Newforma Project Center creates a powerful, productive environment for project managers and their project teams, enabling them to easily organize project information, exchange large amounts of information with internal and external project team members, and run project processes more efficiently. It integrates information from multiple sources, such as CAD, Microsoft Office, .PDF files, and email, enabling users to search, compare, review, mark up, transfer, and use information more effectively. Project Center organizes and provides context for the information in terms that any AECO team member can relate to, and offers a suite of activities that all AECO project team members will find useful.
Project Center is comprised of the following features:
Action Items are seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Outlook to help create, edit, and manage them easily, and engage the power of the project team in resolving problems quickly and effectively. Project action items and their email correspondence are automatically filed and logged to the project, allowing all project team members to view, search, and contribute to action item resolution. Supporting documents and drawings can be associated with action items, providing a permanent record of all related documents as well as identifying all action items associated with any particular file. While project managers are the primary beneficiaries, the greatest benefit is realized when all project team members use this feature to track action items that need to be addressed.
Compare visually identifies differences between project folders, files, document sets, or record copies, eliminating the time-consuming process of manually comparing them. By color-coding additions, deletions, and changes, the compare feature enables project team members to focus their attention on important coordination issues and evaluate the quantity, cost, and scheduling impacts of design revisions.
The Batch Compare dialog box eliminates the time and cost of comparing large drawing sets, enabling the project team to quickly set up batch compare processes that output results to .PDF files or a plotter.
The Newforma Viewer (described below) is also used to compare files. It enables you to electronically compare two or more versions of a drawing. The compare animator allows project team members to dynamically transition between adjacent drawing versions for a clear understanding of how the design has evolved over the project timeline. It also provides the ability to animate changes and filter out dimensionally insignificant changes. Multi-version animation sequences can also be output as animated .GIF files through Project Center's Digital Light Table.
Document sets enable you to “virtually” organize related project files and folders into process-specific groups without duplicating or modifying the underlying file structure. Live links to Windows folders and files, and advanced file name filtering allow document sets to be dynamically updated as the underlying folder contents change. You can view and search document set contents, send the document sets to other project team members, and compare current project files and folders with archived or updated versions.
The Newforma Info Exchange Server is an automated and secure means of exchanging project files with internal and external team members that overcomes the file size limitations of email, and is integrated with the transmittal, submittal, RFI, and markup workflow within Project Center. Simply select files to send from any activity center in Project Center, add recipients, and Info Exchange takes care of the rest, including packaging the selected files and their XREFs and posting them to the Info Exchange website, which is hosted on the Info Exchange Server within your company’s IT infrastructure.
Internal team members receive an email message with a direct link to download the files in Project Center. External recipients receive an email message with a link to download the file transfer through a browser with a secure connection to the Info Exchange website. This same web interface can be used by external team members to upload file transfers. Info Exchange tracks the download activity associated with each file transfer and sends final notifications to recipients with pending transfers prior to removing them from the server on the designated expiration date. It also maintains a backup record copy of each file transfer, allowing the file contents of expired transfers to be re-sent, reviewed, or compared to updated versions.
Markup supports a drawing "red-line” workflow for electronically reviewing, marking up, and commenting on sets of project drawings using the Newforma Viewer. CAD expertise is not required to use the built-in tools such as free-form drawing, revision cloud, stamp tool, and multi-line text. You can quickly create multiple markups for a drawing or BIM model, link them to action items or project files, and save them to a markup session associated with the underlying source file. Anybody on the project team who selects the project drawing or BIM model can easily browse, preview, and add comments to the related markups. After markups have been reviewed and any corrections incorporated into the underlying source drawings and models, the markups are closed but remain a permanent part of the project record.
Use the Newforma Viewer to create markups, as described above, as well as open, view, and compare drawings electronically.
Projects are the primary method by which information is accessed and organized within Project Center. Projects are created by specifying key informational fields such as Project Name, Project Number, Status, and Type. Project Center projects also contain paths to root project folders on your company’s network, allowing the files and sub-folders beneath the root location to be associated with the project.
Project Center does not require you to move, modify, or restructure your network-stored project data. Instead, you simply define projects that reference the data as it is currently structured on your firm’s central file server. The data is then grouped together and accessible from one place to all team members instead of many different locations.
The Project Center Add-in for Microsoft Outlook integrates Microsoft Outlook with Project Center for seamless filing between Outlook items and your projects.
The Newforma Project Center Server acts as an unseen background software application that supports the actions users perform on the Project Center clients, such as searching files, XREFs, and project items, managing the interaction with Newforma Info Exchange, and administration of each project’s store of centralized data (such as contacts, action items, transmittals, submittals, document sets, etc.).
Project Email enables you to manage the flood of email that can swamp your Inbox. It consists of the Project Email activity center, which members of the internal project team can use to browse, sort, filter, or search the messages and any file attachments, and the Project Center Add-in for Microsoft Outlook, which allows users to quickly file email messages to Project Center projects, benefitting all project team members. Duplicate email messages are prevented, related email messages can quickly be found, and when you need to find information, all project email messages and files are listed in one location.
The Project Team activity center enables you to create and manage a team for each project. Internal and external project team members are added from a central list of contacts and are then available to all project users when sending file transfers, managing action items, RFIs, and submittals, administering Info Exchange, or reviewing markups.
Use the Project Timeline activity center to view, add, edit, and manage project milestones, phases, events, and holidays.
The Record Copies activity center keeps a log of all Project Center items and file transfers that have been created and sent for each project.
Use the RFIs activity center to log, edit, and manage requests for information (RFIs) electronically.
Search provides a single interface to search all sources of information, including email messages, .DWG, .DOC, .PDF. files, and other supported file formats, and project items such as transmittals, submittals, action items, RFIs, timeline items, markup sessions, etc. All text matches are displayed along with links that take you directly to the desired information. By default, the search scope is limited to the current project, but you can also select multiple active projects, archived projects, opportunity projects, offline projects, and other sources of information to expand the scope to include any information that your firm is involved with.
Use the Submittals activity center to log, forward, review, and respond to submittals received by the project team. Tracking submittals and the entire interaction associated with processing and reviewing submittals gives the project team a tool that is tailored specifically to increase responsiveness and reduce the cycle time and effort in reviewing submittals. Submittal management is facilitated by support for batch import of scheduled submittals from Microsoft Excel, the ability to accept, reject, forward, or request re-submittals, and the ability to track and report the submittal status and history, including monitoring any email exchange between project team members related to a submittal.
Use the Transmittals activity center to create and log transmittals that accompany the exchange of both physical and electronic materials with other project team members. Transmittals contain descriptive information about the electronic documents or physical items being conveyed. You can customize the appearance of transmittals to match your company’s existing forms. Transmittals are often created as by-products of other processes, such as file transfers sent via Newforma Info Exchange or email, or submittals. The transmittal log consolidates all electronic and physical exchanges in a single location.
Project Center administrators: Open the Project Center Administration activity center to create a project.
Project Center users: Open the My Project Center activity center to start working with a project and the features listed above.
Help updated 4/8/11
© 2011 Newforma, Inc. All Rights Reserved.