CBS offers three types of services for Blaise End-Users:
In-Depth Support, which is included in the Blaise License Agreement
Fee-based standard services
Fee-Based tailor-made consultancy
In-Depth Support included in the Blaise License Agreement
This support contains:
Online Documentation
Tutorials and Training Videos
Technical Support
Advice (within reason) on integrating the Blaise software into an end-user's IT infrastructure
Fee-based standard services
These standard services consist of additional classroom courses and advanced training, such as
Basic Blaise 5 training (or new users)
New in Blaise 5 (for Blaise 4 users)
Layout Designer Course
Resource Editor Course
Manipula Training Course
CATI course
Training on API possibilities
Training can be on-premise at the End-User or at one of the CBS facilities. ==> For more information and pricing, contact Blaise or check the Training webpage.
Fee-Based tailor-made consultancy
CBS-Blaise offers the possibility to develop tailor-made services for special activities, such as e.g.:
Blaise 5 set-up and integration at the End-User’s facility
B4 to B5-Transition as a Service (TaaS) in order to assist End-Users to make a smooth transition
Survey as a Service where CBS-Blaise could offer services to perform (part of) the survey project
For more information and discussion on possibilities, please contact our support team at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. If you are located in North or South America, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
The successor of Blaise 4.8 was completely rewritten to be suitable for new platforms and technologies such as smartphones and tablets. With Blaise 5, you can now create surveys that are truly multimode, multiplatform, and multidevice with hybrid-mode capabilities.
Watch our latest Blaise 5 video to see how your respondents can benefit from Blaise 5 questionnaires.
Truly Multimode
Depending on your research design, you will want to deploy your questionnaires in single or mixed interviewing modes. With Blaise 5, you can plan the modes for each survey and determine how to stage each mode in a mixed-mode design.
Multiplatform
Respondents and interviewers can fill in Blaise 5 questionnaires on all common platforms. Your questionnaires will always appear the way you specified them, no matter which browser or operating system is used to display them.
Multidevice and hybrid-mode
With Blaise 5, your respondents can switch to a different device while completing a questionnaire and continue exactly where they left off (hybrid-mode). A new tool introduced with Blaise 5, the Layout Designer, is the key to this flexibility. This powerful addition to the Blaise Control Centre helps you create questionnaires that adapt to any device and screen size. This saves you the time of making many custom designs.
Built for diversity
Blaise 5 lets you create multilingual and multinational questionnaires. No matter if your questionnaires use Western, right-to-left, or Asian scripts, the system supports all languages. Your respondents and interviewers can also switch between languages during an interview. Furthermore, Blaise 5 is 508/WCAG 2.1 and HIPAA compliant to meet accessibility standards for people with disabilities.
Integrated development tools
Blaise 5 offers integrated development tools such as the Control Centre, Layout Designer, Resource Editor and on-line help. You can configure these tools to support your organization’s needs.
One survey platform for all your needs
Blaise 5 supports all aspects of survey production, including data collection, data coding, data entry, and data editing. Investing in one system helps you cut down your organization’s costs, work time and resources. With the help of Blaise APIs, you can seamlessly incorporate your existing IT infrastructure into Blaise 5 and vice versa.
Questionnaires support all types of research designs
Blaise 5 can handle the most straightforward one-off survey all the way to multi-instrument, longitudinal studies. For institutional surveys, different respondents can handle different parts of a questionnaire. For a household survey, a screener can enumerate family members, and spawn any number of cases suitable for each member. Additionally, your respondents can make use of your hybrid-mode design by switching between devices at any point in the questionnaire.
Design questionnaires once and use them everywhere
Blaise 5’s layout and operational flexibility let you design one questionnaire for different interview modes and devices. No matter which device your respondents and interviewers use to fill in their responses, the details of your design adapt to their screen size and input method. This is what makes your questionnaires truly multi- and hybrid-mode.
Sophisticated data entry programs
Blaise Data Entry Programs (DEP) give interviewers the freedom to collect data while being connected to or disconnected from the internet. Choosing your run mode preference lets you safeguard data, even when there are connectivity or power issues. Apart from the Windows DEP app, the Blaise 5 apps are available for iOS and Android and ensure all your data are encrypted during transfer. Our Case Management Application (CMA) gives your interviewers the additional benefit of managing their entire workload in one app.
Watch the video to see how the Blaise 5 apps and CMA work.
More Blaise 5
Because of the extensive list of requirements from our user base, the Blaise survey software platform offers an impressive and ever-growing list of features. Download our latest brochure for an in-depth overview of Blaise 5’s benefits and visit our Information Center for more videos and information materials. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notified when we publish new videos and to see all of our video content.
Below is a collection of documents to help you decide if Blaise 5 is the best solution for your organization. Click on the images or titles to open the document in a new tab.
This is our latest Blaise 5 brochure. In it, you'll find what makes Blaise 5 so special, an overview of the most important features and what other users have to say about our survey software platform.
Today’s field workers need to interview on mobile devices. Blaise has created an application that not only lets them collect data on their smartphones or tablets but also helps them manage their workload. This brochure explains what CMA is and how your workers can benefit from using it.
Blaise Colectica Questionnaires is a survey specification creator, and now integrates with the new Colectica Question Bank. This new tool allows users to author questions and sequences of questions with a simple, web-based interface. Users can tag questions with categories, add custom metadata, indicate how response data appears in resulting datasets, and see surveys in which questions have been used. All changes and usages of questions are tracked in the metadata repository for a full audit trail. Documentation about the resulting data can reference the source questions to provide full lifecycle view of the data lineage. Blaise Colectica Questionnaires can connect to Colectica Question Bank or Colectica Repository to use single questions or full sequences of questions within a survey instrument.
Using Blaise Colectica Questionnaires, surveys are designed once and can be published as PDF specifications, paper forms, Blaise 5 data capture instruments, and standardized XML. The tool allows rapid, iterative survey development and testing. Survey authors can collaborate within the tool, making comments and edits that are tracked in a metadata repository, instead of exchanging Word documents or text files by email.
In the past year, Blaise Colectica Questionnaires has also added support for in-survey search, survey validation, intelligent drag-and-drop survey organization, visual calculation editing, external data lookup, and custom Blaise code in expressions and rules.
This paper was written by Jeremy Iverson and Dan Smith for the IBUC 2020. It details new BCQ features and explains how Colectica Question Bank works.
Now that interviewers can conduct their interviews on Android- and iOS-based smartphones and tablets via the Blaise 5 App, we have developed a tool to help them manage their workload. Gina-Qian Cheung and Team Blaise worked together on the specifications of what we have named CMA (Case Management Application). Development started in 2019.
CMA's capabilities cover the following actions:
Deliver sample lines to interviewers
Manage samples within the interviewers' devices
Download and install survey instruments
Launch instruments in the Blaise 5 app for data collection
Handle case statuses (e.g., record appointments, enter call notes etc.)
Send survey data to the central database
CMA is available since Blaise 5.8.2. This paper explains what CMA is, how it matured, how it works, and what is planned for future development.
Collecting data on smartphones and tablets has many advantages. But connectivity can be an issue. With Blaise 5 apps, your interviewers can move about without worrying about their internet connection. Find out what Blaise 5 apps are, how they work, and how you can use them to your advantage in this brochure.
Watch the video "What are Blaise 5 apps?" in our Videos area to see the apps in action.
Blaise 5 is especially useful when your survey programme is complex. This paper explains what a complex survey is and how Blaise 5 helps you overcome the challenges involved. To see what a Blaise 5 questionnaire looks like, please check out our National Commuters Survey demonstration questionnaire.
The latest Blaise Colectica Questionnaires brochure about the BCQ’s benefits includes video clips to demonstrate the features as well as the entire demonstration video made by Colectica.
A white paper by Barry Schouten and Ralph Dolmans about the Data Collection Innovation Network (WIN). WIN focuses on mobile device surveys and mobile device sensors. This paper details the areas of focus as well as the goals to expand Blaise's functionality.
A white paper by Mike Pierzchala about the importance of mixed-mode surveys. This paper explains the technical challenges of such surveys and lists tools to overcome them.
Blaise 4 is used widely around the globe. Driven by technological changes and user requirements, it has been continuously improved since its first version in 1998. Blaise 4's successor is Blaise 5. Watch this video to see the benefits of transitioning to Blaise 5.
Customizing layout, menu items, menu text and language and other special applications
There are many layout control options in Blaise. For example, you can add layout and text fill controls in a question text. The modelib editor, enables you to customize the layout (fonts, position and colours for all panels) of a questionnaire and lots of behaviour options (such as autosave and dynamic routing). The Blaise Menu editor lets you customize the displayed menu items and adapt the used text (and their language) for data entry. You can define buttons in one or more (dockable) panels. Furthermore, the appearance of certain field types can be controlled by applying a value mask. This can also be used to define restrictions on valid data entry (for example, accepting only numerical values in a string field). For selecting a category value (enumeration value), the answer list may appear just as text with radio buttons, or as a list box or just as an open space where the right answer should be typed. This can be controlled in the "datamodel properties".
The successor of Blaise 4.8 is being completely rewritten in .NET. It has the advantage that it is suitable for new platforms / technologies such as smartphones and tablets. The web part is being completely renewed to meet today’s standards. It is 508/WCAG 2.1 and HIPAA compliant.
So far, the emphasis of development has mainly centered on the layout, but it is increasingly moving into the next stage: case management.
Customizing layout
Blaise 5 has disconnected layout from content. The data model is still the same, but the layout section is no longer used. Instead, a Resource Editor (similar to the modelib editor in Blaise 4) is used to create a Resource Database. This separate file can be reused over multiple questionnaires. The values and properties as set in that database can be changed for every separate question in the data model. These values and properties can also differ between modes (layout set groups), styles or even languages, making Blaise 5 a very flexible tool. It is possible to create a house-style for your organization. You can also still add text fill controls in the data model.
