Tag: document management

The latest update for Bluebeam Revu has recently been released; you can find the release notes at this link.

Independent Length Measurement units.  In previous versions, a user would calibrate a page, say in feet and inches, and all length measurements would be locked to that unit.  Length measurements can now be set to any preferred unit.  Create a measurement and change the unit in the properties.
TIP:  if the default measurement is not in the desired unit, change the unit then set that as the new default by right-clicking.

A refined Calibration tool.  The name has been changed from Calibrate to Set Scale.  After the tool has been launched, the dialog is a little different.  In previous versions, the Pick Points calibration window would appear first.  Now, the Apply Scales page appears first.  The user chooses either preset or custom scales, or they choose to calibrate using selected points.  Also, in this same form, the user can choose to apply the scale to a selected range of pages and add the custom scale to a preset for later use.
TIP:  to remove a preset, click the garbage can icon in the Measurement tab.

This story was originally published by Bluebeam, Inc. on Built, the Bluebeam Blog.

Most construction projects are massive undertakings. Teams of architects and engineers work tirelessly preparing large volumes of design documents before they ultimately make their way onto a construction jobsite, where workers labor vigorously to build off those plans down to the tiniest details.

The evolution of technology in the construction industry has made the arduous task of managing the flow of such large project document loads easier. Once initial plans are made, multiple rounds of revisions must take place among varying project stakeholders before they’re ultimately pushed out to the field, where more revisions may occur as new challenges emerge.

Pablo Giraldo, an assistant construction technology manager with The Walsh Group in Atlanta, Georgia, is one among a crowd of passionate and tech-savvy construction professionals who have embraced digital transformation in the industry. Giraldo has spent a lot of time, including through his own growing YouTube channel, figuring out how to make digital transformation of document management work on his projects.

Here is a breakdown of how Giraldo leads document management using the varying tools within Bluebeam Revu, based on his recent presentation as part of Bluebeam’s ongoing virtual events series.

Create Sets

The first thing Giraldo does to initiate his document management workflow is to create document Sets in Revu.

Sets allow Revu users to open a collection of plan documents as if they were a single file. Pages in a Set are organized in a specific and sorted order, including any revisions. Sets ultimately allow users to navigate through multiple files in Revu as if they were one document.

Publishing the latest Set ultimately allows files to load faster for workers in the field; it also allows a check-out/check-in system that allows users to check-in/out a document one person at a time.

https://youtu.be/XOmzLYnW3gk 

Batch Link

Next, Giraldo Batch Links his Set. Batch Link in Revu automatically creates navigational hyperlinks within a particular group of documents based on user-defined criteria. Batch Link, which is only available in the eXtreme edition of Revu, can be run against multiple PDFs or a single, multi-paged PDF.

“This is beneficial as you’re going through the drawings to easily flip back and forth through different documents,” Giraldo said.

This is particularly helpful for workers in the field, Giraldo said, as they can transition between different documents on their iPads, looking at different sections of drawings as they spot important details while working on the jobsite.

Hyperlink drawings

In addition to Batch Linking document Sets, Giraldo often uses hyperlinks throughout different documents in other ways to help provide field workers and other collaborators with easy ways to find and reference critical project information as they work.

Links, which can be placed on anything in a PDF, including markups, can include anything from linking to other project documents to reference websites to any other important, web-accessible information.

https://youtu.be/gjRN4JM03ms 

Publish

Once Giraldo has set up all his Sets, Batched Linked and set up hyperlinks to other documents or resources throughout the documents, now it’s time to publish the Sets and send them out to workers in the field. There, workers will use the Bluebeam app on iPads to sync to the latest document Sets to reference and work off while in the field.

Anytime a worker in the field can connect to the internet, either via WiFi or cellular connectivity, they can hit “Sync” in the Bluebeam app. Then all the documents will automatically download the latest set of drawings, Giraldo said.

Create dashboard

One of the powerful ways to help everyone collaborating on documents—whether they’re in-office engineers approving plans or field workers implementing them—is to create a digital project dashboard in Revu. Digital dashboards are hyperlinked, button-enabled PDFs that can be configured and designed such that users have a simple place for reference for all project documents and resources, alleviating the need for anyone to have to navigate through complex folder structures to find documents.

Giraldo said once he’s completed the above steps, he ultimately creates two project dashboards: one for workers who interact with documents in the office, and another for workers in the field. The dashboard for workers in the office is slightly more robust, with multiple buttons directing workers to key documents and resources. The dashboard for field workers is less detailed, allowing them a simple and easy-to-understand interface as they need to review documents while working on hectic jobsites.

https://youtu.be/knTzovEw5Fs?list=PLJ7Sea2rdFrlbonLl3F3u3-w35nkIXLdh

Create Studio groups

Studio, which provides users with document management and real-time collaboration capabilities, is another tool Giraldo uses on his projects. Creating groups within Studio allows the administrator—in this case Giraldo—the ability to provide different users access to different documents within the Studio Project as well as the ability to collaborate on document review in Studio Sessions.

Users can have three levels of permissions within Studio: read, read/write and read/write/delete. “This can function as your server,” Giraldo said of Studio Projects, although most larger firms ultimately store their files elsewhere. “I’ve seen small companies rely on Studio Projects entirely for their document management.”

Bluebeam for iPad

A major asset for Giraldo’s document management implementation with his projects has been use of iPad in the field. The Revu for iPad app, in addition to giving field workers access to view project documents nearly like an in-office worker would on a desktop computer, is especially great when it comes to project tracking, Giraldo said.

Moreover, Giraldo has used tablets in the field to take pictures of completed work to store in the document, such that workers can view project elements as they’re installed within the drawings as construction progresses. Giraldo has also taken to dictating notes using the audio recording capability within the iPad app to make notes on certain markups within drawings while out in the field.

Track work with statuses

Lastly, the Markups List in Revu includes a Status column that allows Giraldo and other users the ability to track the progress of different project elements. What’s more, the status column is followed by a color column that allows users to color-code different statuses.

Giraldo on a recent project, for instance, had three different statuses displaying what stage a series of pre-cast panels were at: ordered, delivered, installed. To set a status, users can right click on a markup, click “Set a Status,” then pick the project element. This can be done both in the field on a tablet and in an office on a desktop.

Streamlined efficiency

Overall, this digital document management workflow has helped Giraldo and the rest of his project team cut down on printing and use of paper documents, which often led to confusion and disorganization on jobsites. It has also helped field workers be more efficient, Giraldo said, as they no longer must account for and reference rolls of paper documents.

Thanks to these tools provided by Revu, as well as construction professionals like Giraldo who are willing to figure out the connective elements of establishing a fully functional digital document workflow, construction workers have an example of how to store, organize, track and find important project documents and resources digitally, making the office-to-field document flow easier to manage.

This article was originally published by Bluebeam, Inc. on the Bluebeam Blog.

ne of the downstream effects of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has been a strong projected uptick in cloud software conversions. With employees increasingly working remotely, software needs to be available anytime, anywhere. Software doesn’t have to be cloud-based to be remotely accessible, but many chief information officers (CIO), even at midsize companies, have had cloud transformation on their roadmaps, and the pandemic has provided the occasion to ask: if not now, when?

Moving key software applications to the cloud, which has already taken place across the construction industry, will have significant implications for the organisation – most obviously on the IT team that has been maintaining the software on-premises. In financial terms, the cloud-based construction management software transformation is a change from licensing software and paying annual maintenance fees to an on-demand and pay-as-you-go model. You rent the application instead of buying it.

For end-users, a smooth cloud migration may be almost imperceptible. For instance, a user logs in to their cloud-based construction software application, works with colleagues on finalising a set of documents for a large office building project and passes them on for approval without even a hint of consideration of the technology making that series of interactions possible.

Here are answers to common questions construction professionals may have about cloud collaboration in the construction industry and the technology behind it.

Where’s my software?

It’s not on your computer anymore. It’s on a remote server, being delivered to you whenever and wherever you need it. Is that something to be concerned about?

According to Jim Prothe, marketing director at Magenium, an IT solutions consulting firm based in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, there are good reasons to be excited about the change.

‘A friend of mine has a business that rents an office in a Chicago suburb’, Prothe said. ‘Last summer, another tenant in their building had a fire over a weekend. All the sprinkler systems turned on, and the application server was toast. They had to spend the next two weeks rebuilding that server from month-old tape backups. So, they lost a month of data, including all their billings. If they’d been operating in a cloud environment that had an outage in a region, they’d have had built-in failover capacity; they would have been able to spin up capacity in another region, and their business would never miss a beat.’

Where is this server?

It’s no longer in the company’s server room – or, in cloud computing parlance, it’s no longer ‘on-premise’. Where it’s situated depends on where your business is located and what kind of cloud you’re using.

What kind of cloud?

There are at least three different kinds of cloud service infrastructure that drives cloud collaboration in the construction industry:

• Public cloud: You, the end-user company, are renting services from a large vendor, perhaps even a global enterprise like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services or RackSpace. Typically, your company is sharing the rented infrastructure with other companies (what the vendor calls ‘tenants’). Your applications and your data are architecturally walled off from those of other tenants, but the bits are located on shared machines. In the early days of cloud adoption, some tenants worried about the possibility of proprietary data bleeding over into other tenants’ spaces. But growing confidence in providers and in cloud technology has generally done away with that concern.
• Private cloud: This generally refers to an infrastructure with all the characteristics of cloud architecture, but one built and maintained by your company. Large enterprises may prefer a private cloud for extremely sensitive data. It’s an exceptional situation for a mid-sized architecture, engineering or construction firm.
• Hybrid cloud: Some organisations maintain applications in both public and private cloud infrastructures.

As an end-user, the type of cloud probably won’t affect the availability or performance of the software.

What are we getting from the server?

There are at least three different levels of commitment your company could make to its cloud transformation:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Your company rents physical space on the provider’s servers and relies on the provider to keep them running. But that’s it – your own IT people set up and maintain all the software.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS): In addition to the hardware, the provider maintains the operating system and all the other architectural features of the environment. Your people still maintain the applications.
• Software as a Service (SaaS): The provider maintains everything from the operating system to the applications; your company pays to use these services on an as-needed basis.

Where’s my data?

Some of it is local – but the bulk of it is in the cloud. The physical location of the server generally makes little or no difference to the end-user, other than in exceptional circumstances involving regulatory compliance. Under Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, enacted after the Enron accounting scandal in the early 2000s, financial services firms often need to be able to specify to regulators where their account data is being stored. Other regulations come into play if they operate internationally. You can ensure, contractually, that your data stays within a certain region or on a certain server.

The server’s physical location isn’t entirely irrelevant when it comes to cloud collaboration in the construction industry. The speed at which data packets travel their tortuous routes across the internet is breathtaking, but if the server is far enough away, the end-user will experience a noticeable performance lag. This is why public cloud providers – and large organisations that host their own private clouds – have multiple, redundant servers distributed among regions. The infrastructure will be designed to route your data through the nearest server and to reroute to the next-nearest server if your region’s system goes down.

‘Generally, the large cloud service providers give you the option to choose the region where your primary servers will be located’, Prothe said. ‘Nearly every metropolitan area will have its own dedicated servers.’

Why are we using cloud software?

In the short run, it’s cheaper to rent than to buy. The SaaS provider can price services inexpensively because it enjoys huge economies of scale.

From an accounting standpoint, there are benefits in reducing capital costs and increasing operating expenditures. Cloud service contracts generally come under operating expenditures. ‘During the 2008 financial crisis, capital budgets evaporated’, Prothe said. ‘Businesses still had to operate and moving applications to the cloud was one way to keep going. In some industries, we’re seeing the same thing happen because of COVID.’

Renting cloud software reduces the burden on a company’s IT services, because it has less infrastructure to maintain. ‘A friend of mine who runs an HVAC engineering company complains about the burden of supporting on-premises software’, Prothe said. ‘It constantly needs to be patched, and each time that introduces a new security vulnerability. The investment in IT resources to manage those changes is pretty daunting for a small engineering firm.’

Isn’t this risky for our secret stuff?

Some companies express concerns about their most sensitive data, but the cloud can be more secure than having your own data centres.

A global company like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft may have thousands of full-time security people, assisted by artificial intelligence tools designed to spot or even prevent service interruptions or hacker intrusions. Their automation tools can detect unusual activity across the network, such as odd data traffic, and analyse it quickly to size it up as a potential threat. And, of course, traffic over cloud networks is encrypted end to end. The provider’s reputation is riding on the strength of that encryption.

‘Your instinct may tell you to maintain close control over important applications’, Prothe said. ‘But you need to ask yourself who is better at maintaining a secure infrastructure – a cloud service provider whose survival depends on their reputation for security, or your IT guys?’

There must be a downside to cloud adoption, right?

There is one, obvious downside: users need to have a reliable internet connection.

Still, start-up costs are cheaper, although cloud software can cost more in the long run. ‘We have a lot of companies move applications from on-premises to the cloud, and they often need help optimising their spend’, Prothe said.’“You can spend a lot of money quickly in the cloud. You spin up a lot of power, and you pay for it on a monthly basis, so you may not notice it. You can often dial down the power you consume during off-hours when people are less likely to be online.’

If the data structure in the cloud application is different from that of the on-premises software, the data may have to be cleaned up, restructured and normalised. Migrating data to the cloud can be expensive, cumbersome and risky if undertaken without expert help.

Is everybody moving to cloud software?

It depends. Some companies are using only the basic applications like email in the cloud; some are ‘cloud-first’ – the default, when introducing a new application, is to adopt the cloud version.

It also depends on the application. Many software companies are themselves moving to a cloud-first product development roadmap, gradually transitioning their long-time customers from on-premises installations to their cloud offerings. Many new software vendors are likely to be cloud-only.

So, the next time you log on to use any cloud-based application to review a design or communicate a set of document changes, now you know how the technology behind those transactions truly works.