Word, Excel, Slack, the USPTO and the EPO are now reachable from the Workflow Builder

A workflow that stops at the edge of the platform is not a workflow. Most IP work happens in a document, a spreadsheet, a chat thread and a patent office register, and until a system reaches all four, the handoffs between them stay invisible and unmeasured.

Five surfaces are now connected in the Cblindspot Workflow Builder. It is worth being precise about what that means, because the word partnership gets used loosely in this market. These are connectors. Microsoft, Slack, the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the European Patent Office are not commercial partners of Cblindspot, have not endorsed the platform, and have no commitment to it. They are systems the platform reaches, on the public and documented interfaces each of them publishes.

Microsoft Word. Drafting is where invention disclosures, office action responses and specifications are actually written. Word is reachable as a workflow surface, so a drafting step runs where the practitioner already works rather than in a separate window.

Microsoft Excel. Reports, prior-art tables and client deliverables leave the platform in the format the recipient expects, without a manual export and re-format at the end of every run.

Slack. Notifications and approvals reach the channel where the team already coordinates. A workflow that waits on a human decision can ask for it in Slack instead of in an inbox nobody times. This connector is in pilot: it is live and running, with rollout still limited.

The USPTO. United States filings, file wrappers, Art Unit data and office action history are reachable through the USPTO Open Data Portal API. Fetching the documents attached to an application, or searching applications by Art Unit, becomes a step in a workflow rather than a manual retrieval.

The EPO. European Register records, bibliographic data, legal events, family and global dossier, are reachable through EPO Open Patent Services. A cohort of applications can be checked in one fan-out step.

The point of connecting these five is not the individual integrations. It is that a prosecution workflow can now cross a drafting platform, a spreadsheet, a chat channel and two patent offices while every transition between them is measured, the time each step takes, what it costs, where errors appear, and how long a handoff sits waiting.

More than 2,000 IP and LegalTech products sit in the Cblindspot catalog. Each connector added makes the measured surface wider, and the blind spot between systems smaller.