Line Meets Curve

There are so many things one must think about when beginning a new project. The list is endless…

I have spent the better part of the morning listening to several architects puzzling over the drawings and submittals on a project that is causing no small headaches… While I don’t know the details, it seems to have been caused by miscommunication from somewhere down the line… So how to prevent this in the future? How to get the people up and down the line doing what they are supposed to be doing when they need to do it?

Accountability and responsibility are a large part of what this industry battles daily. Everyone works hard to manage their work and do their best with the information they have. So making sure everyone has the information they need at their disposal when it’s time to make those decisions would be a key part of managing AEC jobs.

Adding processes and bureaucracy to enforce communication will slow things down and just begs for larger problems as more people opt out of compliance.

Perhaps we just need to give people a way to get to the information that is currently in other people’s hands out to those who need to see it at the same time without creating an entire bureaucratic/industrial process to allow for that to happen… Perhaps we just need to get people to use the tools that most of them already have in place and more and more of them are using everyday anyway.

It’s called just in time information and it’s one of the many things 550 can do for you.

We’ve been busy around here. We have a number of fixes & features to announce in this release cycle:

Our Guest Access Accounts feature for pyramids is now implemented. Administrators who want to invite bidders (or others) to a workspace to download documents or read announcements can do so without cluttering their contact lists or memberships. More importantly, without compromising the security of their pyramid.

These guest access accounts allow greater flexibility in assigning permissions to individual lists and workspaces within a pyramid. The accounts expire automatically but the pyramid administrator may adjust this period. A pyramid can have multiple Guest Access Accounts to address various needs.

This feature was in the planning stages but it turned out to be an important one among our construction/contractor clients and we thank you for your participation and feedback on this one. We look forward to hearing more from you about how it works in practice. Our Comments & Suggestions page is always available as are the forum and the comments here on Line Meets Curve.

By the way, we upgraded our blog engine and now you really can leave comments and subscribe to the feed for easier access through your feed reader.

There are two new widgets for your convenience: an image widget and a slideshow widget.

We have also released several new standard lists: the Change Order Proposal, the Change Order, and the Pay Application lists.

To all who experienced our login issue for new users, we are heartily sorry that you had to deal with that. It was a stealth bug that occurred when we did an upgrade. We got a fix out within minutes of hearing about it but we understand that some of you went for several days thinking there was something wrong with your initial sign up.

We have also tweaked and reworked several other functionalities, adding more flexibility to the lists where you can generate title headings for different parts of forms that the application generates for you for detail views of list items.

Multi-file management allows you to upload multiple files into one list item (great for attaching a set of documents to one title) or to upload them all and have the application automatically create each file as a separate list item.

AND we’ve upgraded our servers to serve everyone better and faster.

We are currently working on several initiatives that that we’re especially excited about: The Daily Digest email and the Client Invoicing/Billing are two of them.

Of course, continually improving our processes to get new development out the door is part of our everyday task list. There is plenty more to come.

One can feel the electricity in the air over here.