6 Reasons Why You Should Manage Documents Online
3 Reasons Why You Should Manage Documents Online
Spot mistakes before they cause problems
Coordinate All of Your Team and Subcontractors
Access Project Information From Site
3 Reasons Why You Should Choose Collabor8online
Ease-Of-Use
No Complicated IT requirements
Software Designed by Contractors.. for Contractors
If you’d like to know more click or call 0203 369 6491 for more information, or try now.
Try Now Free 30 Days 25% off Annual subscriptions TweetAll things BIM
Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility. A BIM is a shared knowledge resource for information about a facility forming a reliable basis for decisions during its life-cycle; defined as existing from earliest conception to demolition.
It seems the world has gone mad for BIM!
It’s difficult to keep abreast of new developments, to keep up to speed to be fully informed and above all to be comfortable that you have done enough to embrace the new technologies without going overboard. As is often the case good information can be truly difficult to obtain so, rather than simply regurgitate another article explaining the dos and don’ts, let me point you to an excellent resource “Extranet Evolution” ; the author, Paul Wilkinson admits to having had a fairly intensive BIM week, attending a BIM event almost every day! An excellent source of information Paul has found time to write about our product in the past, when we took to youtube to explain “How does Project Management work?” In this video and, when we talked about our forthcoming enhancements or upd8s as Paul put it!
Some time ago I actually spoke to an Architect who enquired about our product, he admitted that he didn’t truthfully know what collabor8online did or how I worked, when I explained that:
Collabor8online allowes you to easily publish and share your drawings and project documentation online (as opposed to e-mail),
he explained flatly that it wouldn’t be suitable for him. When I enquired if e-mailing large drawings didn’t at least occasionally cause problems, he explained that it never did, because he didn’t have e-mail, didn’t use a computer, still produced drawings by hand and delivered them by post. Furthermore, as he was close to retirement, he wasn’t going to start embracing any of that “nonsense” now.
I thanked him for his enquiry and we parted on good terms. It takes all sorts.
We still meet Architectural practices for whom the world of online or cloud document sharing is completely new. We pride ourselves on offering a product that can be easily embraced by even the most technically “challenged” practice. Our video guides and product walk-throughs are always on hand and if all else fails, unlike many cloud software vendors, we’re UK-based and are always available at the end of the phone.
If you’d like to save time and effort, publish drawings and project information quickly and easily and generally move towards the world of BIM, why not call or click below. We have a 30 day free trial on all accounts at prices that won’t make you blush.
Call 020 3369 6491
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How Architects use Collabor8online
Belt & Braces Backups
The arrival of the latest wave of suitably sized USB memory sticks makes having ALL of your data in the palm of your hand literally possible.
So let’s imagine you’ve embraced cloud computing, and our server in the sky represents a backup of all your correspondence, orders, invoices, certificates and everything that you consider valuable. You’ll take some additional comfort in knowing that our server is also backed up, to a remote site (a backup of your backup if you will.)
But, here’s the problem knowing your data is safe and secure is not exactly the same as having that data in the palm of your hand. Well, worry no more you now can have both.
32 GB of data for literally a few pounds, 64 GB of data for a few pounds more, means that even the largest systems can now be backed up to yes a pencil sized USB memory stick!
If you wish, we will back up your data from our server onto a USB memory stick and dispatch that content to you, via secure courier. Giving you that extra sense of double, double security. Prices start at just £95 and are dependent on data size, CONTACT US for more details.
For those of you who are especially paranoid, we can also send a copy round to your mum’s house for safekeeping if you wish.
Call 020 3369 6491
Workflow Calendar with Refraction View
Following feedback from clients we’ve significantly enhanced our calendar and To-Do list functionality to include a magnificent new Refraction View calendar.
Click to Enlarge
The aim was simple, we wanted project managers to be able to see who was doing what and when.
The new Refraction View gives assigns a colour for each team member, so you can instantly see who was working on your project. Hover your mouse over the calendar for a moment and you see further details; an Image/Avatar of the team member assigned to the task (humans can recognise faces quicker than computers), details of who assigned the task and exactly which project it relates to.
Further views show projects start dates, events along the projects lifespan such as milestones, meetings and deadlines and of course completion dates. All of these can be coloured coded, exactly as you require (Bright red target dates anyone?)
These helicopter views allow users to instantly identify bottlenecks, deadlines and perhaps just as importantly gaps in Project cycles. The interface goes one step further and allows managers to simply click and drag tasks to different dates, smoothing workflow, removing bottlenecks and scheduling efficiently.
Simplicity is the key, and a link to Google calendar allows the information to be communicated instantly to Outlook, tablet or mobile device.
The new calendar view is great–I can instantly see the projects in the current month and the next, and for me the most important aspect is that I can see my full current order book at a glance and identify any gaps that need filling or resource shortages that need to be addressed
If you’d like to know who is doing what click on any of the links below or call.
Call 020 3369 6491
Google Calendar Link and More!
Enhancements to Collabor8online rolled out over the Easter period include an automatic link/synchronisation to Google calendar, automatic update of revision numbers a new calendar using Colour Refraction View and more!
Remember — all packages include the first 30 days free and there is no fixed term contract you can cancel at any time with just 30 days notice, signing up is completely RISK FREE
Or CALL 0161 820 1642 and we can open your account in minutes over the phone!
E-mail too big to send?
Do you ever have problems sending large e-mails?–I certainly do. The limit from my home service is 25 MB and given that we I a cable connection with speeds of up to 60 Mb per second, it’s not too difficult to get a file that is larger than that.
Commercially of course, larger files are very much the norm. Even a word document, enhanced by photographs and diagrams, comments, annotations and of course a fair bit of text, just how big could that be you might ask? Sizes of up to 35 MB are fairly common. Of course this depends on the quality of diagrams and imagery included but, what’s the point of reducing the quality of images if you’ve gone to the trouble of creating them at high resolution in the first place!
As use of images becomes more common throughout an ever-growing number of businesses, so do the problems of e-mailing large files.
If it isn’t images because the problem it can be files such as specifications and technical drawings, or any form of CAD output, 50, 60 MB or Gigabytes are not uncommon.
There is an ever-increasing reliance on video, too. Video files even in extremely modest resolution with all the usual compression and file reduction techniques can still be many megabytes in size.
More and more people are turning to online file sharing and document management solutions to get around these problems as they present a quick and easy fix to a persistent and annoying everyday difficulty.
Simply upload your large file to your cloud-based storage solution and simply e-mail the link to the file to your contacts or colleagues. They’ll certainly thank you for it! No more huge e-mail files clogging up their e-mail send and retrieve routines!
You’ll find life becomes so much easier, files can be uploaded in seconds, and sophisticated systems such as Collabor8online can even forward the e-mail link automatically for you.
If you need to view the document again, don’t worry, it’s stored safely in the cloud and will stay there for as long as you need it.
If you’d like to overcome the problems associated with sending large files by e-mail–click on any of the links below or call.
Call 020 3369 6491
Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody
There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realised that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when actually Nobody did what Anybody could have done!
(OK You’ve probably all heard this story before, but it’s worth repeating)
In a slightly more modern twist, perhaps the resulting proverb could be that to ASSuME makes an ASS out of U and me!
When there are jobs to be done, people need to go WHO is going to do that job and WHEN it’s going to be done. There can be no assumptions, no reliance on what “normally” happens. Tasks need to be assigned, people need to know that they have been assigned and most importantly, to who.
This is the overall goal of collabor8online’s latest enhancements to its To-Do list and calendar features. “To -Do’s can be created by any user and assigned to other team members (or themselves). The resulting task (To-Do) is clearly visible to all users of the project and is displayed graphically on the project calendar. The display shows the duration of the task (in days) in a colour unique to that user. If you mouse over the task and the user’s image and a full description of the task is also displayed. Managers can drag and drop tasks change durations of tasks, even moving them from one week to another to allow unbelievably quick and easy allocation of tasks and scheduling/re-scheduling of work.
When a user marks the task is complete, the assignor of the task is automatically e-mailed to inform them that the task has been completed. As one of our users very succinctly put it,
Having assigned tasks to the team in the morning I like to hear my blackberry pinging all day as one by one, the tasks are marked as completed.
In another feature, the calendar also allows milestones to be entered and displayed. Milestones are events that are not assigned to anyone individual, but nevertheless are clearly important in managing and scheduling workloads. Once again these events are clearly visible to all.
So, we end up with a system where Anybody can see what Everybody is doing, if anything goes wrong, Somebody can tell Everybody about it and Nobody is kept in the dark (..poor Nobody).
If you’d like to know more about collabor8online’s latest calendar, to-do and event enhancements click or on any of the links below or call 020 3369 6491
Call 020 3369 6491
KISS
Keep It Simple Stupid is a truly great acronym. With a superb economy of words it implies not only that with most things, keeping it simple is a sensible idea but frankly it would be stupid not to!
It’s the same if with online document sharing and online project management. Managing projects and documents online is not a miraculous innovation, not overly complex, not incredibly sophisticated but it is simple.
And thereby lies the key. This is a simple and effective solution, to sharing documents online. It’s not dramatically different from sharing documents by e-mail (most people’s preferred method), it is less complex than setting up desktop sharing or a VPN (virtual private network) around your own hardware. It delivers the same results, the same (or better) levels of security but above all it does it … Simply.
So, with a system such ar collabpor8online that you can sign up to online in less than 60 seconds, you can begin to share documents with colleagues, contacts and clients in a secure and above all easy-to-use environment. You can set up folders, such as “My Project” and you can create subfolders, such as “drawings”, “specifications”, ” tender documents” and “financials” and, most importantly you can restrict who has access to each.
So when your accountant logs on he will only see the “financial” folder, when your subcontractor or client logs on he will only see the folders that have content relevant to them.
Keeping it simple for your users as well as you.
And then of course you can create a new folder, “My Second Project” and share that content with a whole new set of colleagues, contacts and clients.
“To-Do” lists are another simple yet effective function that is included. You have a task that needs doing, you can assign it to a person, with a note “New drawings have been issued, please check that you are happy with the revisions”, you can attach a target date or dates to the task, and the system will automatically notify the individual that the task has been assigned to them and notify you when that task has been completed! Simple, effective communications on project sensitive issues.
Project documentation and drawings in one place, project communications and tasks in one place and even project calendars showing up and coming events and milestones for all of your projects, in one place. Simple.
As with all things Internet or computer related, simple works. Twitter is simple, so it’s Facebook and so is LinkedIn, if you’d like to take the next step and literally collaborate online then have a look at Collabor8online, you can sign up in 60 seconds (no credit card required) and you can simplify your document sharing and project management.
Take the Tour Try Now Free 30 Days 25% off Annual subscriptions TweetFor Contractors .. By Contractors
Timesheet Entry online
Designed by Contractors …for Contractors
When designing our latest enhancement to Collabor8online, we have drawn heavily on our experience of over 25 years within the Contracting industry, both as vendors and as Contractors! (We were once contractors ourselves).
Operatives can enter their hours directly from site, or from home, access is even available via mobile device if you prefer. This means that there is no need for operatives to travel to and from the office to record their hours and the information is available immediately online for processing and production of invoices if required.
This innovation reduces time, cuts costs and enables rapid billing and ensures faster payment.
For those who prefer to control these tasks carefully, entry of time sheets can be restricted to selected users and only be carried out by supervisors only. If you wish, you can further ensure that time is only be recorded against preallocated tasks, enabling tight control on how individual hours are booked against jobs.
Export routines, unable system to integrate seamlessly with third-party billing accounting or invoicing systems and our technical staff are on hand at any time to assist you in getting the system up and running quickly.
Your only 60 seconds away from a free trial, and one phone can activate the timesheets feature for the duration of your free trial. The free trial is entirely risk-free, simply cancel within 30 days and you will not be charged at all–NO credit card is required.
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