Beginning on Wednesday 11/29/16 at 12:00 am est we will be applying a minor release along with routine scheduled maintenance.

Improved Document Commenting

We’ve been hard at work improving the way that document markups associated with Bluebeam are returned to the applicant.  Previously the documents were auto-flattened when a review cycle was completed.  This allowed the applicant to view the document and it’s markups in any pdf viewer but also removed the list of markups that were associated with the document.  We have recently developed an alternative methodology which will auto-embed the markups instead.  This has a similar effect as the flatten option but preserves the list of annotations within the viewer.  This allows the applicant to easily find or search through the list of markups and when one is clicked, the viewer takes the user directly to the appropriate page.

In addition we’ve also added the following features:

• New Custom Variables
  We’ve added two new custom variables in an effort to help direct applicants to the proper section of the project page when responding to comments.
  • <ProjectDocumentsLink> – This will output a link to the project that auto-scrolls down to the project documents section.
  • <OpenIssuesLink> – This will output a link to the project that auto-scrolls down to the open issues and expands that section.
• Improved Email Addressing
  The addressing of emails has been significantly improved with the implementation of an auto-suggest feature.  You can now begin typing a user’s name or email and the system will suggest matches and allow you to add or remove recipients quickly and easily.
• Improved Performance for Issue Attachments
  We have been seeing more and more open issues that include images which in some cases were causing the pages to load slower than normal.  We’ve improved the way that images are attached to issues which should allow the page to fully load while the images continue streaming.
• New Options for Displaying Plan Reviewer Contact Info
  We have added options for including the reviewer’s phone number and/or email with the open issues.  Including this information will allow the applicant to contact the reviewer directly if any questions should present themselves during the resubmittal process.
• Performance and Display Formatting Improvements for Inspections
  We’ve been working hard to optimize the online and offline experiences for mobile devices.  There was some inconsistant behavior on some devices mostly concerning the text editor causing the keyboard to pop up at unexpected times on iOS devices.  This and several other minor display issues have been resolved in this release.

Coming Soon:

• Time Localization
• API Framework
• CityWorks Integration
• LaserFiche Integration
• Fee Report Improvements

Beginning on Wednesday 11/2/16 at 12:00 am est we will be applying a minor release along with routine scheduled maintenance.  This release brings many improvements and new features including some exciting additions to the Inspections Application.

Inspections Enhancements

We’ve been getting great reviews of our new mobile inspections system and there have been a lot of excellent feature requests.  With this update we have integrated the dynamic form builder into the inspection request and inspection complete events.  This allows you to customize the information that you request and or require the applicant to enter when requesting an inspection.  This also positions us for another enhancement in the coming months to allow inspectors to enter customized information regarding inspection results.  For example you might require a soil inspection lab results to be submitted when a soil inspection is approved.  This custom form data is configured to also display on the inspection dashboard and associated reports.

In addition we’ve also added the following features:

• Time Localization (Edit: 11/1/16 pushed to the next minor release)
  We’ve gone to great lengths to modify the date/time stamps in the system to better match local time-zones.  We will automatically detect your most likely time-zone preference for you, but you’ll also have the ability to modify your preferred time zone from within your account preferences as well.
• New Fee Reports
  There are two new fee reports that have been added to the system.  When searching fees now you will see two new options to sort by Fee Type Detail and Fee Type Summary.  These two new options will allow you to customize reports based on fee types.  The summary will show one record per fee type along with the total paid, unpaid, and grand total.  The detail will output one record per fee sorted by fee type.
• New Fee Variables
  We have 3 new variables that will allow you to better customize the project fees on your custom documents.  You can now use <totalFees>, <totalFeesPaid>, and <totalFeesUnpaid>.  These will output a decimal value out to two decimal places.  You can apply your own dollar formatting, or use these variables in calculations.
• Plan Review Summary
  This new custom document element will output the results of the most recent review cycle into your comment and approval letters.  This gives the applicant a quick overview of the review results along with each discipline and the results of their review cycle.
• Reviewer License Numbers
  You now have the option of entering a license number for a reviewer when adding them to a discipline.  This allows us to record a different license number per reviewer per discipline.  When a comment or approval letter is generated, we can include these license numbers into the new plan review summary.
• Improved Issue Formatting
  In order to improve performance when generating comment letters with hundreds of comments, we’ve made some slight changes to the way that the project issues are output.  With this change we were able to improve both performance and the appearance of the comments.
• Issue Document Link Improvements
  We’ve changed the way that the comment letter issues link to documents in order to always point to the flattened or embedded version of the document (even when the markups are flattened/embedded after the comment letter was created).  This should reduce confusion on the part of the applicant and streamline the way that comments are responded to.
• Miscellaneous Performance Improvements
  We have also applied several performance enhancements in this update to better handle any temporary connection problems with the document server.  We have also applied several patches to the offline functionality of the inspections module regarding different browsers.