Hello Workflows. Nice to meet you.
You may have noticed some new capabilities within Concert recently. We added to Concert because we heard and watched how people were using it, and wanted to make many of the use cases native to Concert.
We saw users using Concert to do all sort of things: creating distribution for construction, getting internal and external approval to proceed to a new stage, and signing of models so they could be sent to clients, among others.
As such, you’ll see: especially within Collections, you’ll see request assets, set purpose, distribute and request signature, all of which have a distinct use case:
Requesting Assets: Send an email to a user and ask them for an asset. This allows project managers to obtain all the assets needed in a collection.
Set purpose: This allows you to say what a distribution is used for. We saw our users distinguishing between for construction or not for construction and now you can natively say what the purpose is, or something else if it makes sense. In addition, since the data is immutable, people were concerned about what to do when errors were later discovered or newer versions became available – and now a collection can also be marked as obsolete.
Distribute: Distribute lets you email a user an entire collection. They receive an email letting them know that they received the collection and can follow the links in the email to see it. You can send to Concert users through this system and it will auto-populate the user’s email.
Request signature: As this sounds, this lets you request a user to sign a collection, and you can specify whether you want the registered architecture seal or the ink signature. Also, you can suggest a signing statement and reason that you’re requesting the signature. The user receives an email with links to follow to complete the action.
And, we keep the assets the way they should be.
In addition to workflow, we have also worked to seamlessly ensure that everyone that you want has the right access permissions at the right time. This is dealt with mostly at the project level, where the project administrator can ensure that the right collaborators can register, certify and administer a project.
Using Concert’s workflow
We have already seen users find many user cases for these sets of functions, which we collectively call workflow. For example, one user wanted to make sure that all the necessary principals approved design documents before sending them out to the client. He found that Concert’s workflow paired well with the internal process. Everyone could have access to the definitive version within a collection as it came together, and they this could be packaged and sent out with the appropriate signatures for the client.
We also envision this to have endless use cases. A design firm can make sure that there are the correct official signatures and seals before sending off a collection of documents to a permitting authority and the client. And, using Concert’s lookup features, anyone can check that the versions are the correct ones and the most recent versions to take a look at.
Or, a design firm can now protect their IP within their model, ensure that there is a permanent record of the version that they send to their clients, and that the principals or architect of record can be requested to sign the collection, whoever is actually assembling a diverse set of assets, such as perhaps a project administrator. This is the path to digital delivery, allowing for signed models and accompanying assets with keeping everyone in-synch as to what is being delivered to whom and when.
We believe that we are only scratching the surface.
We’d love to hear…- what do you use Concert for?
