This, my friends, is one of the big ones. It represents the beautiful beginning of our project information management (PIM) party. What is it? We\u2019ve hooked some of the fundamental features of Synergy into SharePoint and back again<\/a>, to wrap up some of our customers\u2019 document control, document editing, and document management issues.<\/p>\n Now, not everybody feels like they’ve got a document management problem, so it’s not for absolutely everyone. That said, I\u2019m fairly sure that even the people who don’t think they’ve got a document control problem, actually do. So it likely really is for absolutely everyone. But don\u2019t panic about your problem, we\u2019re solving it already.<\/p>\n SharePoint’s<\/a> been around for a long time. That\u2019s its particular strength, and its weakness. Why? Some people used SharePoint a long time ago. I think it\u2019s fair to say, it was pretty clunky back then. People who used SharePoint 10 years ago say, “Yeah. Yeah. Tried SharePoint. It wasn\u2019t great.” When you say, “Look, we’ve hooked into SharePoint!” they go, “Yeah, not interested”. But SharePoint’s come a long way in 10 years. A long, long way.<\/p>\n Total Synergy is a really good example of this as a business \u2014 we don’t have a file server. Everything we do is on SharePoint. Because SharePoint’s great. SharePoint is fantastic. Why would you get a file server and manage it onsite, when you can just chuck everything on SharePoint? Using SharePoint, every file that anyone in Team Total Synergy is working on is available to all of our staff, all of the time, and it doesn’t matter where they are. What\u2019s more, it comes with the mid-tier Microsoft 365 business plan \u2014 you probably already have it.<\/p>\n And now you’re thinking \u2018but what about CAD?\u2019. Let\u2019s get to that a bit later.<\/p>\n This integration was a project on our roadmap for next year, but with the COVID issue, we understand that, for the foreseeable future, at least half of your staff are going to be working from home. Possibly all of your staff are working from home \u2014 that file sharing issue has become a big issue.<\/p>\n We rearranged our roadmap to get this out as quick as we could in response to an understanding that built environment businesses need better cloud tools to continue doing their work wherever they find themselves, right now.<\/p>\n We’ve kept it nice and simple so that people are happy to use it. SharePoint is truly excellent with document collaboration \u2014 we use it all the time ourselves. There’ll be two of us working in the same document, from separate locations, and each can see what the other is changing, in real time. Brilliant. People don’t realize SharePoint can do that stuff. So, it’s really good at that, and the things that Synergy is really good at, make both even better.<\/p>\n One example is, when I make a new project<\/a>, I want to have a project folder structure set up on my file server. That’s the first feature \u2014 when you create a new project, it automatically looks up the template and makes a project folder structure in SharePoint where it’s set up according to your quality systems and filing conventions. You\u2019re not leaving it up to somebody to make the folders, which is time consuming and prone to error.<\/p>\n Then the next shiny new thing is, you can generate project documents<\/a> out of Synergy. There are certain documents you create for any built environment design business, and different company types have different types of documents. Proposals, reports, instructions, RFIs, the list goes on. Let’s pick one as an example:<\/p>\n When you make a proposal document, you can just use a template from SharePoint or Word. Sure. But it won’t include all the information you’d like to have in your document. When I make a proposal, by the time I’m making the proposal, I’ve already made a project in Synergy because I’m going to track the proposal-making time against it \u2014 and when I make the proposal document, I want it to contain:<\/p>\n Another example is while you’re doing the quote, the first actual step of the quote is in Synergy. Then you generate the proposal document in Word from Synergy and it copies all the stuff you’ve already done in Synergy into that document, so the proposal’s half done. You’ve just got to finish it.<\/p>\n It’s all done the same way from the same template and populated with the same Synergy data. It’s all nice and connected, but Synergy also puts it in the right folder \u2014 because it knows what folder it’s got to go into, of the folders it created, and Synergy also gave it a consistent file name. Synergy\u2019s clever like that.<\/p>\n The first step is making the folder structure. Now we’re dropping Synergy documents straight into that structure, in the right folder, with the right name. People are enabled to work concurrently on the Synergy documents much more elegantly. Told you PIM was pretty!<\/p>\n Now, we used to put each file into our Synergy document register and you could check it out \u2014 which was very SharePoint, 2001. We still put it in our register so that we keep \u2018version zero\u2019 of that document, but then \u2026 we give it to you in SharePoint where, as I said, it’s a document collaboration wonderland. Now you and I have worked on this document and it’s beautiful, so what’s the next step?<\/p>\n The next step comes down to document control. We all know that document control is so important it could make a person cry (and a lot of offices have a document control manual, on a shelf somewhere, that nobody\u2019s ever read). But why is it so?<\/p>\n The truth is, it’s not uncommon for builders and architects to end up in court. It happens all the time. A joke I made for years is that all building projects go through the same lifecycle \u2014 first there\u2019s concept design, then detailed design, documentation, construction, and finally, litigation.<\/p>\n When something goes wrong, there’s a whole bunch of finger pointing about whose fault it was.<\/p>\n Once you\u2019re in court, it usually boils down to who has the better paperwork. It\u2019s sadly that simple. If it’s my word against yours, okay, we’re 50\/50. If I say, “Look, I made a note on the back of this parking ticket … If you squint, you’ll see it,\u201d and I can hold that up in front of the judge, that judge goes, “Well, it’s no longer one person\u2019s word against another\u2019s \u2014 he\u2019s got an illegible scribble on the back of the lunch receipt or something \u2014 his documentation is better than yours, so I trust him.”<\/p>\n Just by doing that little bit of paperwork, keeping a copy of everything you send out \u2014 it’s just covering your rear. Most people think that sending a document via email is sufficient because they’ll probably be able to find that email. Okay, it’s better than nothing, but it’s not really considered proper document control. Normally it’s expected that anything you sent out is going to have a document control number so that we can refer to it and it’s going to have some kind of versioning number. It’s got to be easy to track.<\/p>\n The way we suggest doing it is when you made that proposal from Synergy and we put it in SharePoint, we kept version zero. You can always roll back to the very first version if you need to because we kept a copy of that. You and your mates all edited that report and you’ve got it to a point where it’s ready for review somewhere by someone. It might be another engineer or architect, or it might be the client, or it could be anybody. All you do is:<\/p>\n And that is a legally acceptable copy. Bye bye litigation phase!<\/p>\n Then you can just click a button to put it on a transmittal<\/a> and send it, which will then also keep a record to say:<\/p>\n All that as opposed to, say, email. You just don\u2019t get that with email. You\u2019ll never again have to hear, “I never got that” or \u201cI haven\u2019t seen it\u201d. You can prove they got it. We’ve wrapped up that little bit of your workflow.<\/p>\n So, by now you are thinking \u2018well, that\u2019s great for the small files, but it\u2019s no help with CAD,\u2019 and \u2018I want to have all my files in one place, and I can\u2019t put CAD on SharePoint\u2019. I think what you\u2019re trying to say is \u2018gotcha! I get to keep my file server\u2019. We get it, you tear up every time you hear a Madonna song and recall the day you bought it.<\/p>\n These days, the software vendors are building cloud software that lives on their cloud platform. That\u2019s where it works best. Sure, maybe you can force it to save somewhere else \u2014 but that\u2019s not where it will work best.<\/p>\n Microsoft give you Microsoft 365<\/a>, which produces documents best hosted on SharePoint. Autodesk gives you Revit<\/a>, which lives on BIM 360. If you have small AutoCAD files, like house-plan-small, these will actually work pretty well straight out of SharePoint. But the big stuff, big Xref\u2019d AutoCAD or anything Revit, you need to consider BIM 360. It\u2019s horses for courses.<\/p>\n Again, Synergy steps in to help. If you generate your PDF \u2018drawing sheets\u2019 from your CAD product of choice, and save those sheets into a folder in SharePoint, from Synergy we will let you know there are new and updated sheets, and we give you a bulk-import tool to update your document register, ready to shoot off those documents on a transmittal.<\/p>\nThis is<\/em> the DMS you\u2019ve been looking for<\/span><\/h3>\n
Buddying with the best, especially now<\/span><\/h3>\n
What does it all mean for your AEC workflow?<\/span><\/h3>\n
Dreamy document continuity \u2014 generating project documents from Synergy<\/span><\/h3>\n
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<\/figure>\nWon\u2019t see you in court \u2014 AEC document control covered<\/span><\/h3>\n
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Yes, yes, but what about CAD?<\/span><\/h3>\n
The relativity of speed \u2014 making right easier than wrong<\/span><\/h3>\n