Announcing the August ‘09 Blueprint Update

This morning, the August ‘09 update went live on blueprint.lombardi.com! The team has been hard at work over the past month and I think you’ll be very happy with the latest improvements. We’ve improved the portability of your processes with the first shipping implementation of the BPMN 2.0 export format, added full text search across all of your process data, and made substantial usability improvements to Blueprint’s activity feeds based upon your feedback.

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• BPMN 2.0 Exports: We’re committed to ensuring that you can use your processes in whatever way you’d like with whichever system that works best for you. To that end, we’re delivering the first shipping implementation of the BPMN 2.0 export format. We expect BPMN 2.0 to quickly become the de facto standard for exchanging process diagrams among modeling tools. The BPMN 2.0 specification just reached beta status, and as Bruce Silver pointed out there are areas where it still could be improved. We hope that our implementation can help further the discussion and serve as a reference for others in the industry. We think that well designed and supported standards are hugely beneficial for our customers and we’re committed to making BPMN 2.0 just that.

  And don’t forget: Blueprint also supports XPDL 2.1 to give you the maximum flexibility with your models today.

• Full Text Search: Blueprint’s search feature now indexes all of the content in your account — project and process documentation, inputs, outputs, and all of the other assets you’ve entered. Have a question about the onboarding process in your company? You’re just a search away from the answer. Need to see everywhere your legacy CRM system is leveraged in your organization? Not a problem. We’ve been using the enhanced search at Lombardi for the last few weeks and it has hugely increased the visibility of our internal processes already. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

• What’s New Feed Improvements: Blueprint’s What’s New activity feeds give you instant notifications and visibility into the information you care about to do your work more effectively. The feeds are very powerful — just like social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook do for you for updates from your circle of friends, Blueprint lets you know about changes to processes that are important to you at your company.

  Our design team has been listening to your feedback and as a result we’ve introduced significant improvements to the usability of the feeds. They are much more readable now, making it even easier to skim them for the information you need. Similar entries are rolled up to save space and reduce clutter, the times of updates are always visible to give you better context, and filtering options have been expanded and improved. Try it out and keep the feedback coming!

On top of that, there are many, many small improvements that we’ve added during this release — everything from tweaks to “where used” to longer process names. Log in now and try it out for yourself! If you don’t have an account yet, just sign up for a free 30 day trial now. And if you want to hear the latest inside info on what’s coming next, make sure you follow us on Twitter.