Lately, I’ve been working on implementing a new symbol library, our BPMN symbols. We’ve been using a graphic designer in Brazil, and Gliffy has played a big part in making the communication process to get the symbol assets developed a snap (which is kind of unfortunate because I’d really love to have a reason to go to Brazil on business).

To start the symbol design process, we give our designer a list of symbols we want done, some inspirational mock-ups or examples and ideas on style, and he then gives us a single image of his design. Once we approve the design, I let him know how we want them delivered (various .swf and .svg files). For our more complicated symbols, I need to give him a guide on how certain assets are cut. For instance certain parts of a symbol may “stretch”, while other parts may not. So I’ll need the asset cut into those parts. This is where Gliffy has sped up the process. I’ll create a guide of how these symbol assets should be cut and organized in Gliffy and share the diagram with the designer. Below are some snippets from these diagrams.

As with the Horizontal Scrollbar above from our user interface library, after our designer gave us a design image of the complete symbol, I was able to bring that into Gliffy using the image import feature. I then laid out how the symbol is cut into multiple assets. The nice thing is that I don’t need to bring the symbol image into photoshop or anything to cut it up. I just use Gliffy’s “visual magic” by overlaying a white rectangle to cover up any areas I don’t want shown. (so asset #2 is the same as asset #1 with a white rectangle over the right). This makes producing the design so much faster. And the added bonus is, its easy to make revisions or revert in Gliffy, and our designer always has the latest revision.

With rising gas prices and Earth Day a few weeks ago, a recent CNN Money article, caught our eye. We created a Gliffy flow chart to really bring the point home.

Join the movement Green Slow Moving Vehicle Movement or read how driving slower affects the the San Francisco Bay Area commute.

This is your chance to meet the people behind Gliffy. We will be on hand April 23-25 at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Take a moment to introduce yourself to us; we will be sharing booth space 535 with Atlassian Software Systems.

We think this is a great opportunity to:

• explore the latest that Gliffy has to offer
• share with us what you’d like to see next with the program
• meet our talented team
• ask questions

If your team is considering Gliffy, stop by and test the program with us. We are confident you will be impressed.
As a thanks for saying hello, discount codes for purchase of new Gliffy Plugin for Confluence Licenses will be handed out at the booth (suggestion: other cool schwag available, get there early).

Chris Kohlhardt, the CEO & Founder, and Clint Dickson, VP of Engineering & Founder, will be available during the conference. This is a great time to get information about Gliffy from the founders. If you would like to make an appointment with us in advance, drop us a note. Mark your conference schedule for 2pm Wednesday the 23rd and 4pm Thursday the 24th for a mini-presentation in the booth by Chris.

We would be glad to see you at Web 2.0 Expo!

I’m getting hitched in May, and the planning activities are reaching a new high. Part of the challenge is being able to communicate to your vendors what the wedding site will look like, how things will be laid out, etc. For instance, our band would like to know where they need to set up during different parts of the wedding. Our photographer and videographer would like to know where certain things will be located, like the bride and grooms rooms. They also would like to get a sense for what the site will look like, indoors and out.

Well, Gliffy to the rescue! Using Gliffy as floor plan software, I was able to quickly draw and share the diagram below with my vendors to answer their questions. Click the thumbnail below to see the diagram.

New Flexibility: Gliffy now offers Organizational (multi-user) Accounts

Many businesses and academic groups have been looking for a way to use Gliffy Online on a group level. With the release of Organizational Accounts groups can set up, manage and purchase multi-user accounts based on the number of users. Organizational Accounts allow you to share all business diagrams, like Organizational Charts, without choosing the Share –> Collaborate option. Other highlights we are proud of include:

• Organizations can manage (add, delete, etc) multiple users in an account through the Account Administrator Role

• All diagrams are automatically shared amongst users in an Organizational Account

• All Uploaded Images are automatically shared amongst users in an Organizational Account
• Account Administrators can be added and removed by the Organization

Personal Account users will notice they now have the option to be part of an Organizational Account and their Personal Account. Users can easily switch between each account and set one to be their default account. In addition the following payment improvements have been made:

• Premium Accounts can be purchased directly, without going through the sign up process (benefits both Individual and Organizational users)
• Purchasing a Premium Account no longer goes through PayPal, and the process is streamlined

Ever wonder if you are the only one with this question?

You’re not. Here is the quick and easy way to move your Gliffy organizational chart, flow chart or other Gliffy document into Word.

With Gliffy Diagram Open:

File, Export as JPG

Hit Ok, Save to Desktop

Then, within your word document: Insert, Picture, From File

You will browse to the JPG file on your desktop, Select the JPG file, Click Insert and you are ready to go!

This may not be news to some, but we hope it is relief for others. Enjoy~

As Mike mentioned in the recent post about our new web site and logo, we’re now using JIRA for customer support which is helping us respond to customer queries more quickly.

Where JIRA really shines, however, is in the issue/bug tracking department. We’ve now moved all of our bug and feature request tracking into JIRA which is helping us keep better tabs on the many feature requests we receive on a regular basis.

At this point you may be thinking…. that’s nice… but why do I care?

Part of our goal as a company is to keep you as informed as possible about what we’re working on, and make it easier for you to tell us what is important to you. To this end, product issues are now publicly available for you to view, create, vote on, and watch.

Take a peek at the issues currently logged in our system:

http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY

If you log into JIRA, you’ll be able to perform several different operations with issues:

Vote on issues – If a feature or issue is is important to you, please vote on it. By voting on an issue, we’ll know that issue is important to you, and that will help us know to implement that feature first. Watch issues – Again, if an issue is important to you, you can ‘watch’ an issue in JIRA. When the status of an issue changes, you’ll be notified. Create issues – Is there something you’d really like to see in Gliffy? Create a feature request, and we’ll look into it. Browse – Are you interested in finding out if a feature is on our radar? You can browse or search for issues that are important to you. Comment – Do you have an idea or more information about a feature request or issue? Comment on an issue to provide us with your ideas.

Search for answers

Another new feature we’ve added to our support portal is the ability to search all of our content. By simply entering your search terms, you’ll be able to find related information on our web site from a variety of sources including JIRA, FAQ, forums, and of course this blog. Try it here:

Gliffy.com got a face lift. After many hours of hard work the new site is up and running and I hope that you all enjoy it. For all of you who follow this blog through a feed reader we encourage you to check out the new site .

Highlights of the new web site include our new logo, product overview pages that present more information on our products, greatly expanded examples section to visually showcase what you can do with Gliffy and display example diagrams that utilize our latest shape libraries (Floorplan and Network Diagrams). Support system implemented to enhance user support experience. A new Tips and Tutorials page and enhanced FAQ pages give users more self support ability.

New Logo

Learn More About Gliffy

We have expanded our Product Description Pages, Feature Detail Pages and our Product Comparison Page to comprehensively explain the benefits and features of our product lines. Customers and prospects can learn more about all of our products on the product overview pages or the individual drill down pages.

Explore New Ways to Use Gliffy

Now with over 80 example diagrams in our Examples section we are visually showcasing what you can do with Gliffy. Have you built a flowchart, org chart, floor plan, mind map or network diagram with Gliffy that you want to showcase or would you like to see additional examples in some areas please tell us.

Utilize Gliffy to the Full Extent

Clint’s popular drawing tips now have their own page. Our new Tips and Tutorials page highlights product usage tips. Our FAQs have been updated. We will be adding more content like this to help customers use Gliffy to it full extent.

Who is Using Gliffy

We have highlighted a number of the organization using Gliffy on our Customer Page . After only a year since releasing our paid services we are very enthusiastic about our current customer list and look forward to adding many more. SAP, IBM, Chevron, Band of America, Harvard Business School, Virginia Tech, Ford Motor Company, Apache Software Foundation, AOL and many more.

Partner with Us

Become a Gliffy Partner! Visit our Partner Page. To learn more about integrating with Gliffy, reselling and co-marketing opportunities.

Read About Gliffy

Our news page highlights articles on Gliffy. Read the latest news from Gliffy on our Blog or any of our newsletters in on our newsletter page.

Making Customer Support More Efficient with Atlassian’s Jira

Along with our new website- Chris K released the first stage of a new support system. We are very excited about how this will help us provide a highly scalable, reliable and fast support system. Atlassian’s Jira is helping us make our customer support much more efficient. It is far and away the best issue tracker we have ever used. We are amazed at how good it looks while allowing us to fully customize it to meet our needs.

Special Thanks

Special thanks to Colleen Bryant on her helping us shape our content, Uttara Sahu for helping get our content on the web and to Fuse Box – Bryan Thatcher and Steve Newman for our new logo. We are also huge fans of their product Empressr for Presentation creation, management and sharing. Thanks to Prince Arora for good feedback and Ann Haas of Migoto for design work.

Please contact me if you’ve got any input or thoughts on the current site or suggestions where we could be doing things more effectively.

We are very excited about some new features coming very soon to help extend Gliffy’s ability.

Thanks

Mike

old network	improved network

On Monday night we made two significant changes that have us really excited. In one fell swoop, Gliffy has switched over to a much better hosting facility, and we’ve improved our network symbols by giving them an new look are greater variety (there are now over 30 to choose from).
Log in now to try the new symbols, or read more about them below.

About the new hosting facility

• Gliffy, and your documents, will be available when you need them. The hosting service and data center utilize state-of-the art equipment, redundancy, and 24/7 monitoring to ensure virtually 100% uptime and data protection.
• Data is stored in a hot-swappable hardware RAID 1 array, meaning it is written simultaneously onto two hard drives on the server. In the event of an issue with one hard drive, the other hard drive instantaneously takes over.
• All data is replicated onto a separate server. In the event of a failure in the first layer server, the data can be restored from the second server.
• Data is backed up daily and sent to a separate physical location from the first two back-up layers
• The Gliffy hosting service is now monitored 24/7/365, with level 3 engineers on standby to ensure maximum performance and uptime.
• The application is hosted on a network of top brand equipment from Cisco and Foundry in a fully meshed configuration. All core elements, including switches and routers, are fully N+1 redundant.
• The network that hosts Gliffy is connected to multiple Tier 1 providers. This minimizes the distance to the end user for faster performance and ensures redundancy for reliable uptime.
• Our network is configured to transfer traffic to a separate connection in the event of a problem. The redundant core of our hosting network feeds two diverse network connections, from two separate core switches. One connection runs the load and the other stays in standby mode for an instantaneous switch-over if there is a problem.
• All servers are stored in an area with 24/7 security including more than 200 cameras on-site. The equipment hosting Gliffy is in a locked cage.
• The area meets the requirements of numerous regulatory policies, including Sarbanes, HIPAA/CIPAA, and privacy laws.

New Gliffy Features

The improved network symbols are broken out into three categories under the network tab to make your network diagrams extra spiffy:

• Home Network
• Business Network
• Rack Elements

We also added a few other new symbols while we were at it:

• Multi-Document shape (under Flow Chart tab for great Flow Chart diagrams)
• Vertical Wall shape (under Floorplan tab–> Structure/Office options for Floorplan diagrams)

Are you missing a particular shape library you’d like to see? Let us know, and we’ll get right on it!

Lastly, we have included some bug fixes with this release:

• bug fix to drag and drop of uploaded images with thin height
• Made more of a delay before image options button displays
• Added help text to hover over image for options button

As you can see, we’ve been very busy improving the quality of Gliffy. There are many more improvements coming… stay tuned!

Old Floorplan Shapes	New Floorplan shapes

One of the big themes this summer has been to improve the overall quality of Gliffy. One of the first steps we’ve taken in this direction is to improve the way our product looks. Today we are proud to announce what we think is a huge step in this direction: New super awesome floorplan shapes

Notice that the new floorplan shapes are much more detailed than before and have been rendered by a professional artist. These changes are guaranteed to improve the quality of your Floorplan diagrams. Also notice that you may set the color of the floorplan shapes to match the color of your actual furniture. More importantly, the infrastructure we’ve built to make these new floorplan shapes is going to enable us to produce additional shape libraries at a faster pace. Are you missing a particular shape library? Let us know, and we’ll see what we can do about getting it into the product.

In addition to the new floorplan shapes, here are some bugs we’ve fixed as well:

• Issue when opening a diagram and immediately printing only printed a small corner of the diagram
• Fit to Screen for default 5000 x 5000 will now fit actual diagram in view pane, and not whole page.
• Fix for NaN showing up for Yahoo Image search image size
• Issue where zooming out on very wide or very tall diagram and then zooming back in caused page to be lost
• For SVG shapes, when deleting and undo, any line connections were not being remembered