Extension pointers #15: Create blueprints to carry out business processes smoothly

When the various stages of a business process are well-planned and executed efficiently, the entire process runs smoothly and the overall functionality is efficient. 

Blueprint is a useful feature available in Zoho CRM that is currently supported in the Zoho Developer platform. It allows you to plan different stages of a business process and set up predefined transitions between the stages to achieve the desired results. Along with defining the stages for a blueprint, you can associate people to each stage, guide them through the process, mandate information, validate information, and automate routine processes if necessary.

Components of a blueprint

A blueprint is made up of two major components or blocks: states and transitions. We’ll discuss each below.

State

A business process might involve one or more stages that need to be crossed for its completion. A state is a stage that is involved in a business process. It’s a particular condition/stage that a process is in at a given point of time.

Transition

A transition acts as a connecting factor or link between stages. It consists of the conditions that must be met to move from one stage to another.

Let's consider an example that demonstrates how blueprints can be effectively implemented/incorporated through an extension to achieve desired business processes. 

Assume you run a campaign management organization. Several companies hire (outsource) you as a vendor to work on campaigns to help their businesses grow. Depending on your clients’ business needs, you manage the processes involved in preparing these campaigns using the Campaigns module in Zoho CRM. Campaigns can be of different types, such as webinar, advertisements, emails, etc.

Each of these campaign types will require following a different flow in order to be organized and executed. For example, for a webinar, you’ll need to check on resource availability and target audience, whereas for advertisements, you must check on content and banner design. It would be difficult to manually ensure that all of your team members assigned to a client’s campaign follows the correct flow each time.

A blueprint would be useful in this situation because a fixed process can be designed for a specific campaign type. This way, whenever one of your team members is assigned to handle that campaign type, they follow the defined process flow to execute it. 

Similarly, different blueprints can be designed for different campaign types and collectively rendered as an extension to help your campaign management process as a whole. In this post, we'll build the overall blueprint flow for a webinar-type campaign.

A company contacts your campaign management organization about organizing a webinar to promote their business. You plan a webinar idea based on the needs of the company, gather the requirements to organize the campaign, generate or execute your campaign plan and share it with the manager, decide whether the plan is active or inactive based on feedback and discussion, and, finally, complete the campaign by finalizing (active) or closing (inactive) based on discussion.

Creating a blueprint for the Campaigns module in Zoho developer console

Here are the process steps for creating a blueprint flow:

• Go to the Extension's detail page in the Zoho Developer console.
  
• Choose Workflow under Automate from the left panel of the Zoho CRM console under Build, and then click Blueprint.
  
• Click Create Blueprint.
  

• Enter the necessary details. You can refer to this link to get detailed information on creating a blueprint. In our example, the module is Campaign, the layout is Standard and the field is Status.
  

                                                 

Note: You can create picklist fields through the extension and choose them as the field for the blueprint. This helps you run blueprints specific to your campaign’s organization-related Zoho CRM fields as well.

• When the basic details are filled in, next you’ll define the criteria based on which records will be associated with this blueprint. In our example, we choose the campaign records of the webinar type to be associated with this blueprint.
  
• There’s an option to create continuous blueprints, i.e., with the completion of a transition the next transition is automatically triggered, and so on. To achieve this, click Advanced configuration. Enable the Is this a continuous Blueprint? option. Choose the owners who will be eligible to view the transitions as buttons in the record's detail page.

Note: In our example, we don't enable this option; we manually execute transitions one after the other when the preceding transition's conditions are met and the next one is ready to be implemented. Click Next.

• Below is the blueprint created for our example.
  

• The states and the transitions involved in our example are listed below.

States	Transitions
Plan idea	Plan
Requirement gathering	Requirement analysis
Plan generation	Generate plan
Active	Active
Inactive	Inactive
Complete	Complete

• Next, add the criteria to be met at different stages of the transition (BEFORE, DURING, and AFTER). These transitions are conditions to be met to cross from one state to another, and will appear as buttons on the record details page.

•  Let's see the criteria involved in our example for each transition.

Plan: Notes on the webinar plan and tags are mandatory during this transition.

                                                      

Requirement analysis: Create a checklist for analyzing the requirements by using the Add > Checklists during the transition.

                                                      

Generate plan: Make attachments of the contents or related documents required for the webinar mandatory during the transition. 

                                                      

After the transition, generate an email notification to your manager with the campaign plan details. We’ve associated a campaign plan email template that includes the description of the campaign record as part of the email body.

                                                      

Active: Upon discussion with the manager, if the plan is approved, the campaign plan is active and is to be executed further. Make tags mandatory during the transition.

Schedule the campaign start date for 15 days from the current execution date (i.e., the date the plan changes to active status) after the transition is completed.

                                                      

Inactive: After discussion with the manager, if the plan is not approved, the campaign plan is inactive and is then moved to an inactive state. When you click Inactive, the campaign is automatically moved to Complete status.

Complete: Finally, whether the plan is active and ready to be executed, we can move it to a closed state by making tags mandatory to establish that the record for creating the webinar campaign plan has been completed.

•  Now that the blueprint is designed, click Publish. 
  
• You can now publish the extension and install it in your Zoho CRM account.

Sample Output

You can view the sample output attached as a video.

In this manner, any webinar campaign will follow the blueprint process to completion. Similarly, you can create blueprints for each campaign and efficiently manage your campaign management process. 

We hope you find this information useful. Keep following us for more inputs!!

<<Previous

Next>>

• Topic Participants

• Nanditha Somasundaram Somasundaram

  

• Sticky Posts

• Kaizen #197: Frequently Asked Questions on GraphQL APIs

  🎊 Nearing 200th Kaizen Post – We want to hear from you! Do you have any questions, suggestions, or topics you would like us to cover in future posts? Your insights and suggestions help us shape future content and make this series better for everyone.

• Kaizen #198: Using Client Script for Custom Validation in Blueprint

  Nearing 200th Kaizen Post – 1 More to the Big Two-Oh-Oh! Do you have any questions, suggestions, or topics you would like us to cover in future posts? Your insights and suggestions help us shape future content and make this series better for everyone.

• Celebrating 200 posts of Kaizen! Share your ideas for the milestone post

  Hello Developers, We launched the Kaizen series in 2019 to share helpful content to support your Zoho CRM development journey. Staying true to its spirit—Kaizen Series: Continuous Improvement for Developer Experience—we've shared everything from FAQs

• Kaizen #193: Creating different fields in Zoho CRM through API

  🎊 Nearing 200th Kaizen Post – We want to hear from you! Do you have any questions, suggestions, or topics you would like us to cover in future posts? Your insights and suggestions help us shape future content and make this series better for everyone.

• Client Script | Update - Introducing Commands in Client Script!

  Have you ever wished you could trigger Client Script from contexts other than just the supported pages and events? Have you ever wanted to leverage the advantage of Client Script at your finger tip? Discover the power of Client Script - Commands! Commands

• Recent Topics

• Using files from Zoho CRM in Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude

  Hi all, I’ve got subscriptions to Gemini and a few other AI tools which I use for tasks like data enrichment, email composition, etc. In our workflow, we often receive various documents from clients — such as process workflows, BRDs/requirement documents

• Enhancements to the formula field in Zoho CRM: Auto-refresh formulas with the "Now" function, stop formula executions based on criteria, and include formulas within formulas

  Dear Customers, We hope you're well! By their nature, modern businesses rely every day on computations, whether it's to calculate the price of a product, assess ROI, evaluate the lifetime value of a customer, or even determine the age of a record. With

• Maximum file limit in zoho people LMS

  Dear Team, I am having approximately 4.9 GB of material, including PPTs and videos for uploading in zoho people LMS course. May I know what is the maximum limit limit for the course files Thanking you, With regards, Logeswar V Executive _ Operations

• Displaying related quotes in sales order and back

  Hi, My colleague liked to see to which sales orders, the quote has been converted. Quote shows Invoices, but not SO. Same, they would like to see the quotes in the sales order, as they can see invoices, packages, shipment, How can we achieve this ? Thank

• Dynamically prefill ticket fields

  Hello, I am using Zoho Desk to collect tickets of our clients about orders they placed on our website. I would like to be able to prefill two tickets fields dynamically, in this case a readonly field for the order id, and a hidden field for the seller

• Optimize your Knowledge Base for better visibility by allowing search engine crawling and indexing

  All you need to know about no-follow and no-index in KB. What are article crawlability and indexability? Crawlability and indexability are vital for making an article visible and accessible to search engines. When a search engine crawls an article, it

• Has anyone created a public ASAP Guide that I can check out?

  I am thinking of adding an ASAP guide to my web application, but I have noticed that the ASAP widget itself can be really slow to load sometimes. Has anyone created a public ASAP Guide that I can check to see how performant it is? I don't want to spend

• Zoho Desk Partners with Microsoft's M365 Copilot for seamless customer service experiences

  Hello Zoho Desk users, We are happy to announce that Zoho Desk has partnered with Microsoft's M365 to empower customer service teams with enhanced capabilities and seamless experiences for agents. Microsoft announced their partnership during their keynote

• What’s New in Zoho Analytics – September 2025

  Hello Users!! In this month’s update, we’re raising the bar across multiple touchpoints, from how you bring in data, plan and track projects to how you design and brand your dashboards. We’ve added the all-new Gantt chart for project visualization, expanded

• Zoho MCP has no tools for Creator or 3rd Party Apps?

  I don't see a Zoho MCP community forum so putting this here. Two big problems I see: 1) Although Zoho advertises "over 950 3rd party apps" as available through their MCP, when I go to "Add Tools" there are ZERO 3rd party apps available to choose from.

• Zoho Forms - Zoho Drive connection - Shared Drives not supported

  Hello i am stuck with Google Drive Connection There is no supported shared drives Connection is not support shared drives boolean Query Parameters - supportsAllDrives=true&supportsTeamDrives=true to activate fetch files from the shared drives. Ahat need

• Can't create package until Bill created?

  I can't understand why we cannot create a package until a Bill is created? We are having to created draft Bills to create a package when the item is received, but we may not have received a Bill from the supplier. Also, Bill # is required, but we normally

• Whats the Time out Limit for API Calls from Deluge?

  Hi Creator Devs, We are making API calls to third party server via Deluge. Getting this error message: Error at line : 24, The task has been terminated since the API call is taking too long to respond. Please try again after sometime. Whats the default

• Community Digest Agosto 2025 - Todas las novedades en Español Zoho Community

  ¡Hola, Zoho Community! Agosto llega a su fin y septiembre nos trae aire fresco a la comunidad: más inteligencia con IA, actualizaciones que elevan la productividad y la recta final hacia Zoholics España 2025. Aquí tienes lo más destacado del mes para

• Tip #3: How to change your booking page language

  Displaying your booking page in your target audience's language can greatly increase customer satisfaction. By speaking their language, you will help customers feel more comfortable scheduling with you and create a stronger connection with them. Let's

• How can I optimize a Zoho Site page for SEO when embedding external menu or restaurant links?

  Hi everyone, I’m experimenting with building small content hubs on Zoho Sites and want to make sure I’m doing it in an SEO-friendly way. For example, I tried creating a page that highlights restaurant menu items and linked out to a resource like this:

• Diff signature for compose new email and replies

  Hi,   How do i have different signature for replies and new emails. its inconvenient to have one large signature for replies. Usually on Outlook we have the option to keep separate signatures for new emails and for replies.

• Zoho Website Site Speed Up & Setting

  We are experiencing slow loading speeds on our Zoho website and would like assistance in optimizing its performance. Kindly review the site and suggest or implement necessary improvements to enhance speed, especially related to: > Caching mechanisms >

• Clickjacking: Zoho Vault's Response

  Issue: Password manager browser extensions are found to be vulnerable to clickjacking security vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to steal account credentials, TFA codes, and card details under certain conditions. Reported by: Marek Toth, Independent

• No option for pick up in Zoho Books / Inventory but yes on commerce

  Is it planned to release soon on books/inventory?

• Accessing Zoho form enteries via API

  Hi As a user I can view enteries to a form at: https://forms.zoho.com/<myOrganisation>/report/<myReportName>/records/web How do I access these entries via API? I don't have any problem with scope and getting tokens. But I have no idea what the API call

• Zoho Books - France

  L’équipe de Zoho France reçoit régulièrement des questions sur la conformité de ses applications de finances (Zoho Books/ Zoho Invoice) pour le marché français. Voici quelques points pour clarifier la question : Zoho Books est un logiciel de comptabilité

• Blueprint Issue - Being able to set a subform field as mandatory

  I'm creating a blueprint. My record involves a subform which is only shown once field is set but the field gets set in step two of the process. My problem - I can't save the record as the subform field is set to mandatory - If I unset the mandatory field,

• Blueprint - Mandatory file upload field

  Hi, File upload (as we as image upload) field cannot be set as mandatory during a blueprint transition. Is there a workaround? Setting attachments as mandatory doesn't solve this need as we have no control over which attachments are added, nor can we

• Zoho Books - Include Quote Status in Workflow Field Triggers

  Hi Zoho Books team, I recently tried to create a Workflow rule based on when a Quote is Accepted by the customer. This is something which I thought would be very easy to do, however I discovered that Status is not listed as a field which can be monitored

• Zoho Books - Show Related Sales Orders on Quotes

  Hi Books team, I've noticed that the Quotes don't show show the related Sales Order. My feature request is to also show related Sales Orders above the Quote so it's easy to follow the thread of records in the sales and fulfilment process. Below screenshot

• Add VAT/Tax line to bank adjustments

  When categorising transactions and matching bank feeds with transactions such as customer payments, we use the "Add Adjustment" to add things like fees/bank fees. It would be useful to choose a VAT/Tax rate here. Whilst there is a bank charges option when adding a payment, this goes into the default bank charges account. We use the adjustments so that we can choose the account and separate our fees. We use different card providers and Worldpay charges VAT so we are stuck. We cannot integrate with

• New Menu Layout Feedback

  I'd really like to see the banking item back on the top of the menu. I'm sure part of it is just because that's what I'm accustomed to. However, for a bookkeeping program, I think there's a logic to having banking be on top. Not a giant issue, but something

• How to use Rollup Summary in a Formula Field?

  I created a Rollup Summary (Decimal) field in my module, and it shows values correctly. When I try to reference it in a Formula Field (e.g. ${Deals.Partners_Requested} - ${Deals.Partners_Paid}), I get the error that the field can’t be found. Is it possible

• Form Accessibility

  Hi, is there an update on the accessibility standard of Zoho forms? Are the forms WCAG 2.1 AA compliant? 

• Cannot schedule report delivery

  The only 'send option' available when exporting reports is 'immediately' The option to schedule the report is missing.

• adding attachment in sendmail script where attachment is in a CRM field

  Hi all, I have a custom field of type 'File Upload' in one of my modules in my CRM. I want to include the file in that field as an attachment to an email - which is done from a button on  the 'Results' module. I have created a script and a button to initiate an email from that module. The Deluge scripting window has allowed me to add arguments for all the fields I need to use except for the one file upload type field. My script currently looks like the below (content of the email omitted). As you

• [Free Webinar] Learning Table Series - AI-Enhanced Insurance Claim Management in Zoho Creator

  Hello Everyone! We’re excited to invite you to another edition of Learning Table Series, where we showcase how Zoho Creator empowers industries with innovative and automated solutions. Struggling with lengthy claim processes, a lack of visibility into

• Zoho Suite is very slow

  Since today Zoho is incredibly slow over all applications! What's going on?

• Not sure how to use credits to my account

  Hi I have a $50 credit to my account. I'm just wondering how I can apply that to either a current invoice or to try a new service. Any advice would be great, thanks. Kind Regards Chris

• Control who sees Timeline and Interactions in Zoho CRM through Profiles

  The feature has been enabled for all DCs (except US, EU, and IN DCs). We will be rolling it out to the other DCs in the upcoming days. Dear All, In a CRM, not all users would require access to the history of a record. For instance, a Marketing Operations

• Zoho Desk Integration - Add the option to send the estimate from the Zoho Desk Ticket Integration

  Hi, Currently in the Zoho Desk integration, the user is able to create an estimate from a ticket, once the estimate is created the user can see the estimate under the ticket (see screenshot below), but is not able to send that estimate from Zoho Desk.

• Utilisation de Zoho en conformité avec l’article 286 du Code général des impôts (CGI)

  Cher(e) client(e), Conformément à l’article 286 du Code général des impôts (CGI) impose aux entreprises assujetties à la TVA d’utiliser des systèmes de caisse ou de gestion commerciale certifiés lorsqu’elles enregistrent des ventes à des particuliers.

• Issue showing too many consultations in my workspace link.

  Hi Team, I’ve set up two Workspaces to track meetings from different sources. So far, this has been working well, and the two Workspaces are differentiated without any issues. However, when I navigate to Consultations and share the link to my personal

• 👋 Welcome to the Zoho MCP Community

  Hello all, glad to have you here! This is your space for everything AI agents, MCP tools, and intelligent business apps. This community is for you — developers, partners, creators, and businesses exploring how agents can transform work. Whether you’re

• Next Page