TLWR summary:
Commander, it’s been a while since we last reported back about our foray into the PM quadrant. We have concentrated our efforts to address an omnipresent, almost invisible villain that forced many intelligent, aspiring life forms into the slavery of monkey work. After months of relentless research, our new inter-plunet-ary weapon built with the help of our allies slashes the beast.
Our first release of the year introduces multiple improvements to how we address and work with Plunet.
The new Plunet vendor portal integration
Regardless of your business management system (BMS), it is likely that you have customers who send you work via Plunet. The Plunet sphere of influence is not just translation companies like Morningside, NLG, or Vistatec, but also enterprises such as Siemens and government agencies that use it daily to outsource translation work.
BeLazy has always featured a Plunet vendor portal integration, however, the first version of this integration required the user of the Plunet portal to get a BeLazy connector to their Plunet and register the API user in our system. Not surprisingly, this prevented the widespread use of the integration which remains until today one of the two least-used vendor portal integrations in BeLazy.
With the new integration, you are now able to connect to Plunet portals by just entering your Plunet URL, username, and password. We would like to thank everyone who contributed:
- To Creative Words, El Turco, Six Continents, and Technolex for their financial and moral support. This was a successful task force (link to task force article).
- To Plunet’s team, Bastian Enners, and Sufian Reiter for helping us overcome the login difficulties.
Plunet business management system full automation
Since the second half of last year, BeLazy has offered full automation for XTRF — Plunet had been left somewhat behind. That is why, we are excited to announce this new full automation, which enables Plunet Business Manager users to use every connection within BeLazy as well as reassign vendors and deliver projects in the vendor portals and translation management systems. This is a milestone for companies using Plunet, as it puts our Plunet integration on par with the XTRF integration.
Partial delivery: An improvement to full automation
Imagine you have two tasks, a translation task, and a review task, and you want to combine them into one workflow in whatever BMS you use. Previously full automation was set up for package-based workflows, and BeLazy could only deliver projects when you completed a workflow in your BMS. This meant that if you combined translation and review, only the final reviewed files could be uploaded automatically.
With this release, we have also overcome this limitation, and BeLazy is able to associate a workflow step to a vendor portal or TMS task. Every workflow step enables vendor reassignment and delivery, so multi-step workflows are fully supported.
This improvement in usability paves the way for our next one which will considerably benefit project managers: task bundling. The Welocalize Junction connector is already able to bundle translation and copy-edit tasks, but this will become fully customizable and open for every connector in the near future.
RWS Moravia Symfonie full automation
This new full automation is the result of a successful task force and the help of RWS Moravia. The new functionality allows to assign licenses in Symfonie, delivering files and closing tasks without going into Symfonie.
This feature is a fantastic productivity booster when you work on jobs coming from some of Moravia’s most important customers: you won’t have to open Symfonie after project creation in your business management system to reassign the vendor.
We thank our task force partners Technolex and El Turco for making this possible.
RWS Moravia SymLite full automation
Just like Symfonie, SymLite also has user assignment, which assigns the right linguist Sesame account in Polyglot. With this development, the right vendor will also be assigned directly from your business management system.
We thank our partner Palex for their assistance in this connection.
Unexpected changes to the Lionbridge LCX and the Welocalize Junction integrations
Both Lionbridge and Welocalize released new versions for the vendor portal without previously notifying our team. This ended up breaking the connections we had to their system. The good news is that just within 3 days, we managed to address all of these issues, so our customers have been very moderately affected.
Lokalise integration
Lokalise is a popular developer-oriented translation management system and they want to improve the way they work with language service providers. Lokalise and BeLazy have worked together to provide a seamless integration between Lokalise and the BMSes that BeLazy supports: XTRF, Plunet, Protemos, LBS Suite, and custom-built business management systems.
The integration is already available, and we are looking for some early adopters who will get all the support from both companies in the onboarding period. We thank Lokalise and especially their product lead Alex Pereverzevs for the great cooperation.
