Today we’re launching printable reports in Blueprint. This has been our most requested feature and we think you’ll like our solution!

View dates, resources, bookings and milestones

Blueprint reports include everything you know and love from your Blueprint calendar. You simply select a date range and then instantly get a beautiful grid of resources and bookings and milestones for those dates.

The reports are instantly generated and all your information is laid out in an appealing grid that makes it easy to scan.

Make your own custom reports

There’s three ways to customize your reports.

1. Resources – you can use different kinds of filtering of resources: you can display all resources; you can show just yourself and your own bookings; or you can use the filtering from your calendar (this is the default).
2. Milestones – you can include or exclude milestones, depending on the purpose of your report. Simply printing a list of your own bookings? Exclude milestones. Printing an overview of your company’s activities? Include milestones.
3. Date range – you can select a custom date range, going back in time, narrow in or expand the date range, select future dates, etc.

Combining these options can be very powerful and you can create very specialized reports for various purposes.

It’s printable

From the get-go, we designed Blueprint reports to be printable. In case you want to bring your Blueprint plans to meetings or just hang them on the wall.

When you click the “Print report” button in the sidebar, a print-dialog will instantly appear and you can print your report right away – exactly the way it looks in your browser (obviously without the navigation links and sidebar).

The printed page is just the beautiful grid-view. We’ve intentionally used thin lines and reduced the booking colors to small bullets in order to conserve your expensive printer ink.

Oh, almost forgot: your custom filtering will of course work when printing too!

Use reports today

Blueprint reports are available to all of our accounts immediately – in all their beauty and knack for printing.

We find the solution quite elegant, and hope you’ll love Blueprint reports as much as we do.

The favourite resource planning tool of hundreds of companies – Blueprint – has now been public for a little over three months and is doing great.

On a daily basis, our users are e-mailing us with appraisal, recommendations, requests or bug experiences. And we really appreciate every piece of feedback we get.

The impressive stats after only three months

• 716 accounts since public launch.
• 12.895 bookings.
• 2.657 resources – 1.710 with access (~65%), 947 without access (~35%).
• 873 groups – surprisingly few of them are for cities / countries, it’s mostly teams and titles.
• 11.938 companies – 1.158 custom (~10%), rest imported from Basecamp.
• 39.602 projects – 3.089 custom (~8%), rest imported from Basecamp.
• 151.316 milestones – 439 custom (~0.27%), rest imported from Basecamp.

A few words from our thrilled users

Here you have some snippets from our many clients from all sorts of companies based around the world.

“Love the product. It really helps me keep track of who’s working on what and when (I project manage a small group of people)…. this is really cool stuff.”
Chloe Heath, Thomson Reuters

“Just signed up – REALLY impressed – we have been using Google Calendars but they just don’t give us the visibility … I’m off out to buy a big screen so we can put this on the wall!”
Adam McCrory, Internetware Limited

“We are very happy with your product and use it regularly within our group.”
Jay Strickler, Geo Digital

“I have signed up at Blueprint (privately) in order to test it and so far it works great. I have the feeling that this is the tool we need.”
Lex van der Velde, Connect Holland

“It’s really awesome how simple and useful it is. I like blueprint for its clear view of what my employees are doing. I’m using it and I love it!!”
Fernando de Lusarreta, Selnet

Improved support solution

We have now set up a dedicated support service, so we can make sure we handle each and every one of your requests in a timely manner.

Both Vicki (based in Zurich) and William (based in Copenhagen) are ready to get back to your questions, so feel free to get in touch at support@blueprintlog.com.

Blueprint, the simple web-based resource planning tool is finally here. Today’s beta launch release marks Spoiled Milk’s initial foray into the world of web applications. Clients, friends and cohorts are freely invited to try out what we’ve been using for the past four months to plan our busy schedules.

We made the Blueprint announcement back in April and are today releasing a new Blueprint website along with the free public beta. Simply, we want more users, so we can gather feedback and improve the tool step-by-step.

Quick recap on where Blueprint comes from

They say necessity is the mother of invention. As we at Spoiled Milk have grown from four fellows in a room in Copenhagen to an agency that spans multiple offices, we’ve needed better tools about who’s doing what, where and when. Basecamp has served us well on the day-to-day tasks and milestones but we’ve never been able to use it to get the bigger picture.

Initially, we threw together an ad hoc solution using Google spreadsheets that laid out on a grid who was working on what on a given day. The cell structure proved to be too confining, so we realised we’d only get what we needed by putting our heads and hands to the task.

The dynamic calender idea was born, a planner we could manipulate for various views and move time to fit our internal needs. But what to name it? Brainstorming and Google yielded some interesting options which were jotted down, rejected and ulitmately resurrected to small bits of paper put in a hat. We drew and voila, Blueprint was born.

Get a free account and let us know what you think!

We’ve been using it for some months and now think its time you gave it a test spin. This public beta version is ready for you to try. Put it to task on your agency’s important projects, use it with your flatmates to schedule fish bowl cleaning or invent your own purpose. The interface is simple and the sky is the limit.

Visit the revitalised Blueprint website to sign up: http://blueprintlog.com

In the last couple of months, we have internally developed a simple web-based resource planning tool that enhances transparency, promotes involvement and improves team performance. This is our first announcement concerning Blueprint.

Why we built Blueprint

All service-oriented organisations find themselves with the question: “How do we manage our resources in an optimal way?”. This question is tightly connected to technology, although we still hear stories about resources drawn up on chalkboards.

Early on, our small team did not call for fully dedicated resource planning, as everyone knew which projects were active and what other team members were focusing on. But as we grew to two offices and a distributed project organisation, we formed a spreadsheet in Google Docs with our employees vertically and the dates horizontally. Just like so many other companies oversee their resources.

The problem about resource planning in spreadsheets is however the randomness, with which projects are named, resources are listed, dates are entered, access is granted, etc. Something as delicate as a company’s work resources has to be secure, reliable and organised.

Also, spreadsheets are just not sexy. They don’t come with extra features. They don’t allow for integrated conversation. They don’t show you only what’s relevant to you. They are difficult to share with people outside of the company core, because access is either for “view all” or “no access”.

What Blueprint will offer

Blueprint is built to solve our own resource planning pain – and already does.

The tool is centred around the calendar, into which you can enter bookings for certain resources on selected projects. All with an easily comprehensible user interface that separates projects into different custom colors.

Resources can also be invited to the system as users to view what they and other team members are booked on for the next weeks. Administrators of the system can choose to limit the view of a specific resource (typically external) to only “view own calendar”, if required.

As an interesting add-on, we have made it possible to synchronise directly with Basecamp (a project management system) projects and milestones. Other synchronisation options may be added later.

And that’s in short what Blueprint is about. We have a list of features to add and a list of more abstract ideas, but the prime of Blueprint will always stay to the promise of ‘Resource planning made easy’.

When Blueprint will be launched

Today, we’re rolling out the product to a number of selected beta test companies and expect to have the full public launch ready by August 2010.

Until then, we urge you to visit blueprintlog.com and sign up for updates regarding launch. You can also follow Blueprint on Twitter.