Here's what you need to know.
How do I make a booking?
Simply click a date in the calendar and a dialogue will appear. This will allow you to create a booking for that resource on that day. You can also select multiple days by holding down your mouse and dragging to either side.
When you start typing in the booking dialogue, an auto-complete will help you quickly create a booking for a project in the system (you will need to create or import these projects first, of course). Using this feature makes it really fast to create bookings for your different projects and it will automatically color-code those projects so you can easily identify and separate multiple bookings across different resources.
Once you have added a booking, you can click it to open up an info dialogue. Here you can remove the booking, if it is not relevant any longer. You can also resize a booking by dragging either the left or right side of it, and then drag to either extend or shrink the booking.
Note: You do not have to choose an existing project. You can always create a “custom” booking, just write whatever you want in the title field.
How do I add a resource?
All your resources are located to the left in the calendar. They are visible at all times and each have their own row in the calendar. When you create bookings for the dates in a resource row, the booking is made for that resource.
To add or change features to Resources select the Resources tab. Here you will find all of your Resources listed as well as a box to manage groups and a button to “Add a new resource”. This brings you to a page where you can name, add to a group and set the permission level for your users.
At the minimum, a resource consists of a name and a permission. You may also have to provide an email, if you intend to give the resource access to your calendar. When you create a new resource, it is immediately available in the calendar and you can start booking that resource.
Groups
If you have a lot of resources, a great way to manage (and filter) them is to put them in different groups. Groups work much like a label – any resource can have as many labels as you want to. In the calendar you can use these labels to hide certain resources.
Examples of different groups could be “Designers”, “Developers”, “Project managers”, and so on. Since this is a very flexible system, a dose of creativity goes a long way. E.g. we wanted to give some people access to the calendar, but did not want them in the actual calendar view. Instead of creating a new feature for this specific purpose, we just created a group called “Inactive” and put all these resources in that group. Now, we could hide them all in the calendar with just a single click. Projects
If there are certain groups of resources which you do not want to see, you can use the filtering option (see top-left corner of the calendar). Note: This filtering is remembered in the system, so when you filter something out it will also be that way the next time you open your Blueprint calendar.
Tip: You can also reorder the resources. This way you can put them in the order you like. Note: This reordering only happens for each user. So each user can have their own unique order, allowing each user to e.g. put themselves on the top of the calendar. This order is remembered in the system and will be the same the next time you open your Blueprint calendar.
How do I add a project?
Projects are not necessary to make a booking, but they sure make it a lot easier and more valuable (we highly recommend you to use them).
You can add new projects and change project names and colors under the Projects tab. To add a new one click on the Add new projects button and you will be taken to a page where you can name your project and assign it to a company. A project must always belong to a company. It has a title, and either inherits a color from the company or uses a custom color.
All your projects will be available in the calendar view when you add new bookings. So when you start typing the name of a new booking, an auto-complete field will allow you to select existing projects. This way you can add new bookings in a snap, and as a bonus the booking will get the color of the project. This makes it much easier to separate the bookings in your calendar view.
How do I create Milestones?
Milestones can be seen as universal one-day bookings. They are by default collapsed, but you can view them by rolling over the milestone row in the top of the calendar with your mouse. Any day that has one or more milestones will say so.
Milestones can be assigned to a project and will inherit that project’s color (just like regular bookings).
Note 1: Only people who can see all resources, admins and the account owner can see milestones. People who can only see their own calendar will not be able to see milestones.
Note 2: If you have provided us with a Basecamp API token, we will automatically import milestones every 2 hours for all your Basecamp projects.
How do I setup Blueprint with Basecamp?
If you use Basecamp, we’ve made it super easy to get started with projects. All you have to do is provide your Basecamp API token at sign up or in the account settings, and we will automatically start importing all your Basecamp companies, projects and milestones. We will look for new projects and updates to existing ones every 2 hours.
If you want to, you can also force-fetch projects by going to the projects view in Blueprint and click the “Force-fetch” button in the sidebar. Note: This is only visible if you have provided a Basecamp API token.