Blueprint in Zoho Projects
Often, we stumble upon tasks having the same status workflow. Repetitive task processes are tedious to handle, right? That’s why we have introduced Blueprint for task automation. Blueprint is a tool to organize tasks and automate them based on the workflow you design and the criteria you define.
How do I associate tasks with a blueprint?
You can set the criteria while creating the blueprint such that when you publish a blueprint, the tasks that satisfy the criteria will be associated with the blueprint. For example, if you set the blueprint criteria with a project name, then all the tasks that are newly created under that project will be associated with the blueprint.
What can you do with a blueprint?
Visualize the task process and customize the workflow in the blueprint editor with status and transitions. Status is nothing but the task custom status which is available in the task layout. You can also create new statuses in your blueprint which will be saved only when you publish the blueprint. However, you can save the blueprint as a draft until you're completely done with the workflow design and configuration.
Transitions are the links between any two statuses where a task will advance from one status to another when a transition is performed.
- You can configure the Before Transition setting by selecting users or user roles who can view the transition. These users will be able to view the transitions as buttons in the task details page. They will be able to click the transition button and perform the action.
- The transitions in a blueprint can be configured such that for every status update, certain fields are updated. The fields are configured in the During Transition settings. This way you can make sure that some work is done for every task status update. You can also configure messages in During Transition which can be an information or an instruction that will be displayed when the user performs the transition.
- Automation is the key in blueprint. You can automate some routine actions while configuring the After Transition settings. When a task status is updated, the users will be notified of the update. However, sometimes you don’t want to send the same task update notification email to all the users, right? In this case you can create multiple email alerts with customized content and send them separately to different user roles or project/client users.
- You can also update the dependent fields. For example, if you want to update the task completion percentage, you can set the % completion value or if you want to reassign the task to someone when a particular task status is updated, you can set a task assignee. When you complete the transition, these fields will be automatically updated.
How do I execute a blueprint?
The tasks that are created after publishing a blueprint and matching the blueprint criteria will enter the blueprint process. To preview the blueprint, click the Blueprint Preview button from the task details page. You can click the transition button and update the fields with values. Once done, the task status will be updated as per the blueprint.