STAAD.foundation V8i (Release 5.0) was released in the first week of July 2009. This version is a major leap forward in addressing the foundation design needs for practicing engineers and a major upgrade to version 4.3. The workflow in STAAD.foundation has been revised to align with the practical needs of practicing engineers. Most of the development effort was dedicated to produce professional quality drawings and step by step calculation sheets enabling engineers to see how the results were derived. All drawings are customizable and can be exported to DWG or DGN files. The old layout drawings have been replaced by more detailed GA (General Arrangement) drawings which produce a table with foundation marks and sizes along with actual foundation plan drawing. Detailed drawings have been revised to minimize the effort to produce construction drawings. A new "schedule drawing" is also introduced to produce foundation schedule drawings. Several new foundation types have been added like "Block foundation", "Drilled Pier" and "Dead man anchor guy foundation". A new "Foundation Toolkit" mode has been created to address the needs of special foundation types like "Drilled Pier". New design parameters such as "water table" and "cohesion" have been added to both the isolated and combined foundation modules to address buoyancy effect and cohesion effect during uplift for all design codes. "Footing grouping" is another new feature to optimize time and cost and material. The Australian (AS 3600-2400) and Canadian (CSA 23.3-04) codes are added to design isolated, combined and mat foundations. A new verification manual will be published along with the software release including 60+ verification cases ranging from simple axially loaded footings to complex biaxial bending problems to polygonal shaped mat foundation. Verification problems are created to explain the design procedures for special foundations like "drilled pier" foundation.