It has been a little under two weeks since we took over BlueSky and made it (once again) a part of the LightSky family. The last few weeks have been filled with discussions both internally, and with our clients, regarding the future of BlueSky. If you have not done so already, I encourage you to stop by our ideas portal and submit and vote on the features most important to you.
Launch of the BlueSky Website
As you can tell, we have launched the new www.bluesky.com website. The site itself is very minimalist at this point, but you can expect it to grow as we add content and expand the feature set of BlueSky. We will also be posting to our blog on a regular basis, so check back often for updates. If you have any ideas regarding content that you would like to see us write, let us know or leave a comment below.
Launch of our Support Portal
We know that there are going to be aspects of BlueSky that you are going to have questions about and we encourage you to contact us via our support portal. For now, you will need to create an account, but we hope to add single sign-on support from within BlueSky in the future. You can also find a knowledge base there, and like the website, it will be a continual work in progress.
Site Analysis and Redesign
We have also spent the last few weeks peeking under the hood of BlueSky and doing an analysis as to help determine what has changed since we last saw the application. After that analysis was complete, we decided that one of the first things on our plate should be to port the application to the newest version of Ruby on Rails (the framework that runs BlueSky). Due to the significant amount of work that will go into that port, we decided it would be best to approach the redesign of the application at the same time.
One of our biggest goals with this redesign is to simplify the user interface to make editing meeting groups, agendas, and items as easy as possible. With the prevalence of mobile in the web today, we are aiming to have the BlueSky application be completely responsive. This conversion to a responsive design means that you will be able to do all the managing, updating and editing of your account from mobile and tablet devices if you so choose.
As we discussed the redesign of the application internally, we talked about the concern that a lot of our clients have used BlueSky for years and are used to its current layout. If we change the design too drastically all at once, it can be jarring for our users. Because of this, we are taking extra steps to ensure that the application remains familiar to those that use it most frequently, while still leveraging the benefits that the redesign will offer.
You can expect more updates as the weeks go by. We want to be very transparent about what we are doing and the rationale behind the decisions we are making. As with everything, we hope you will offer your feedback and participate in the discussions.
Sincerely,
Michael Hodge
President and CEO
BlueSky