The Blueprint October ‘08 Update

The latest monthly refresh of Blueprint went live this morning, and I’m excited to give you the scoop on the changes. Over the past 6 weeks, we’ve focused on addressing the top pieces of feedback that we’ve heard from customers. With this release, you’ll find it much easier to keep track of who’s currently using Blueprint, to collaborate with new users, and to print out your process diagrams in exactly the right format. We use your feedback to drive our release schedule, so make sure you give us your thoughts!

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

• User Management: In today’s business environment, it’s more important than ever to ensure that you’re getting maximum utilization of your software. One of the great benefits of Blueprint’s SaaS model is that you can add users to your account just in time when they need access to the tool. When they’re done, you can remove or reuse their license so you’re not paying for software that isn’t being used. This can save you a ton of money compared to traditional desktop tools like Visio that require a big upfront investment and then only get used a few times a year by many people.

  In this release, we’ve greatly enhanced our user management capabilities. You can now see at a glance who has access to your account, when they last used Blueprint, and how many seats you have available. If someone doesn’t need access anymore, it’s just one click to archive them and make their license available to someone new.

  

• Invitations: Blueprint’s greatest strength is facilitating collaboration around process discovery and documentation. We think your team will have a great experience inside the product working together on the process. But what about stakeholders that don’t yet have access to Blueprint? It’s now a lot easier to get them involved. With this release, it’s just one click to have Blueprint send an email to invite someone new to join you.

  

• Instant Upgrades: In the previous release, we made the initial signup experience for new Blueprint accounts far quicker and easier. Now we’ve brought the same improvements to the upgrade process. Need to upgrade your free account to the professional edition? Or add more seats to your pro account? It’s never been faster or more painless.



• Perfect Printing: Once you’ve documented a process, you’ll almost always want to print out your process diagram so that you can share it with all of the other stakeholders in your organization. We often see customers use a plotter to print their diagrams on one large roll of paper and previous releases of Blueprint enabled that. But what if you don’t want to go through the hassle of running to the nearest plotter in the next building or driving to the neighborhood Kinko’s? Now you can have Blueprint format your diagram to print on standard paper sizes. Shrink it down to one page or tile it across many: the choice is yours.



• Word Export of Process Documentation: We’ve made some nice improvements to the Microsoft Word documents that can be created from the Documentation View. All of your inputs, outputs, problems, and stakeholders are now included in the generated Word document. We’ve also made some tweaks to make the formatting look even better. It’s a great way to share training material and processes and procedures with the end users of your processes.

Make sure you log in now to check out the new release. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up now for free.