Your QA expertise certainly came to the fore 🙂 We look forward to work with you in improving the multilingual workflow.

Thanks,

Vivek