On Sunday 5th July 2009 between 3am and 5am AEST the network hosting the Blaq servers underwent scheduled maintenance.

During any scheduled maintenance there could be small disruptions to the Blaq service, but the service will be fully operational again by the end of the allotted maintenance time.

The July 2009 update contains a number of improvements.

• Security - there have been a number of security enhancements, an area we're constantly improving.
• Options & Preferences - the Administration > System > Options section and Preferences section have both been redesigned. Each section has seen its various areas split up into separate tabs to make it easier to follow.
• Groups - the use of Groups has been expanded. Previously, groups were only used with products but they can now be used with Contacts and Customers as well. Both global groups and personal groups can be added. For now, their main purpose is to assist you when searching for clients and customers. More uses will be added in the future.
• Menu - because of the change to the Groups section, it has been moved along with the Products section under the Administration > Company Setup menu.
• Menu - the top menu has been redesigned to be narrower to make it easy to use on narrower screens. We've had requests for this partly due to netbooks becoming more popular.
• Emails - the HTML editor's style menus have been improved to work better when the window is scrolled.
• Contacts - in the Administration > System > Options section you can specify whether business contacts must have a company name and position.
• Calendars - date fields no longer have a button to click for the calendar, simply click on the field and the calendar will be displayed.

The May 2009 update was a major upgrade.

Since the last upgrade, there have been a lot of improvements to Blaq with several new features.

General Changes:

• New look - new menu, updated sidebar (with new functionality).
• Much more "Web 2.0" design, allows Blaq (and you) to work a lot quicker.
• No longer a need to have Java installed on Blaq workstations as it's no longer used.

Layout Changes:

• New "Skins" allow users to give Blaq a more personalised look - these can be set in the Preferences section.
• Menus reorganised into a more practical order. New submenus for "Sales" and "Purchasing". Accounts section now found under "Administration".
• Toolbars now only show relevant buttons - navigation buttons moved to bottom right of screen.

New features:

• Stock control - each 'product' can be set as being stocked or not. The products which are stocked are then listed in the new "Stock Control" section (under Purchasing) and their current stock level, allocation and quantity on order are available there. Also, stock adjustments can be made in this section.
• Widgets - the updated sidebar can now hold numerous new 'widgets'. Available widgets are listed in a user's preferences section, where they can select which they would like to use. Selected widgets will then appear on the sidebar when the user next logs in. Widgets can be reordered, resized and minimised.
• Employee budgets - each employee can have a sales budget. This is set in the "Budget" tab of the "Employees" section. One of the new widgets then allows the employee to see their sales for a month in comparison to their budget.
• My Week Ahead - this is now found under the CRM > Planner section. As well as the usual summary of the user's activities for the forthcoming week, it has been updated to show recent Blaq activity relevant to the user, such as when their jobs are updated.
• Scheduling - departments can be setup (in the Branch section) and then a job (or any of it's sections) can be moved between departments, from either within the job or from the Sales > Schedule section. This allows users to quickly see where a job is. Departments can be setup for any "location" a job might be at, for example, Sales, Production, Accounts and Outsource.
• Opportunities - this is a new type of transaction which a sales rep can use prior to learning all the details for a quote or job. It is a brief summary of a potential job and is used to keep track of potential work which might be coming in.
• Production Details - for any type of transaction, the components can now be more quickly re-ordered by drag and drop.
• Planner - each of the planner views has been enhanced and now allow activities to be added faster by simply double-clicking on the date/time where the activity is to be created.