TL/DR;
zoho crm team, please provide admin users the ability to update the value of a dropdown field tied to a blueprint, and have the "State" related to that dropdown value dynamically updated, without requiring the admin to first delete then recreate the Blueprint State & associated Transitions.
okay, now here goes my rant to describe why this is such an important feature
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i don't know how many zoho crm customers actually use Blueprints, but my business uses them very heavily. it is by far the most impressive feature i've used across many crms (beats the heck out of salesforce).
however ....
the biggest pain in the rear is when you need to update the name of a value in the dropdown field that is managed by a Blueprint. by far, the most annoying, worst experience of having to undo all of my previous hard work, just to do it all over again, when that shouldn't be necessary. for anyone who uses blueprint and has renamed dropdown values before, you know what i mean. for those of you who don't here's the 411:
you've already built and launched your blueprint to your team, operating for weeks, months, what have you... then your business requirement changes to where you need to update one of the dropdown values. let's say in this instance, something minimal like renaming Potentials stage "closed lost" to just "lost".
you would think you can simply go to Settings > Modules > Potentials > Layouts, click on the "Stage" dropdown field and edit properties, find the "closed lost" dropdown value and rename it.
Noooope... you receive an error saying that the "Stage" field is managed by a Blueprint. The only solution to be able to rename the value is to do the following:
- go to the blueprint and delete the State of the dropdown value that you want to rename
- that includes ALL transitions tied to that state
- create bogus/placeholder transitions in place of the gap left behind after you've deleted your state
- this is a huuuuge pain because you may have 5, 10, 15 workflow automations, validations, tasks, functions, all assigned to not just one, but EVERY transition tied to that state you deleted.
- now that you've deleted the state, you go change the name of the dropdown value just as you normally would for any other dropdown value (as i described above)
- with your dropdown value updated to your liking, you now have to go back to the blueprint, add that one state back, AND recreate every single transition you deleted in step 2 above, including the 40-50 workflow automations associated to each transition
- this easily takes up a solid hour to two hours to go through this process, when it could easily be done in a matter of seconds if zoho crm would automatically update the Blueprint State name with the revised dropdown value name.
every product feature is designed to solve a user's problem or to give them the tools to be more efficient. in this case, Blueprint is a tool to help users be more efficient and accurate but it has a nasty side effect. this process of updating a dropdown field value is a problem - a huge waste of time performing a task that could easily be solved by software.
i truly hope the zoho crm team can dream up an elegant solution to this highly inefficient process. i would be most grateful and i'm confident every user today and in the future would be as well.