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User experience improvements
Previously, BeLazy stopped showing more projects when you had over 100 in a list. Therefore, it was often impossible to get a good overview of all the work in progress. Now we have introduced pagination, which allows you to see and search for up to 1000 projects at any given time – should be enough for everyone!
For each Connection card, we have introduced a chart that shows the opportunities (projects that required approvals) appearing for each day and their current status. Status changes are always shown for the date of the original opportunity appearing in BeLazy. Thus, the Y axis always shows the number of opportunities that BeLazy could see on any given day, and its value does not change after the day in question is over. It answers questions such as how many opportunities I missed on this connection, how many projects from a given day are still not delivered, how many were auto-approved and how many were manually approved, etc.
Are you looking to resize the columns and make certain columns appear or disappear? Just use the eye icon to hide columns, and just like in Excel, make changes to column width.
While the @ sign input in the Instruction mapping was working fine, searching for the right value was never easy. Also, sometimes the cursor positioning got lost as well. We have rewritten the control to improve the way you can enter values coming from the origin system into instruction fields. Instruction mapping also got some updates, for example it is now possible to add Lionbridge LCX weighted word counts.
Looking to understand where you are in the profile menu? The highlight now shows the current page.
Connection filtering has been available in BeLazy for a very long time, however, sometimes you did not see if you had all connections enabled or some were filtered out. As a result, some users complained that certain projects did not appear, while they were there, just filtered out. To make it more obvious where the error lies, we are now showing more descriptive text in the header of the Connections section.
We have introduced a new icon, the checkmark with the computer, that appears in the Deliveries pending section if a project was approved by the auto-approve functionality. For manually approved projects, you still see the old icon. Projects approved through the BeLazy APIs get a cogwheel icon with a checkmark.
CONNECTOR CHANGES
T-Blue’s customer presets are downloaded as reference files. Aso the briefing files available at project start are downloaded.
Both Phrase TMS and Lionbridge JIRA got the capability to track projects delivered manually. Projects that were closed in Phrase TMS and Lionbridge JIRA are now automatically put to delivered in BeLazy.
It is now possible to split up multilingual projects/jobs into bilingual projects/jobs to allow handling different languages with different workflows or translate only certain languages.
CHANGES ON THE BUSINESS MANAGEMENT SYSTEM SIDE
You are now able to configure which Plunet item status BeLazy should choose for newly created items (In preparation, in progress, etc.).
Both the order and the item purchase order number fields are now configurable fields during Instruction mapping.
We have reviewed all the instruction mapping to improve the user experience and make sure that in the case of bundling, values can be appended to existing values rather than overwritten.
Given XTRF introduced a per-call based API pricing, we have carefully reviewed the synchronization methods to ensure that webhooks do the heavy lifting and inform BeLazy about the changes. However, if for some reason they fail to work, BeLazy is still able to deliver on time. This reduced the number of calls to XTRF by 75%.
EMAIL ASSISTANT IMPROVEMENTS
BeLazy’s email assistant works with two types of emails: template-based and free-text. While free-text emails definitely require at least a check from the project manager, template-based emails (such as those coming from Acolad GCMS, Argos TMS, ULG Octave or RWS Aurora) can now automatically create opportunities, which can be auto-approved by the auto-approval rules. This decreases the number of clicks: such projects can appear in the business management system without any user action.We have also separated template-based emails on the user interface for easier navigation.
The email assistant’s logic performs two AI-driven operations: first, BeLazy detects if an email is likely to contain an order or not. Second, it extracts named entities such as languages, deadline, end customer.
The named entity extraction was so far performed by Microsoft Azure. We have now enabled ChatGPT as an alternative provider. ChatGPT's suggestions can be obtained with a single click.
Email attachments were not handled by BeLazy so far, even though they are essential in the case of free text emails. With the new update, BeLazy is able to download email attachments and enable them as source files.
BeLazy has its own email assistant interface that does not allow answering an email. With the button to open the email in Outlook, you can now easily respond to the email you have open in the BeLazy email assistant.
WEBHOOKS, WEBHOOKS, WEBHOOKS (ESSENTIAL FOR ORCHESTRATION)
BeLazy now uses the Plunet subscription API to be notified about new events that happen in Plunet. This means that the waiting time for any action that you perform in Plunet goes down from up to 30 minutes to a couple of seconds, making the system much snappier.
So far, only the REST API BMS was capable of sending webhooks (callbacks) when a new project was created. We have enabled this for the supported business management systems as well. If you use an infrastructure such as Make.com to catch webhooks and perform actions, you can, for example, automatically send an email to the project manager when the project was created by BeLazy.
This is the first time BeLazy sends a webhook about a new opportunity appearing in the system. If you are using a system such as Make.com you are able to include a newly appearing project immediately in a Google Sheet, or you can also set up complex, configurable auto-approval rules that BeLazy itself does not enable.
THE APIS COME OUT OF PREVIEW
We have spent significant efforts to make sure the APIs are stable, calls do not get lost even if there is a version update, and made minor changes to the APIs (e.g. retrieved statuses, assigning vendors to multiple pricing items at a time) based on real-life use cases.
All the BeLazy APIs came out of preview, which means that we will not make any breaking changes to them without versioning. BeLazy APIs are now robust, available, and scalable.
HUBSPOT INTEGRATION WITH XTRF AND PLUNET
We have added a number of mappable fields in both Plunet and XTRF. Given that these systems’ APIs handle different fields on the user interface in different ways, if there is still anything missing, let us know!
Some companies did not want to synchronize everything between Hubspot and XTRF/Plunet. They only wanted to synchronize companies with a certain tag, or quotes that were created in the last two months. Now it is possible to exclude any company or quote based on configurable rules. If you just want to test the system with a single synchronization, choose a specific company or quote. If you want to set it up for only a subset of the companies or quotes, configure the right rules, see the preview that shows you which companies and quotes will be synchronized, and then run the automation.
Connector changes
The TBlue connector allows vendors of Transline to automatically take, process, and deliver projects using their business management system.
With the Crowdin connector, BeLazy rounds up the list of the most popular development-oriented translation management systems, extending support to all four big ones. Due to their powerful capabilities and affordable licensing structure, Crowdin and Crowdin Enterprise are widely used systems among enterprise customers. Using BeLazy, you as a translation provider can accept, reassign, and deliver any Crowdin task, regardless of the edition. What’s more, the Crowdin connector also supports XLIFF export-import.
Plunet 9.x is a major upgrade from Plunet, and in this version, Plunet changed the entire web technology used. We have upgraded our connector - which was a partial rewrite, given the scope of the changes -, so now Plunet 9 projects can also be handled automatically by BeLazy.
The new parser connected to BeLazy’s Email Assistant is able to automatically extract all the metadata from emails that are received from ULG’s Octave system. Using this data, you can create BeLazy opportunities, and with a single click populate the project data in your business management system. Email parsers don’t accept projects in the portals, and do not deliver projects.
The new parser connected to BeLazy’s Email Assistant is able to automatically extract all the metadata from emails that are received from RWS’s Aurora system, used mostly for life sciences projects.
We have introduced several improvements to the Smartling connector. BeLazy is now able to extract custom fields from Smartling, and include them in the project description or among the selectable exceptions. We have also done a major upgrade in terms of speed - the connector is about 20 times faster than before, as we managed to eliminate a very slow call. We are now also extracting every type of analysis results, and work well with dynamic workflows. And if your customer does not add deadlines, BeLazy has an automated functionality to generate deadlines by adding a pre-defined number of business days. What’s more, business days are configurable!
From XTRF jobs coming from XTRF Smart projects with memoQ integration, we are now able to extract the actual link from the vendor portal, thus allowing your linguist to go directly to the memoQ project.
Previously analyses did not indicate the workflow step, whereas now we are storing those as well, avoiding confusion in pricing.
RWS introduced a new authentication method called RWS Azure AD authentication, which is to replace the old Moravia Login. We are now supporting both of these authentications. Also, previously, we have only extracted word-based units. Now we are able to extract other calculation units, such as hours, as well.
Changes on the business management system side
Plunet 9.x is a major upgrade from Plunet. We have updated our API calls to be compatible with the newest version, so BeLazy now supports Plunet 7.4, 8.x and 9.x.
Email Assistant improvements
Users can now include the URL to the original email from BeLazy’s Email Assistant in the business management system project, thus it is automatically possible to refer back to the original email with a single click from the BMS project.
Many of our customers complained that they don't know which system is their authoritative source of truth. At BeLazy we believe that reliable metrics contribute to a better understanding of business operations.
Until now, in the projects delivered section in BeLazy (which lists all the projects delivered within a certain number of days) you could only see those which had been delivered using BeLazy’s automatic project delivery functionality.
But what happened if a project had been managed manually? So far they weren’t counted as delivered, instead they were left in the Deliveries pending section. This made BeLazy less of an authoritative source of information on what had been delivered and what hadn’t.
With this new functionality, projects that are manually delivered will also appear under the Project Delivered section. And this will work for most of our large-scale connectors, including Welocalize, Symfonie, Smartling, XTRF, Lionbridge LCX.
How does it happen? If you deliver a project or close it within one of these systems and then synchronize BeLazy, we will detect it and show it as manually delivered (as opposed to automatically delivered). Therefore, after a synchronization, you can always be sure that BeLazy shows up-to-date information.
While the email assistant was already released in July, we made several improvements to the system. The email assistant now supports automated emails coming from Acolad’s GCMS system and the Argos TMS, creating projects with all the details in your business management system.
Changes to business management systems’ integrations:
BeLazy now allows a single language in language-dependent templates, a condition that is required if you want to have an automatic vendor assignment. While we still recommend that you keep templates language-independent, if you need to have a template to auto-assign one particular vendor, this functionality will do the trick.
Just select the target language as the basis for exceptions in workflow mapping.
You can select the CAT conversion scheme for receivables for each job, rather than for each project. This means that you can have separate CAT conversion schemes for translation and review. For instance, you may charge only fuzzies for translation, while you still charge everything but context match for review.
We extended the CAT conversion scheme support to payables too. You can now create payables automatically in Protemos and select the right CAT scheme. What's more, BeLazy will update the vendor prices after vendor selection to show the correct amount, extending Protemos' capabilities. This does not happen instantly, but every five to thirty minutes once BeLazy gets to process the project.
Ultimately, this enables a totally automated approach in Protemos, leaving only vendor selection to the project manager. With the addition of this feature, our support for Protemos is up to par with Plunet and XTRF.
We separated unit mapping from rate mapping and enabled rate mapping to be different for each job type. Therefore, if a customer's system gives you a 100% match, you can now apply a different price line for words translation 100% match and words proofreading 100% match, depending on the job type assigned to the price line. This gives you the same flexibility in charging for review as what you got for Protemos or XTRF, following Plunet's logic.
We also enabled a separate analysis for receivables and payables. This functionality is still a work in progress and only functions with memoQ. On the first page of the memoQ connector, if you are using Plunet, you can now select two different settings for analyses, one for receivables and one for payables. Thus, you can include and exclude the locked segments, as necessary.
We removed the need for admin user rights. Now you can create API users bound to certain customers as well.
We enabled items to automatically have the price lists selected, which was manual before.
XTRF is the first business management system where we speed up processing via XTRF webhooks. When you perform some operation in XTRF, such as assigning a vendor or changing the status of a job, XTRF notifies BeLazy, and BeLazy takes care of the assignment or delivery in the source system almost immediately.
We now introduced handling different weight schemes for different jobs.
You can now define different CAT weight schemes in the BMS settings (e.g., for translation you might want to have a CAT analysis-based receivable whereas for review you charge 100% for everything but context matches) and map these to the different steps during the workflow mapping.
This functionality extends XTRF’s capabilities by allowing the definition of more than one weight scheme within the same project. These weight schemes are stored and managed in BeLazy.
XLIFFs extracted from systems like Phrase Strings or Lokalise are now stored in your business management system per language. This means that while previously every document - no matter if it was a Word file or an XLIFF - was made available in every language pair, now all the bilingual documents are only made available in the language pair where they belong, in all our supported business management systems.
Changes to source connectors:
It is now possible to export and import XLIFF in Lokalise projects, so you can decide to go offline and perform the translation in a third-party tool. BeLazy will also extract the project description property, which it didn't earlier.
Updated our code based on their API deprecations and changed whatever these companies required. The functionality is unaffected.
New extended configuration possibilities allow ignoring languages and resources as necessary through a specific setting. This means you can now fine-tune the way you work if you don't provide all languages to a customer.
Improved source updates handling: Previously, BeLazy did not pick up if an already translated segment had a source update. Now it does, giving you a more reliable system.
The connector now correctly handles the minimum fees offered to you.
Project exclusion is now enabled in order to speed up synchronization. If excluded projects are not parsed, synchronization takes less time.
Changes to the APIs:
Every custom extraData value can be used for mapping and creating rules during onboarding.
This is important mainly for two reasons: First, it extends the functionality of integrating any content via these APIs into BeLazy and thus into your business management system. Second, it enables the Email Assistant to enter any value from template-based emails, besides those that are visible on the form.
The vendor portal API has become an ideal tool if you want to create projects from external sources (such as a customer portal) in business management systems supported by BeLazy (XTRF, Plunet, Protemos).
Vendor portals usually allow the application of minimum fees, which means that for small projects you get a fixed fee which is obviously higher than what the small projects would cost if word rates were considered. BeLazy did support minimum fees in portals like Lionbridge LCX where LCX displays that something is minimum fee, but other systems like Junction or XTRF simply apply the minimum fee without indication. BeLazy introduces new functionality to detect this and either just create a minimum fee price unit or allow you to create a minimum fee difference unit, depending on how you want to handle it (it’s only important for your reporting purposes). Similarly, discounts applied will also reflect in your BMS projects. This is configured on the Units page of the Edit automation dialog.
Connector changes
The Memsource connector so far could not handle continuous jobs in a project because it was not clear which projects to monitor. We are now introducing a new Memsource connector that you can select in the Edit automation dialog, which allows you to:
The new connector is significantly faster as well, because it builds on Memsource’s webhooks functionality – any change is visible within seconds. Please note that an opportunity in the new connector is a Memsource job, i.e. a file, rather than a Memsource project as it was earlier, so you need to use BeLazy’s bundling functionality to recreate the project-based working if you need that.
The memoQ connector also got improved: if you are an admin on your server, previously you could only create projects with three steps, translator, review 1, review 2. Now with a little trick of indicating which workflow steps you actually want to use in the description of the memoQ project (memoQ gives no way of specifying this for sure) you are able to create workflows with one or two steps, i.e. translation, translation + review 1 or translation + review 2, besides the existing translation + review 1 + review 2. Due to this change, we also introduced bundling to the memoQ connector.
Way before we had support for bundling, we auto-bundled Junction translation and copy-edit opportunities. While for compatibility reasons we still allow this, we encourage all users to use the standard bundling functionality of BeLazy. Now you can select if translation and copy-edit should be one task of two steps or two tasks of individual steps.
Symlite users complained that they needed a weighted word count in Symlite projects rather than detailed word counts, as the customer changed the way they work. We listened and implemented.
Changes on the business management system side
Files were previously just saved in the main folder of Plunet, but due to the extensive usage of bundling opportunities into Plunet items – for example for monthly projects – this was not sustainable. Starting from this release, BeLazy puts files into the POS folders. Make sure you update your workflow templates in Plunet to allow access for translators!
XTRF Smart projects and Protemos projects do not have tasks/items, only jobs, so if you wanted to bundle them, you had a hard time to know which file belongs to which origin opportunity. We enabled zipping and naming the files, so the opportunity can always be easily identified – you will always know which files belong to which opportunities. This is of course optional and configurable on the new Files tab of the Edit automation dialog.
When we introduced support for downloading files from Phrase, our first connector to support bilingual XLIFF files, we realized that BeLazy still saves every XLIFF file to every language task, which isn’t ideal. With the new improvements BeLazy now knows which file should go to which language, and thus makes also the BMS integrations with CAT tools work better with BeLazy. This change so far only affects our BMS API and the Phrase connector, but enables more file downloads.
Does your customer always send you long reference documents for each tiny task? You don’t have to spend time downloading them if you exclude them using a simple naming convention on the Files tab of the Edit automation dialog. What’s more, you can also exclude certain files – such as vendor’s notes – from being uploaded to portals.
User experience improvements
For one reason or another, not everybody needs every section (Red flags, Approvals pending, Deliveries pending, Recently delivered projects, Connections) open in BeLazy at all times. BeLazy’s responsive user interface now remembers your selection and won’t reopen everything after a reload.
When we are mapping workflows with customers, we often see that there is one workflow they hardly know about coming from client systems. We have to map each workflow, but not every decision is equally important. Now on the Workflow mapping page of each Edit automation dialog we show how many out of the downloaded workflows belong to every given category.
We have made several improvements on this front. Our goal is for you to use BeLazy to deliver every project you work on.
API improvements
The first steps towards artificial intelligence in BeLazy
Project managers work in vendor portals, BMSes, TMSes, but still, up-to-date their #1 project management tool is the email. Email notifications trigger actions, orders come in email, issues are reported via email, and queries resolved… Did you think we’d forget about it? We did not, that’s why we’re adding email-based synchronization triggering.
It’s simple, you integrate your Microsoft email account to BeLazy, and if you give us consent to analyze your emails, our AI technology will begin to assist you during work. It will first categorize emails by type and suggest projects to be created.
By default, BeLazy synchronizes every 30 minutes. However, when you connect your Microsoft email to BeLazy, you can indicate the system to monitor a specific folder so that whenever a new email arrives, BeLazy can immediately pick up the new projects.
Improving the PM’s feeling of control
Until now, it was really hard to identify which projects had been delivered successfully by BeLazy. Fortunately, that has changed and now you can see all recently delivered projects in a separate list. You can also set up how much time you want to look back — one, three, seven, fourteen days,a month — and see when the projects were delivered to the portal, highlighting any late deliveries. Not far in the future, BeLazy will also monitor your manual deliveries.
Under Deliveries pending, you can now see which PM has been assigned to a specific project by BeLazy. This way, PMs can filter the list for their projects only by moving the header up one level. This feature is especially useful when you need to substitute a PM since you can easily see their projects.
Two new developer-oriented TMS connectors
Phrase is a popular system for developers, especially in German-speaking countries. BeLazy’s Phrase connector extracts Phrase jobs and creates and manages them in your BMS. Read more.
Another popular developer-oriented TMS allows you to localize keys and websites, and manage strings directly from code. BeLazy introduces a special job tagging functionality that will make this system convenient for any LSP that works with customers in Transifex. Read more.
Business management system improvements
Protemos conquered many LSPs with its friendly pricing and easy-to-use APIs. Their team took our feedback and enabled additional functionality on the APIs that allowed us to implement several improvements including linguist assignment, automatic CAT-log-based receivable creation, partial deliveries from jobs, and file categorization.
Back in 2021, we introduced project bundling, a game-changing functionality that is currently used by almost every user. But at the time, bundling could not be released altogether because it alters every connector we have.
Today, we are gradually transforming our existing, pre-packaged bundling into a user-configurable feature, which can be enabled and disabled for tasks and jobs.In connectors that work with multiple items under the opportunity (such as files/jobs in Memsource or files/documents in memoQ), you could not decide earlier what to do with these items: create just receivables/payables or create jobs or create new tasks. Now you can decide if you want a new task for each file or combine them as jobs.
What’s more, with XTRF classic projects we have also introduced the bundling of jobs into receivables/payables, thus all the different files can go in a single job to one vendor. By default, the bundling configuration does not change but watch out when you redo the automation.
We have also significantly improved our monthly bundling: previously we were not able to bundle new jobs into closed projects. Now we treat the periodic bundling differently, and it can also reopen such projects.
Business management system improvements
Our Memsource connector now extracts quotes from Memsource as extraData. They are still not used for setting prices because quotes can be out-of-date, but you can use them to compare your analysis to what they provide. We also extract the job number (#), the machine translation status, and engine details.
Business management system improvements
Locale ref ID, certification, and content specialty are three fields that we now extract from Junction. This is especially important if you work on projects for two of Welocalize’s big tech customers.
The description is now extracted from Symfonie projects.
We have speeded up the Plunet connection 5 times by redesigning how we fetch the project information.
If in a smart project your customer does not allow selecting certain deliverable types, we now offer a fallback login, to make sure you can deliver. If in a smart project you are offered a multilingual job, BeLazy detects it and will throw a red flag - unfortunately, the interface here is not straightforward and you cannot know without a doubt which payable belongs to which language, which may cause a problem when further outsourcing the task to two linguists.
Business management system improvements Auto-approval improvements
If you only want to accept projects which have a certain word in the name, you can do so. If you also want to take into account the client’s project name (where available), you can also do that now.
Delivery improvements
Many other minor improvements
We have developed over a hundred different smaller or bigger features between the previous release and this release, with most of them addressing some edge cases in one or more connectors. It is simply not worth documenting everything – the end result is a more reliable, stable BeLazy that you can trust.
New business logic
In each business management system, be it XTRF, Plunet, Protemos, LBS Suite or BeLazy’s own API, there are several instruction fields that contain valuable information for project managers, finance administrators, or vendors. BeLazy’s new release makes all of this configurable, with a built-in editor that can combine the texts you compose yourself with the source system values that BeLazy extracts, so you can easily write vendor instructions that contain URLs, for example, or you can name your Plunet items the way you want.
This feature works best if you don’t even see it! Systems are fragile, and very often a first attempt to perform a task does not end with success. Previously we were throwing red flags immediately, while now we will try three times before notifying the project manager: once more in 5 minutes, and once more in 15 minutes from the original attempt. We will automatically retry file downloads, linguist assignments, or delivery if the first attempt fails. We find it very important to minimize the number of red flags you receive, and besides automatically retrying, we also made sure to decrease those red flags which resulted from insufficient support of certain functionalities in BeLazy.
Project bundling allows you to merge multiple opportunities received into a single business management system project. We made project bundling optional: now you have a switch that allows you to turn it on or off for a certain connection. We also enabled cleverer project bundling: by the month, by the week, by the day. This means improvements in both the project bundling interface and also in the project naming interface where you can now use days, weeks or months in multiple different formats for the naming convention. Task merging also has a regex option now, which is especially useful if you want to merge opportunities from an XTRF or a Plunet vendor portal into a single job chain.
We added two small tweaks that will make your life easier: now you can use the project name as a condition for auto-approval, and also you have the option to select ‘does not contain’ as an operator - previously you could only select contain. This way you can easily reject projects that are not meeting your naming requirements.
Business management system updates
We enhanced the job creation to not overwrite but rather support the automated deadline calculation features of XTRF and also Plunet. This way job deadlines can be better set up using the built-in automation capabilities of these business management systems.
Many Protemos users don’t use specialization, to get all the translators in the system when selecting and inviting translators. We now allow you to select a “No specialization” value in the specialization mapping if you are using Protemos.
Vendor portal improvements
Plunet is our second most commonly used connector, but it did not support full automation nor bundling so far. We have not only implemented full automation, i.e. file upload and task delivery - which also allows using it in bundling -, but also improved the speed of the connector and the red flags handling. Plunet does not like multiple logins, so when BeLazy works, stay away from the portal, please! Now BeLazy also tells you with certainty if you did not...
BeLazy’s new release improves our support of Junction by introducing the possibility of excluding projects to speed up project retrieval, improves handling of open offers, extracts the weighted word count visible in the Junction interface as a handled data for BeLazy that you can use in other fields (beware: this is not necessarily the weighted word count that you get paid after!), improves the onboarding experience and generally makes the Junction integration way more robust.
Two very useful options became available for XTRF: BeLazy can extract Memsource URLs for the projects that were created with the Memsource integration of XTRF, making the project bundling and project processing better (remember, you can embed these in the vendor instructions), and we also enabled handling flat fee projects where the actual receivable and the analysis simply don’t match - XTRF does not visually indicate in any other way if a project is paid with a flat fee.
UI/UX improvements
Previously red flags only took you to the vendor portal or TMS projects, even in cases where something did not work right in the creation or management of the business management system project. Now we allow you to open the BMS project directly from the red flag.
New business logic
In XTRF (Classic and Smart projects), Plunet, and Protemos you can now map the workflow steps in vendor portals or translation management systems to those in a business management system. This allows you to include for example preparation steps in your BMS workflows.
In addition to workflow mapping, you can also fine-tune the behaviour of each step! You can decide which steps in the BMS should deliver files back to the source step, which should reassign translators, which should close steps in the source system, and which should havereceivables or payables created.
For example, if you have three steps (preparation, translation & QA) in the target system for a single-step translation source workflow, you can indicate that:
Project bundling allows you to merge multiple projects received as single target language projects into a multilingual project, or to merge separate translation and editing jobs into a single workflow.
You can also decide if different files should be merged into the same job or whether they should create new jobs. What’s more, you can even bundle incoming jobs from the same end customer or the same customer project received during the same day or same month into one collection project.
This is the most significant achievement of this release that gives BeLazy’s engine a human-like touch, and a major step: previously BeLazy could only create a project, now BeLazy is able to update an existing project.
In XTRF (Classic projects) and Plunet, project bundling allows you to merge multiple incoming projects into a single project as multiple tasks or items, or even as multiple jobs within the same task or item.
In XTRF (Smart projects) and Protemos, you can merge multiple incoming projects as new jobs into a single project or into different jobs of the same workflow.
We have unified and ironed out the difficulties of various vendor portals and translation management systems when a flat fee or project minimum was charged.
Business management system updates
Just like in XTRF, BeLazy can now create new workflows based on templates. Based on the workflow template used, BeLazy creates the Plunet jobs and adds the vendor price lines to the right job. Assigned vendors are also picked up for reassignment in the translation management systems, and completed jobs are uploaded back to the right place. This brings our Plunet integration’s capabilities on par with XTRF.
In Protemos, you can now base your project creation on templates. Project templates also include the job chains (generated automatically by BeLazy) saving you extra project management time. Bear in mind that BeLazy does not monitor these jobs yet, so partial delivery, payable creation, and translator reassignment are not supported.
New vendor portal automation
Lionbridge manages their Google jobs via a customized JIRA system. BeLazy can now automatically accept and pick up jobs also in this third system supported by Lionbridge.
Translation management system improvements
Many GlobalLink users refer to the GlobalLink submission IDs which were previously not extracted from GlobalLink. Now you can include these in project names or mapping conditions.
Vendor portal improvements
Plunet vendor portals now support file download. Your Plunet files will automatically appear in your business management system.
While companies keep on updating to Plunet’s newer version, we also don’t hesitate: this version introduces support for integrating with the vendor portals of Plunet 8.x.
In order to deliver a project, instructions need to be checked in Welocalize Junction. This new release does the job, and thus the success rate of project delivery increases significantly.
Lionbridge TMS jobs now extract the translation memory information from the project.
Symfonie allows RWS’ project managers to add custom fields per workflow, and these values were not extracted earlier. Now values such as Job External ID are made available for those who integrated BeLazy with their custom BMS.
If you used SymLite earlier, you could see that for multi-file projects the total word count was extracted instead of the weighted word count. We have made some improvements to allow precise word count extraction also from such projects.
SymLite indicates that an LQI is planned with an eye. This means this is a project that will be reviewed on RWS’ side. You can now exclude such projects from being picked up.
Translation management system full automation
March heralds the integration with memoQ, which will come handy for companies who receive projects from customers using memoQ and also for those who manage and create their projects in memoQ. You can now easily import a memoQ or an SDL Trados package with many languages into the memoQ server, slice the documents if needed, and get the full information into XTRF, Plunet, Protemos, LBS or your own system.
New business logic
Opportunities are what used to be the “approvals pending”. This change may appear smaller than it is because there are only two consequences for the user:
From a strategic perspective, opportunities will allow us to add new tasks to existing projects in the near future (also known as project bundling).
Improved integrations
Our Plunet vendor portal integration only supported English language portals. Now it also supports German and other languages.
Business management system improvement
Plunet’s new version changed in many respects, especially allowing more automation when selecting vendors. We have improved our integration to not only support Plunet 7.x, but also the 8.x versions.
Previously, BeLazy could not download the list of languages from your Plunet instance. Now we can and as a result, language mapping is more reliable.
Vendor portal updates
Lionbridge changed the authentication in its LCX portal. We detected this and delivered a solution within 12 hours.
There was an update to Transperfect’s GlobalLink, which we managed to address within a day.
Bug fixes and minor improvements
It’s hard for us to believe, but the number of smaller issues we resolved in this release is over 200! BeLazy is maturing every day.
New Business Logic
Partial delivery may not sound like a huge achievement, but it paves the way for further project management automation. Before this software update, project delivery was only possible at the completion of the project and this did not make it possible to deliver translated files in a project that had both translation and proofreading. Now, BeLazy can close jobs relating to any workflow step and upload files as necessary. This affects our translation management system integrations where you can get more than one workflow step and our Junction integration where Welocalize expects you to upload the translated files as well as the copy-edited files separately, but so far only the latter could be automatically uploaded.
Improved integrations
We have rewritten our Plunet vendor portal integration from scratch. The previous integration worked using Plunet’s APIs and required the customer to pay for the Plunet BeLazy Connector. The new integration is based on web scraping and imitates a user navigating the site in a completely seamless way. You can now use the Plunet vendor portal integration with every Plunet customer you have (or at least those who do not have their Plunet portals behind VPN or two-factor authentication). The new functionality mimics the existing functionality, but we continue to work to be able to download and upload files automatically as well.
Vendor portal full automation
Vendors of Symfonie-integrated RWS Moravia accounts will be delighted to hear that now BeLazy allows you to select the vendor in your business management system and automatically assign the license in Symfonie. For all those mini-projects, this will save countless logins and clicks. We have also implemented file upload into Symfonie.
Business management system full automation
Plunet users may have felt unprivileged as compared to XTRF or Protemos users, but now we bring Plunet automation on par. The system monitors your jobs and job lists, reassigns users in the translation management system accordingly, and also automatically delivers files that are ready for delivery to the original system.
Business management system improvement
Not every vendor portal or translation management system gives you prices. So far it was impossible to upload just an analysis and let Protemos calculate the price for you. We made this possible - if the value for the price is 0, the analysis is still successfully uploaded.
Vendor portal updates
Lionbridge changed the APIs in its LCX portal in December. We detected this and delivered a solution within three days.
The SymLite interface changed slightly in January, breaking the integration. After a user report, we managed to get the integration up and running again within the same day.
New integration
If you use the LBS Suite business management system to run your business and project management, this integration allows you to create projects from all of BeLazy’s connections in your LBS Suite system. The only requirement is that you have access to LBS’s APIs.
Full automation
Earlier this year we implemented support for SymLite, however, vendors still had to be manually assigned. With the enhanced integration, BeLazy is able to automatically map the right resources, and make them available in SymLite, and thus in Polyglot as well.
bug fixes
To finish the year, we decided to dramatically reduce the number of known bugs, and these fixes are deployed in this release.
New functionality
You can now have multiple people who log in with their personal Google or Microsoft accounts join the same organization, and see and manage the same connections. Invite your co-workers into your organization and let everybody log in with their own Google or Microsoft accounts.
Improved user experience
We have renamed this button as it does not reject a project in the source system, it only removes it from the list of projects in BeLazy.
This allows you to keep your project list clean and clear.
If you have an error during project creation, the project remains in the Approval pending list, and can be ignored there. If full automation fails, the Deliveries pending shows these projects, and you can ignore them from there. The list under Connections only shows projects that are no longer handled by BeLazy either because they were successfully delivered or because you decided to ignore them after approval.
New mapping
Previously a BeLazy account related to one project manager. Now it is possible to fine-tune project manager assignment in the business management system based not only on the connection but also on the specifics of the connection, so you can have different people manage projects for different end-customers of the same customer, or different project types - like audiovisual projects are managed by others.
New integration
Protemos users benefit from BeLazy’s new capability of automatically picking up deliverable files and uploading them to the vendor portals configured. We have also improved the financial management, contact management and the file management of this integration.
New integrations
If your customer uses Smartling, you can now connect their instance to your business management system (XTRF, Plunet, Protemos or through the APIs any custom BMS). Projects assigned to you are automatically retrieved and created in your system, and if you assign your linguist in your business management system, the corresponding users get automatically assigned in Smartling. This offers you a streamlined method to work on your customers’ continuous localization projects.
SymLite is a very specific vendor portal that RWS Moravia uses to manage only one of their large accounts. Projects offered to you in SymLite can be accepted and created in your business management system with a single click.
New mapping
BeLazy only supported selecting one client per connection for most vendor portal connections, and one client per office for Welocalize Junction. Multiple assignments of clients were only possible for translation management systems. We have overhauled this configuration and now you can map clients according to any criteria, just the way services are mapped. This also means that we have added a client list for business management systems integrated through the API.
In XTRF, you could only select a customer and a currency before. Now you can choose any of the customers’ price profiles according to the new client mapping. This enables you to, for example, assign different price profiles to different end clients through a vendor portal. As XTRF’s automated vendor assignment is based on the price profile selected, this enables a fully custom totally automated workflow based on the end client, or you can further refine the criteria for translation selection.
User interface improvements
We believe that full automation deserves a visual indication! Previously, once a project had been approved, it got under the list of projects in the connection at the bottom of the screen. Finding out which projects were about to be delivered, which were not completed was no easy task in that clutter. For the first time since the initial release we have made a significant change to the user interface: BeLazy now has not three but four areas in the main dashboard. Besides Approvals pending, we added Deliveries pending. If a project can be fully automated, after approval it gets into the Deliveries pending area, and only fully completed projects go into the history under the connection.
Users who integrate through the API will notice that we have renamed Change business management system to Manage business management system. Now you can easily add or remove API values such as languages, specializations, rates, services, or vendors on the fly. If you use XTRF or Plunet, you can change the main configuration items. We have dramatically reduced the number of times you need to click Edit automation and wait.
Go to any automated connection, and click on the little arrow to expand the pane. You will find that besides the list of terminated projects you have a new option: workflows. This lists your main configuration settings for clients and services, so you don’t need to edit the automation to see how it is set up, and whether the unexpected behavior is due to misconfiguration or not.
New mapping
Initially, BeLazy was meant to work only with word-based projects. With project management automation though there is a need to handle other types of projects, including hour-based, line-based, and page-based. This improvement allows you to map units coming from vendor portals and translation management systems to units in your business management system.
integrations
If you use the popular cloud-based Protemos business management system to run your business and project management, you will welcome this integration. We have implemented the project creation functionality between BeLazy and Protemos. You can create projects from all of BeLazy’s connections in your Protemos system now.
We have introduced the GlobalLink Project Director integration (beta) that allows receiving and claiming submissions, batches and tasks in Project Director as well as creating the corresponding project with all the project files and metadata in your BMS.
We have completed full automation for the Memsource-XTRF translation workflow. Now, when your projects are delivered in XTRF, they will be delivered in Memsource too.
We have added a new delivery step in the Welocalize Junction workflow, which handles the services translation and copy-editing together in one process.
Good news for Lionbridge vendors that we have released the first version of the automation for Lionbridge LCX projects. You can automatically accept projects and generate them in your business management system.
If you are using Memsource as a TMS to receive projects, and XTRF as a BMS to assign vendors, the vendors selected in XTRF - either automatically or manually - are automatically transferred to Memsource. We take care of the mapping of user names, and are even able to create users in Memsource automatically for you.
Good news for Lionbridge vendors that we have released the first version of the automation for Lionbridge LCX projects. You can automatically accept projects and generate them in your business management system.
Our software development team fixed and tested several bugs. We have made improvements on Moravia Symfonie, thus pricing information is always available now (please see our article on how to set up the right permissions for your service account - link below) and Lionbridge project links always open correctly. We also improved the auto-approval feature and now project word counts are added up in case there are multiple receivables, and made improvements on connection synchronizations, synchronization goes both ways.
Before June 2020, the automation workflow in BeLazy ended the moment the translation projects were created in your Business Management System (BMS). From now on, BeLazy offers full automation and round-tripping of translation files.
Good news for Lionbridge vendors that we have released the first version of the automation for Lionbridge LCX projects. You can automatically accept projects and generate them in your business management system.
Translated (also known as Translated.net) is one of the most innovative companies when it comes to process automation, yet the way you work for them was not automated so far. With our new connection, we are allowing translation vendors to Translated automatically get their projects into their business management system.
XTRF vendor portals were supported from the first version of BeLazy, yet given the power of this tool, projects coming from these portals can be set up in many ways. We have now added support for non-CAT payables/receivables, and you can now accept projects with more than one payables/receivables.
We have added support for financial data coming from Symfonie.
The vendor portal API use case allows you to send translatable data to BeLazy and create a translation project that can then go into Plunet, BeLazy, or your proprietary business management system (BMS). It introduces the concept of workspaces and projects.
We have introduced a new functionality that allows you to use BeLazy with auto-approve without opening the interface and still not lose projects: email notifications. BeLazy now sends you emails every time you receive your first red flag. If you get this email, open BeLazy, resolve all the red flags, and then you'll get another one if a new issue arises.
We have added a new menu called concepts to https://api.belazy.cat. It explains how to implement functionalities that are typically used, and also lists the values that are specific to certain connectors but not all.
We have improved the way languages are mapped and relaxed some of the stringent mapping requirements that prevented project creation.
Now you can auto-approve projects that are for certain end clients (e.g. only approve Microsoft jobs from this connection) and are in certain CAT tools (e.g. don’t auto-approve projects in SDL Trados).
We have identified some use cases where the connector did not include deadline and volume even if this data was there and we have improved the connector.
Simply too many… we have resolved all the known bugs, so if you had a problem earlier, make sure to recheck!
February brings a long-requested enhancement: supporting the creation of not only XTRF Smart projects but also XTRF Classic projects, so all of you who don’t use Smart projects can start using BeLazy without changing your workflows. Essential for many Memsource integration users.
Previously you had to add a callback URL, but if you only want to test out whether you can see the projects via the API, now you can click through the entire configuration without changing anything. It’s ideal for first testing how it works, but if you want to use it in production, make sure you got the mapping right!
We have improved the robustness of downloading projects from the XTRF and Plunet vendor portals, improved the language mapping to cover cases we have not thought of before.
If your customer sends you a project in Memsource Cloud, or your project manager sets up one manually there, now it can automatically appear in your instance of XTRF as a smart project. We support also the net rate schemes and price lists appearing in Memsource, and if the analysis is not there, BeLazy creates one automatically.
The API now manages multilingual projects, so TMS-originated projects (Memsource projects currently) can also appear in your proprietary business management system.
Before you had to manually reassign projects to the right Welocalize branch in XTRF or Plunet if the branch offering you the job was not the one you had set up. With the new Memsource connector, we now support multiple customers per connection, and we have extended this support to the Junction connector. We have eliminated the main bottlenecks in this connector.
Rate mapping has always been a hard-to-solve problem (given that the number of rate brackets in the origin system may be higher than the number in the target system), and now we have made it possible to ignore certain rare mapping issues.
Previously we downloaded every project in every connector, and this caused a lot of problems for the users. Now we are only downloading the latest one month of projects, and if we don’t learn enough from those, another month, giving you almost equal user experience but a more careful treatment of your customer’s systems and your nerves.
BeLazy now features a new vendor portal to the list of supported portals: Moravia Symfonie. RWS Moravia encourages the use of automation when receiving projects from them, and we hope that through BeLazy many more users will receive and automatically create the projects in an automated fashion.
So far, BeLazy always applied fixed project naming in the business management system: every project created was named after the source project’s ID and the name of the connection in square brackets. Now we have changed the automation possibilities, and you can set up your own naming convention.
We have created a brand new API that allows you to query connections in BeLazy, and furthermore it allows you to synchronize the connections. Why is this useful? Let’s say you receive an email and using your own system or a third-party system like Zapier you understand that you have a new project. You synchronize the connection, and the new project appears in BeLazy, and using the automated approval rules you accept the project in the blink of an eye.
We have made BeLazy easier to use: we are now color-coding guessed items in the mapping dialogs to give you a better clue what you need to revise and what not, we are adding actual weights after the errors, and we have improved the XTRF-related file category handling. We have fixed a couple of other issues as well, including Plunet tax selection and further improvements to the Welocalize Junction connector.
One of the biggest shortcomings of our automation so far was that files were not moved with the project approval, and the project manager had to go in to the portal and download the files manually. We’re proud to say we have solved this, and files are uploaded into all business management systems supported (Plunet and XTRF) and available for proprietary systems via the API - this requires a little more development on your end, please check the updated Api documentation. Files remain available for a week, so don’t leave old projects hanging there - if you do, you’ll have to log in to the vendor portal and download them manually. BeLazy downloads different types of files such as work files, reference files, TMs, instructions, etc. (only files smaller than 3 GB, but that should be enough), and uploads them to the right places. This functionality is currently supported for the following vendor portal connectors: XTRF, Lionbridge TMS, Welocalize Junction, and not supported for Transline Transact and Plunet vendor portal connections.
Every rate name represents a percentage in discounts over the word price. Rate mapping is tricky because the main requirement is that rates that are mapped to one category in your BMS must have identical discount percentage. We have made various improvements: better guessing, a warning if the user tries to assign non-fitting rates together and a better, talkative red flag that pinpoints the exact problem. This means less surprises.
One of the typical mistakes that our clients made was specifying the vendor portal addresses for Plunet and XTRF wrongly. BeLazy now tries to correct incorrect connection URLs, making the system more reliable and easier to use.
One of the typical mistakes that our clients made was specifying the vendor portal addresses for Plunet and XTRF wrongly. BeLazy now tries to correct incorrect connection URLs, making the system more reliable and easier to use.
This connector emulates the web functionality you perform on Lionbridge TMS, and automates the receipt and creation of projects coming in Lionbridge TMS. If you are a language service provider working for Lionbridge, you should definitely give it a try, especially because you are able to automatically approve these projects, so that they don’t get taken before you log in.
This long-awaited API allows companies that don’t use XTRF or Plunet, but rather their proprietary translation management system, to benefit from the connectors offered by BeLazy. With a few days of work or even less, your developers can connect your system to BeLazy and you can receive projects from any of the vendor portals BeLazy supports, including XTRF, Welocalize Junction, Transline Transact, Lionbridge TMS, or Plunet.
This connector emulates the web functionality you perform on Junction, and automates the receipt and creation of projects coming from Welocalize in your vendor portal. If you are a language service provider working for Welocalize, you should definitely give it a try.
The auto-approval functionality aims to automate the “business-as-usual” projects. This means that BeLazy can automatically accept projects in the vendor portal of your customer and create them in your business management system, without having to wait for a project manager.
The auto-approval functionality aims to automate the “business-as-usual” projects. This means that BeLazy can automatically accept projects in the vendor portal of your customer and create them in your business management system, without having to wait for a project manager.