Atvero | Three ways Atvero enhances information quality on SharePoint   

At Atvero, our mission is to tailor the user experience of SharePoint to the AEC industry by incorporating practices and workflows that AEC professionals expect SharePoint to have but are not natively provided. This article explores the recent improvements to Atvero that helps improves uploads of large sets of documents, allows templated setup of new projects, and adds new workflows to the document review process.

1. Extra help with importing files

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Metadata

Many of us still wear the battle scars of long, repeated meetings where the practice technical team and IT have attempted to define the project standards relating to file naming and folder layouts. As often for things designed by committee, they end up suiting no-one particularly well. People quickly find workarounds for making the system work for them, to the disadvantage of others.

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ISO 19650 gives us a standard way to name any file and the structured name format lets us to do away with folders once we move away from the file server. File names become rich with metadata about the document, allowing for easy searching and filtering to discover and organize files.

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As documents are created in Atvero, we typically use document metadata to generate the document name so ensuring every document is well tagged. But what about information received in?

Transmittals in

Document controllers on large projects, or people working in that role in smaller projects, frequently receive a collection of files to upload into the system. Metadata needs to be added at the point of upload, but this is manual and tedious work and prone to error. We need it to be correct though, and the richer the better, to aid in later discovery.

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From the beginning, Atvero has automatically extracted metadata from files with well-structured names. The ISO 19650 standard, for example, allows us to derive the author, zone, level, document type and number.

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We also found that files sent in a transmittal often have other information appended, in many different formats. Typical examples include the document title, the status of the document and its revision number.

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Atvero can now also extract this information automatically and add it to the document’s metadata, removing a manual step and helping ensure correctness.

2. Templated project setup

What we learnt from our customers is they frequently start a project with a good idea of the deliverables that the project will have and want to create a set of empty records ready to receive information. This makes it easier to pre-assign document numbers and helps them analyze the status of project deliverables.

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Atvero has several ways of creating document records – document templates, uploads, email filing, design system integrations with software like Revit.

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A new feature of Atvero is the ability to pre-define these initial document sets in a spreadsheet. Using a simple table format, document numbers, titles, and other metadata such as status, size and scale can be defined. The spreadsheet is then used to automatically generate the required set of record placeholders, with all the important metadata pre-set.

3. Richer feedback on document reviews

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Adding comments and markup to approval workflows

For AEC professionals, the mark-up of documents and drawings is a key part of the check and approval workflow. Markup starts as part of the internal check and approval workflow. For issued drawings, the recipient will often return them with markup as part of their approval process. And in return, drawings received in as part of a deliverable are often returned with markup added.

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It’s important these marked up drawings are kept alongside the original for easy reference. Atvero’s new comment and mark-up feature makes uploading and reviewing mark-ups simple and intuitive when done during the internal checking process.

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If markup is needed during the review process, the original drawing can be downloaded and marked up using a variety of PDF editing and markup tools. The resulting file is then uploaded and stored alongside the original drawing. Atvero shows the marked-up drawing versions alongside the corresponding revision within the record’s history, making it easy for people to locate later.

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To aid the review process, written commentary can also be added to a revision’s approval or rejection.

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Once a document is approved or rejected, the person who uploaded the file will receive an email that notifies them about the approval status of their revision along with the comments and mark-up. All members of a project can find and read comments on a revision after it is rejected, giving the whole team a deeper insight about why certain revisions were not approved and what work there is left to do.

Approval workflows for larger projects

Often there’s only one person on a project team who can approve or reject drawings. On larger projects, there may be a need to assign specific individuals or a group of individuals who can do it. Sometimes just one person in the group must approve, other times everyone in the group needs to approve before a document can be released.

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Atvero is now completely customizable for assigning reviewers, making it easy to request specific individuals or review groups to approve or reject. People assigned with review responsibilities are notified by email of the documents they need to check. The new enhanced approvals page makes it easy to filter the documents needing approval down to the ones assigned to the reviewer.

Conclusion

By enriching metadata quality, ensuring correctness and streamlining approval workflows, we provide project teams with a more intuitive experience of locating, organising, and reviewing project information. With each new release of Atvero we look to build on customer feedback to keep making improvements that support AEC professionals in following best practice.

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