Savvisofts Blueprint Targets Microsoft Outlooks Printing Limitations

Savvisoft Ltd. announced March 13 that it has released Blueprint, a printing software add-in utility for Microsoft Outlook.

Savvisofts Blueprint attempts to give businesses more control over printing properties in Outlook. Blueprint has functionality that overrides Outlooks standard printing method using an HTML template. It gives users the opportunity to preview, directly print attachments and choose specific pages of a document for printing. Blueprint also allows users to customize document fields such as headers and footers.

"Ultimately, any company which uses Microsoft Outlook for more than just interpersonal e-mailing or are simply looking to add their corporate branding to printed messages could benefit from the Blueprint toolset," Hayden Saveal, managing director of the Nottingham, United Kingdom-based Savvisoft, told eWEEK.

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With Blueprint, a user can add a company image to the header section, which will provide protection for businesses by having their printed messages branded with their companys logo.

"By providing full control over the printed content, users can print messages how they want, not how Microsoft decided to translate the message fields," Saveal said.

Saveal references Sue Moshers report, "The State of Outlook Printing," and agrees with Mosher, an independent consultant who works on Outlook development and deployment issues, that printing from Outlook can be difficult and can often give users trouble when it comes to printing forms, printing from folders or keeping their corporate style.

In noting other printing obstacles that Outlook presents, Saveal said, "In Outlook, if you need to print an e-mail, the entire e-mail must be printed as there is no support for printing specific pages."

To overcome this obstacle, Blueprint allows business professionals to print the pages that they are interested in and if the e-mail comes with an attached file, the user can print the attached file without having to download the attachment.

"We wanted to understand how we could make printing in Outlook better by adopting something similar to what MS Word uses and Savvisofts Blueprint allowed us to do that," Jessica Arnold, product manager of the Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp., told eWEEK.

Saveal agreed with Arnold that users who are comfortable with using Microsoft Word will potentially be comfortable with using Blueprint because of similar features.

"The comparison is evident when one considers the flexibility of headers and footers within Word—allowing text markup (e.g. fonts, color, etc.), and images to be present," Saveal said.

Saveal also noted, "The ability to create .dot document templates within Word could be comparable to the creation of the Blueprint printing templates, such that the presentation of the document is predetermined."

Blueprint also supports the printing of custom forms, which are a customized version of a standard e-mail message where any number of user-defined fields and properties are included in the display of the Outlook form. Blueprint will enable users to control the printed layout of these custom messages along with a users contacts, tasks and appointments.

Blueprint for Outlook is available now and is priced at $34.99 with discounts available for five or more licenses.

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