|
Newforma Project Center
Making project e-mail easier to manage
 |
| Newforma indexes the contents of an e-mail and its attachments and makes them searchable and available to the entire project team.. |
How much time is spent each day just managing the flow of e-mail? How much time searching for a specific e-mail or an attachment sent via e-mail? How much time re-creating information that exists somewhere but can’t be found? No hard numbers exist to answer these questions, but the response is probably “Way too much time.”
The Email Management Program of Newforma Project Center helps A/E/C firms tame the e-mail monster and save time by managing project information and communicating more effectively with team members. Newforma takes project e-mails and treats them like project tools.
“We make the e-mail visible to the entire project team,” says Bob Batcheler, vice president of product management for Newforma. “We take the e-mail message from your in-box after you click ‘file-in-project,’ then it goes to that project.”
But it does not just get transferred passively to a project e-mail site. The contents of the e-mail and its attachments are immediately indexed and searchable. They are linked together in the search, so that if one comes up, the others are brought up with it. There is no more searching for the e-mail that explains the information in the attachment.
Batcheler says that normal search tools don’t look through layers of information so they don’t find things that might be buried in attachments or zip files.
For example, if a contractor is searching for drawing that has notes about a change in ductwork, he can search for the note on the drawing, have the drawing come up and then get the e-mail that came with the drawing with the additional information about how to move the ductwork.
The user decides after he opens the e-mail whether to move it to the project-team site. It takes two clicks to move or copy it. Each desktop is outfitted with Windows application that will take an authorized user to any of the projects on the network.
Once there, the user can view 1,000 of the most recently filed messages and search the rest of the project messages and attachments. Newforma automatically deletes duplicate e-mails.
“You don’t need to install AutoCad on the desktop to see the AutoCad file because Newforma can open and display most types of files currently used by the A/E/C community,” Batcheler adds. This includes DWG, DGN, DWF, DXF, PDF, PLT and most bitmap formats.
Training takes about an hour and can be done online or in person. It takes about two days to prepare the project server.
Newforma software has been developed on the Microsoft.NET platform to operate on a Microsoft Windows platform.
Newforma Project Center client software currently requires the XP operating software and is compatible with both MS Office 2003 and 2007. E-mail management tools currently are designed for Outlook 2003 or 2007 only.
“We are referred to as a ‘tablecloth,’” Batcheler says. “Everything looks better and you can even see things better, but we don’t mess around with what’s underneath the project information. We don’t disrupt anything.”
Newforma Inc.
1750 Elm St.
10th floor
Manchester, N.H. 03104
Phone: (603) 625-6212
Fax: (603) 218-6145
www.newforma.com
|
