Collaborating with your team

IBM Blueworks Live provides several ways of communicating with team members and other stakeholders as you author, review, and share business documentation across your organization.

Community and activity log

In the Community tab, you can view the Account Activity Stream, which provides a comprehensive list of changes that are made within the platform. The stream includes relevant details such as the Date, User, Space, Process, Decision, Policy, and Process App related to each activity. The Community section also gives you the ability to view All Activity and Followed Items, providing quick access to the content that matters most to you. Quick links to artifacts within the platform are also available for easy navigation.

Activity stream and comments

Use the activity stream and commenting features to keep current with what your teammates are doing, and read and participate in discussions. The activity stream automatically logs all activity that is related to the artifacts in your space, including the creation of new items, updates, and publishing. You can filter activities by user or date to narrow down the information you are looking for.

You can interact with the activity stream by posting and commenting. This feature helps you to engage in discussions, ask questions, and collaborate with your teammates. You can create posts by using rich text formatting, which helps you to style your content, add links, and include attachments to share more resources.

With the commenting feature, you can:
  • View a comment when you select the activity, decision, or milestone in process documentation and in the space activity stream. Comments are context-sensitive, which means they are attached directly to processes, activities, milestones, or decisions.
  • Add comments directly within processes and decisions. Right-click an activity in the diagram and click Add comment.
  • Edit your own comments to correct or clarify information, if you are an Editor or Contributor with edit access to the process or decision where the comment is attached. Editing a comment does not reset its read status for other users. For significant edits, consider posting a new comment.
  • Easily find unread comments, which are marked with the icon Unread comment icon showing the number of unread comments. Read comments are marked with the icon Read comment icon. These indicators are visible in the space and library details page, process and decision breadcrumbs, and activities within a process or a decision.
  • Mark comments from others as unread to revisit them later, if you have editing permissions to the process or decision. This is especially useful for process owners and reviewers who manage feedback.
  • Mark all comments as read by clicking Mark all comments as Read in the documentation view.
  • Toggle the visibility of all comments on and off by right-clicking the decision or process diagram and selecting Hide all comments or Show all comments. This choice remains active for the duration of your login session.
  • Include comments in your Excel report when you export a space, process, or decision.
  • Delete a comment if you are the author, unless the comment has a reply. If you are an Editor and have permission to access the space where a process blueprint is, you can delete any comment attached to this process blueprint activity. Admins always have permission to delete comments. Deleting a comment removes the comment and all its child comments, and cannot be undone.

Administrators can manage comment visibility settings for the account. From the admin console, they can select whether comments are displayed to all users by default. If this option is disabled, comments are hidden in process and decision views. However, comment indicators are still visible in space and library details page for read comments, and in the process and decision breadcrumbs for unread comments. Admins can also specify whether comments are shown to Viewers. If this option is disabled, Viewers cannot see comments indicators across the various screens or use the right-click option on diagrams to toggle comment visibility. For more information, see Controlling access and permissions.

Real-time updates and instant messaging

When you are logged in to your Blueworks Live account, you can easily see which other members are online and what artifacts they are viewing. The status bar at the bottom of the screen displays the names and avatars of online members. By clicking a user’s name, you can see which artifact they are engaging with.

If your administrator has enabled instant messaging, you can click Chat to start a real-time conversation with that person. Within your chat session, you can send the other user a link directly to the artifact that you are working on, for example, to ask for feedback or share progress.