Login to website using username and password stored in Zoho CRM

[Newbie_Zoho]

Hi all,

Well, as the name suggests, I'm a newbie here. Trying to take the best from Zoho CRM and mix it with PA. Have a few questions:

1. Zoho CRM is 100% web-based. Our users login on their Chrome browser. This immediately raised the hopes that we can avoid PAD (desktop) and stick to 100% PAC (cloud). Sadly, after playing around a little bit I believe that PAC is actually not going to play nice with Zoho CRM. So, the following questions are based on using PAD.
2. If indeed using PAD - Does it mean all users in our organization will need to install PAD on their machines, including the browser extension, etc.? By working with a cloud-based CRM we have been hoping to avoid any kind of special installations on physical machines. If indeed such as installation  is mandatory, can we install remotely, without asking the user to do anything? (zero clicks, zero "accept", etc.). 
3. Now we drill down to a specific use case:
   1. We need to login to 3rd party websites on behalf of our clients. This is of course fully documented in our agreements with them and it's 100% legal. We store their username and password to such sites inside the Contact record in Zoho CRM.
   2. I'm ashamed  say but currently this is a manual process. The users copy and paste the username and the password to such 3rd party websites. Furthermore, the need to manually logout from a specific client and log back in using another client username and password. Please help us stop this shameful process 🙂
   3. My idea was to add an URL link/button inside the Contact page in Zoho CRM. The URL will be something like (assuming we have no alternative but to use PAD): 
      ms-powerautomate:/console/flow/run?environmentid=Default-xxxx&workflowid=xxxxx&source=Other&Username=XXX&Password=XXX
   4. Yes, I know this is a security breach and we are basically exposing the username and password. I'd be happy to hear recommendation on how to avoid this. Perhaps with a HTTP request? (=webhook?)
   5. I tried to setup input variables in PAD and I than passed such external names in the URL, as shown above. The actual values of the username and password will of course be populated by Zoho CRM.
   6. As for the challenge of logging in and out of multiple users, I was thinking about clearing cookies and cache when launching the URL. Will this work?

Sorry, made it into a very long story. If we cut it short: our users will see a button inside a Contact details page in Zoho CRM. Button will say "Login to YYYY". Once clicked, the user will be logged into the contact personal portal on YYYY website. Once they conclude what they need to do on behalf of this client, they'll close the newly opened window. They'll then do the same exact process with another clients, and another...

I'm sure I made it very hard to understand what we're looking for but I'd like to hope that someone out there can see past the ocean of words and solve our challenge 🙂

Thanks

[Agnius]

Hi. I'll just try to provide some comments to some of those points there:

1. Using Power Automate Cloud is only available if you do not need to use any UI. While you could probably get the credentials from Zoho via their API, your actual task is to login to another web page. And, as far as I can tell, you only want the login to be done automatically, while the user should perform some other actions on the web site. This means that you do in fact need to automate a web UI and thus you do need PAD. If you wanted the entire flow to be done automatically and the users were not needed to do anything on the 3rd party page, you might be able to automate everything in PAC, if this 3rd party page also supported APIs.

2. Yes, PAD and the appropriate browser extension will need to be installed. You can probably install it silently as any other software, but am not sure about the extension. This might need to be done manually.

3. You will likely have trouble launching this via cloud flows to make the cloud flows run a desktop flow afterwards. This is because you will need to make sure that you also provide some means of identification to which machine to run the flow on. Assuming you have a large user base, it will be a pain to build and maintain a flow that automatically finds the machine based on the user name. Also, there is no way to provide a machine to run the flow on dynamically. It is attached to the specific connection that is used in the flow. While you can have multiple, again, it will be a pain to maintain such a flow. Instead, I would suggest trying to invoke a PAD flow directly on the machine, since it is an attended flow anyway.

Secondly, you do not need to provide any credentials to the flow. It can retrieve those from Zoho via its API. You just need to build the flow that does this automatically. 

As for multiple users - you will be doing this on separate machines for each user, so I see no reason for clearing cache and cookies. You could also do it, but it's not absolutely necessary and usually makes the browser launch a bit slower. Unless, of course, you intend multiple users to be using the same machine?

[Newbie_Zoho]

Hi,

Thanks for your detailed response.

We have multiple users (=employees), each with their own machine.

Each such user (along with his/her machine) will need to access the same website using multiple credentials. Each such credential is the username, password and national ID number of a specific client.  As each user (=employee) needs to access data related to multiple credentials (=clients), I have suggested the cache clearing. 

Please explain further about the way to trigger an API (say Zoho's) from within each such machine. Doesn't it mean each such machine will need its own API token (which they do not have of course)?

Thanks

[Agnius]

Okay, since a single user would be using multiple different credentials, it does make sense to clear cache. Alternatively, you can build your flow to check what kind of a page it loads (whether it's asked to log in or is already logged in) and make it log out if it's logged in. This also works. Normally, in our flows, we make the flow log out of the web page at the end of the flow. But since you need your users to perform some actions manually after the flow logs in, that won't work. 

For PAD to be able to use Zoho's API to get the credentials, you will need to have a user account (that PAD can use) that has a Zoho API key. If your Zoho subscription does not support that, you need some alternatives. But all of your machines can potentially use the same account for access to Zoho, assuming it's okay for your employees to also have access to all clients. If that's not the case, you would probably need to issue an API key for each of your employees and make PAD use the individual employee's Zoho account to read the credentials.

What you simply need is to build a flow that uses Zoho API to get the data you need, based on the appropriate endpoint (I can't really be more specific here, as I have no idea where you store those credentials) and then launches a browser to login to the website. Since the credentials are based on a client, you would also need to provide a client Id to the flow as inputs, so that it knows which credentials to pick up.