Today Bluebeam Software is celebrating nine years of PDFin’ power! We were spun out of the aerospace engineering industry from Alliance Space Systems, who had developed a smart CAD to PDF plugin to quickly deliver high-quality PDFs of SolidWorks drawings to their client, NASA JPL. Nine years and a whole lot of software releases later, Bluebeam is proud to be bringing you desktop and platform solutions for digitizing workflows, share information and feedback electronically, reducing paper usage and saving time and money while you’re at it!
To celebrate, here’s a list of some of my favorite Bluebeam moments from the past nine years:
2002 – Bluebeam Comes to Market
In the summer of 2002 Bluebeam launched Pushbutton PDF, which converted AutoCAD drawings to PDF with just the push of a button. Hailed as “fax-killer” software, Pushbutton PDF set out to change the way the architecture and engineers distributed CAD files to clients and project team members.
2003 – Good times at AU
Bluebeam has always been a fun-loving company, as you can see from our debut appearance at Autodesk University 2003.
2004 – Bluebeam introduces more PDFin’ products
Bluebeam continued its push for PDF-based communication by releasing Pushbutton Plus for AutoCAD (the predecessor to Bluebeam PDF Revu CAD) and Bluebeam Lite (the predecessor to Bluebeam PDF Revu Standard).
2005 – Hello Revu!
Bluebeam moved beyond PDF creation in 2005 and released Revu for PDF markup. With this new product came a whole new world of opportunity as Bluebeam was quickly adopted by contractors, sub-contractors, estimators, specifiers consultants and others in the design and construction industry who don’t necessarily create PDFs from CAD applications, but need a powerful solution to review and comment on them.
2006 – Going Mobile
Not long after Revu launched, Bluebeam made a tablet PC compatible version of the software. The first tablet-compatible PDF solutions for the design and construction industry, Revu won the coveted TIPTA Award at the 2006 Construct Canada show for bringing its PDFin’ powers to the field.
2007 – The launch of Revu 5.5 is very popular…and maybe a little too popular
Although it appeared like a just a minor update, we knew our users would love Revu 5.5. After all, we were rolling in PDF text editing and 64-bit compatibility into Bluebeam – two features that had been highly requested in the months preceding the launch. What we didn’t anticipate, though, was that we’d have so much traffic on launch day that we’d crash our website!
2008 – Join the Bluebeam Revolution!
What better way to point all the benefits Bluebeam offers over Adobe than to start a revolution against them?! In 2008 we launched the Bluebeam Revolution campaign, encouraging users just like you to break free from the complexities and frustrations of Adobe by switching to Bluebeam.
2009 – Bluebeam Starts Going Global
In 2009 Bluebeam released its first international version – in Swedish! Today, Revu is now available in 7 languages: English, German, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian and Spanish.
2010 – It’s Collaboratin’ Time
In 2010, Bluebeam brought our PDF markup capabilities to the cloud with the launch of Bluebeam Studio. Included in Bluebeam PDF Revu, Studio is a document-based online collaboration tool that enables users to post markups to the same copy of a single PDF, either together in real time or separately on their own time. Studio debuted at AIA, and to celebrate we threw a party in our new, Mighty Bluebeam-themed booth.
2011 – Bluebeam goes eXtreme
This year we pushed PDFin’ to the limits by releasing Revu 9 with over 30 new features, including 3D PDF viewing and a slick VisualSearch tool for locating symbols on PDFs. We also debuted Revu eXtreme for PDF power users with PDF forms creation, OCR, scripting and redaction.
Did I list your favorite Bluebeam moment? If not, comment below to share it. And remember, to keep on PDFin’!
-Karen
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