Migrate from Rooftop to Zoho Desk

Rooftop Customer records map directly to Zoho Desk Contact. Email, name, phone, and any custom contact properties in the Rooftop export carry over. We use the Contact's email address as the dedupe key during Zoho Desk import. If a Rooftop Customer has no email, we generate a placeholder and flag the record for the customer's admin to review post-migration.

Rooftop Company records map to Zoho Desk Account. Company name, domain, phone, and industry fields migrate directly. Accounts are imported before Contacts so that the Account-Contact lookup relationship is satisfied at the moment of Contact insert. If Rooftop contacts are associated with a Company, we preserve that relationship via the AccountExtId foreign key in the Zoho Desk Contacts CSV import.

Rooftop conversation threads are flat chronological message lists. Zoho Desk structures conversations as a Thread containing Replies, where the first message becomes the initial comment and subsequent messages become replies. We decompose each Rooftop conversation into ordered Reply records, preserving sender attribution, message body (HTML or plain text normalized), timestamp, and the internal-note flag. Agent private notes in Rooftop map to Zoho Desk private comments.

Rooftop Tickets map directly to Zoho Desk Tickets. We map subject, description, priority, status, and created/modified timestamps. Zoho Desk's department-centric routing means we must map each Rooftop ticket to a Zoho Desk Department during import; if the source Rooftop account uses teams rather than departments, we use the primary team as the department and secondary teams as Tags. Note: Zoho Desk does not natively sort tickets by created_at date; agents use Last Modified or custom date filters post-migration.

Rooftop Agent records (name, email, role, team) map to Zoho Desk Agents. Zoho Desk requires agent accounts to be pre-provisioned and active before ticket imports can resolve owner lookups. We extract all distinct agent emails from the Rooftop export, verify or provision corresponding Zoho Desk agents during the migration setup phase, and set their Department and Team assignments. Deactivated Rooftop agents cannot be migrated as Zoho Desk does not accept tickets owned by inactive agents.

Rooftop custom ticket fields are inventoried during scoping, with each field's name, data type, and picklist values mapped to a Zoho Desk custom field of the equivalent type (text, number, date, picklist, checkbox). Custom fields must be pre-created in Zoho Desk Layouts and Fields under Setup before the ticket import runs, so that the import CSV can reference field IDs. Any Rooftop field without a Zoho Desk equivalent is converted to a text field and flagged for the customer's admin to reclassify post-migration.

Rooftop tags migrate as Zoho Desk tag labels applied to tickets. Zoho Desk's tagging model is flat (no tag hierarchy), so multi-level Rooftop tag categories are flattened to dot-separated labels or distributed across multiple tag fields. We preserve the full tag vocabulary from Rooftop and deduplicate at import time. Tag count and distribution are validated against the source export to ensure no labels are silently dropped.

Rooftop's flat knowledge base structure maps to Zoho Desk's three-level hierarchy: Sections contain Sub-sections contain Articles. We analyze the Rooftop KB article list during scoping, infer the category structure from article metadata or naming conventions (folder paths, category fields), and create corresponding Section and Sub-section records in Zoho Desk before article import. Article body content migrates as HTML; internal article IDs are remapped to Zoho Desk article IDs. If Rooftop exposes no KB category data, we create a single default section and flag articles for manual categorization post-migration.

Rooftop ticket attachment metadata (filename, URL reference, size, type, uploader) migrates to Zoho Desk Attachment records. We can transfer attachment URLs and reference metadata through the import CSV, but file re-upload to Zoho Desk's storage must be handled by the customer post-migration or through a separate file transfer step. Zoho Desk's assisted migration supports uploads up to 10GB total; file attachments exceeding this must be migrated separately or stored in linked cloud storage with URL references in the ticket record.

Rooftop internal notes attached to tickets migrate as Zoho Desk private comments, visible only to agents and administrators. We preserve the original author, timestamp, and note body. Visibility is set to internal by matching Rooftop's internal-note flag to Zoho Desk's comment visibility property. The agent who authored the internal note in Rooftop must have a corresponding Zoho Desk agent account for the author attribution to resolve correctly.

Rooftop product records, if present, map to Zoho Desk Products. We migrate product name, SKU, description, and unit price. Products are imported before any ticket records that reference them, so that product lookup references resolve during ticket insert. If Rooftop exposes no products module, this object is excluded from the migration scope.

Rooftop team assignments on agents and tickets map to Zoho Desk Teams. We create Teams in Zoho Desk during schema setup (Setup -> Users and Control -> Teams) and map Rooftop team membership to Zoho Desk team membership during agent import. Ticket-team associations are preserved by mapping the Rooftop team to a Zoho Desk Tag or by setting the ticket's Team Assignment field if enabled in the customer's Zoho Desk settings.

Zoho Desk does not natively migrate the original Rooftop created_at timestamp as the ticket's creation date via CSV import; the ticket creation date defaults to the import time. To preserve historical created_at values, we insert the original timestamp as the first internal comment on each ticket, attributing it to the system or original creator. This is a Zoho Desk platform constraint that applies to all CSV-based imports regardless of source system.