Announcing the Blueprint February Update

One of the great pleasures of delivering Blueprint as a SaaS application is that we’re able to stay flexible and update the product approximately every six weeks. To that end, we dedicated the February Update of Blueprint to fulfilling the top three customer requests we’ve heard over the past few months on the forums and out in the field.

Take a look at this screencast for a quick rundown or see the full details after the break.

Let’s take a look at the improvements in depth:

• Autocomplete Revamp: We’ve heard from you loud and clear that the autocomplete lists in Blueprint needed some work and we think you’ll be really happy with them now. They look nicer, work faster, search more intelligently, and are less intrusive. More importantly, they now only contain active assets. So if you archive a process, you won’t have to see all of that process’s obsolete artifacts cluttering up your lists anymore. Misspelled the name of an input? No problem–just delete it in your process and it won’t show up in autocomplete popup again either. These improvements have already made us quite a bit more productive internally here at Lombardi. Try them out for yourself and let us know what you think.

  

• Swimlane Improvements: If you haven’t set a participant on an activity in Blueprint, it will end up in the “Unassigned” swimlane on the Process Diagram. In this release, we’ve made a couple of nice tweaks to the way that special swimlane works. First, when it’s empty, it will automatically hide itself so it won’t take up space unnecessarily either on screen or in your printouts. Second, you can now double-click the Unassigned swimlane and rename it. This can be a huge time saver if you want to give a bunch of activities to the same participant in one go.

  

• File Attachments and the Word export: We introduced file attachments in the Year End ‘08 release and they’ve been a huge hit. The biggest request we’ve heard is that you’d like to see your attachments show up in the Word and Excel exports for your processes. Well, now they will; each attachment will be listed with a hyperlink back to Blueprint that you can click to securely download it.

  

What’s next? We’ve got some really exciting things we’re working on right now that will debut at our Driven 2009 user conference. Between now and then, be sure to follow us on twitter to keep up with all the latest!