Today I'm excited to announce the availability of Blackout 4.4, a new Blackout feature release that introduces Blackout Analyze!
Blackout Analyze is a new non-billable project type with many unique applications. Achieve blazing speed when testing Blackout Rules or use a list of names to get a sense of how much PII Blackout can automatically redact!
Below, Blackout Product Manager Marko Iwanik answers three key questions users may have about the upcoming release in a conversation with Milyli's Director of Product Management, Tim Randall.
TIM: What are some different scenarios that customers ran into that led to introducing Blackout Analyze, and what does adding this capability allow Blackout users to start doing immediately?
MARKO: Blackout Analyze directly solves for painful workflows our users have created over the years. Some examples of these workflows include, but are not limited to:
Running, reverting, and re-running a Blackout project repeatedly to get a regular expression just right.
Manually running a project incrementally repeatedly to create a comprehensive set of rules that match all the variations of names that appear in a document universe.
Sampling a subset of the document universe to get a sense of the potential cost of running Blackout – both for Blackout billing purposes and client billing purposes
In addition to these processes being painful, they are stressful for project teams. They must manage the state of these projects and ensure the ones that result in work product that won't be kept are appropriately reverted so that they won't be billed for them.
Blackout Analyze aims to alleviate all this by being extremely fast, convenient, and non-billable to run!
Upon upgrading to Blackout 4.4, users can use Blackout Analyze to start testing their documents immediately. We anticipate creative customers finding ways to use the tool we haven't considered – and that's really exciting, and I hope they reach out to me and share those use cases.
In the meantime, here are some ways we hope our users take advantage of the tool right out the gate!
Running a list of names against a subset of documents to validate the effectiveness of automated redaction projects
Testing out different versions of regular expressions against one another
Creating a high-level price quote for a customer based on the estimated number of redacted documents
Determine the cost of running a Blackout project before committing to redacting the documents
Determine the potential over or under redaction of a regular expression before redacting documents
TIM: What else makes this a substantial release? What other features would you like to draw attention to and why?
MARKO: Blackout Analyze is packed with quite a bit of updated UX and some very handy workflow-enhancing features. There are three exciting features I'll cover in more depth.
First, we've stepped up the project results with Blackout Analyze and added the ability to export the project results to CSV. More than just the numbers on the screen, the results CSV has a row for every match made by the rules in the Analyze project. For each match, we include the exact matched text and the character index of that match. The exported results can quickly confirm rules matches using Excel's built-in filtering and pivoting tools.
Our second major update is that we've significantly overhauled how rules are added to the project. Multiple CSVs can be uploaded and combined with manual rules during project creation. The new user interface allows for filtering rules and making changes on the fly. We're very excited about the new approach and hope you find it valuable. We hope to bring this behavior to the other projects in a future release.
Finally, the third feature I want to call attention to is the ability to export a single CSV of all the rules added to the project. Whether you upload multiple CSV templates, add dozens of rules manually, or combine both, the combined list can be re-downloaded into a single CSV that can start your redaction projects quickly.
I encourage users to watch the "What's New" video, subscribe to our Youtube, and review the release notes linked at the bottom of this convo.
TIM: Do you have any recommendations for Blackout users coming up for Q4?
MARKO: "The same thing I recommend every night, Pinky - try..." becoming Blackout Certified!
Other than that, we'd love for you to stop by our booth at Relativity Fest. If you'd prefer to talk through the roadmap, let me know, and we can do that when and how you'd like.
Also, during Account Reviews with our Customer Advocacy team, we've been presenting details about our Q4 and early 2023 roadmap. If you have one coming up, join us to learn more; otherwise, reach out to our CA team and let us know that you would like to get your account review on the calendar!
Finally, if you are interested in receiving additional training on this release (at no cost!), you can sign-up directly on our support website by following this link!
TIM: Thanks, Marko!
As always, let us know what you think of Blackout 4.4, and reach out if you want to talk about any specific ideas you have about what might improve your experience using Blackout.
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