Putting customers first with Benchling’s Polish Bash

Jay Shilling
Technical Program Manager

All year long, we work to build new products and features that help our customers work more efficiently in Benchling — and we share What’s New in Benchling often throughout the year. But sometimes, it’s the smallest things that can make the biggest difference when you’re using the product every day. 

That’s why we host a unique ritual called Polish Bash once a year. In our Polish Bash, our Field and Build teams put their heads together to identify the most impactful “quality of life” improvements we can make to Benchling. Then we spend a full week solely focused on shipping these small, but meaningful improvements that make working in Benchling more joyful. 

This year’s bash was our biggest yet — together we shipped over 250 improvements that you can use in the product today. Improvements like these are why our customers love Benchling! Here's a peek at a few of the polishes we’re most excited about:

General UI and navigation

Projects icon reopens last viewed

Keep your place in projects so you can get more done faster.

Polish bash 1

Settings sidepanel collapse

Save precious screen real estate by collapsing the settings sidepanel.

Settings sidepanel collapse

Persist split workspace view

More areas of Benchling will remember your last used workspace view, so it’s just how you left it.

polish bash 3

Improved page load speed

Refreshing the page should take less time in many cases and feel snappier.

Notebook

Syntax highlighting in formulas

Get more context on your formulas to write them more easily.

polish bash 5

“Paste transpose” in Notebook

Transpose data when pasting into tables to swap column and row structure.

polish bash 6

Ctrl+Y and Cmd+Y for redo in the Notebook

Now Windows and Mac users can use familiar keyboard shortcuts.

polish bash 7

Registry & Inventory

Parent location lookup step

In addition to the box or plate, you can now look up the location of a container.

polish bash 8

Enable registering via structured table without project folder

Avoid clutter in your project folders by only associating items with the Registry.

polish bash 9

Starred Inventory items sort to top

Starred inventory items now sort to the top of your list so they are more easily found.

polish bash 10

Faster registry settings & entity schemas page

Quick-loaded settings pages make sure you’re not waiting for information to appear.

Lab Automation

Copying runs within Notebook

Copy/paste your Runs within or across Notebook entries.

Copying Run Within Notebook - Polish Bash

One step Input File → Output File Processing

No more clicking around to download and upload a file when processing an Input file as an Output file.

Input File To Output File

Workflows

Task schema hyperlinks in flowchart configuration

Quickly access the relevant task schemas from the flowchart configuration.

polish bash 11

Show task schema execution type on settings page

More context on your task schemas in Workflows settings.

polish bash 12

Search

“All Archived” search filter

Easily see all of your archived items without having to select each reason one by one.

polish bash 13

Tenant administration

Allow tenant admins to manage organizations

Tenant admins no longer need to be organization admins to manage organizations.

polish bash 14

Tenant migration report

Auto-generated migration report shows all you’d want to know about your tenant migration.

polish bash 15

Audits

Customizable audit log columns

Tenant admins can customize columns by selecting desired columns to apply to all audit logs across their tenant.

Optimized Audit events performance 

Reduced time to log audit log events for large scale workflows by 10+ seconds.

Curious to see what else we're building at Benchling? Check out What's New for the latest updates.

Sign up for the Benchling newsletter

Get our latest insights and announcements every month.

Powering breakthroughs for over 1,200 biotechnology companies, from startups to Fortune 500s

Helix Image