Announcing the December ‘09 Blueprint Update

The December ‘09 update is now live on blueprint.lombardi.com! With this release, we’ve focused on adding improvements that make you even more productive while documenting and analyzing your processes. We’ve refined the new analysis mode we introduced in the last release, greatly enhanced printing, streamlined several administration tasks, and added much more based upon your feedback.

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

• Refined Process Analysis: We’ve gotten some excellent feedback since we introduced Blueprint’s new analysis mode in October. If you haven’t tried it for yourself yet, in analysis mode Blueprint heat maps your diagram with the information you’ve collected about your process. Areas of waste, high cost or cycle time, and opportunities for improvement instantly stand out. It allows you to have insight and visibility into your process that would have been difficult and time consuming to get previously.

  Today we’ve added several improvements based upon your feedback. First, we’ve made both the diagram and the analysis list show much more information presentably. The diagram now shows more detail on the dimension of your process that you’re viewing through a combination of badges on the activities as well as interactive tooltips. Likewise, the analysis list also shows each of the activities in context with the value that’s being heat mapped to them. Want to see the systems your activities leverage while viewing your process as a BPMN diagram? That’s now a very easy task.

  One more thing: everything you see in the analysis view is now printable.

• Flexible Printing: Some of the most frequent questions I hear from customers revolve around how to most effectively present their processes to their audiences. While the best answer is to invite them to collaborate online and offer their feedback as participants, that’s not always possible. Sometimes a 19th century hard copy is the best answer. To that end, we’ve greatly enhanced the flexibility you have when creating PDFs of your information in Blueprint. You can now choose to fit your process to any number of pages — from “as many as it takes” at 100%, to just one, to anything in between. Don’t have legal paper in your printer and would rather use two pieces of letter size instead? Not a problem.

• User Administration Streamlined: One of Blueprint’s greatest strengths is that it’s easy to scale up or scale down the number of people in your account as often as you like. Have a big project coming up? It’s easy to give access to your new team members for just the period of time they need. You don’t have to worry about making a big investment in a piece of software that someone will use for a month and then never look at again.

  Along those lines, we’ve made user administration in Blueprint simpler than ever. You can export a report of all your users and the last time they logged in, which makes keeping track of activity easier than ever. You can change an invited user’s role with the click of button.  Performance — especially when you have hundreds of users — has also been substantially improved.

As always, this release also features many smaller improvements based upon what we’ve heard from you — including an improved editing experience in the documentation view and improved performance across the board. 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.