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Adapted to the needs of the construction industry, Studio allows your teams to collaborate in real time from wherever they are working. Studio is an essential tool for any construction or engineering team looking to improve and streamline digital workflows.
Study Projects: Where your documentation lives
Studio is a cloud storage system combined with an online collaboration platform that allows teams to consult documents, review and mark them, then check them back into the system with all marks included.
To protect the integrity of your data, you can customize permission settings, from access to editing permissions. This means the right people have access to your project information at the right time.
To further protect information, you can also share individual documents and set what viewers can do with those documents, including the ability to view, flag, or even delete the document. Importantly, Studio Projects also records and stores a file history, meaning you can see who made which changes to documents and when. You can set expiration dates on permissions to ensure that your data cannot be changed as your project moves into new phases.
Studio can host a variety of files, including spreadsheets, images, and PDFs, reducing the need for your team to use multiple tools and platforms to coordinate projects.
Studio lets you keep working on your projects outside the office, even if you’re offline. You can access it from any computer with Revu installed. You can also continue to collaborate with your project teams in real time with Studio Sessions. You can find more information in Studio Sessions and Studio FAQs.
Using Revu on multiple computers
If you use Revu on multiple computers, you’ll likely want to keep the same toolsets and profiles that you use on all devices. You can do this by backing up your settings and then restoring those settings on a new computer. Be sure to save the backup file to a portable device or upload it to a location that you can access from any computer.
If you’re collaborating with people outside of your team who don’t have a Revu license, they can still unlock industry-standard markup tools using View Mode or the Vu iPad app.
Study sessions: where teams collaborate
A virtual planning room that includes a built-in chat feature, Studio Sessions is the virtual room where your team holds meetings and works on projects.
During your session, members can upload, mark, comment, and submit changes to documents simultaneously, with each member’s action recorded as it happens. Follow a member to track all their actions during the meeting, and at the end of the meeting, you can generate a session report and a summary report to share with all members.
Shanoc Halliday is a Bluebeam Technical Sales Engineer who brings over twelve years of BIM experience to his work, helping clients leverage technology to deliver better results.
Shanoc’s top tips for getting the most out of Revu and its tools include:
Define your workflow
The real power of Bluebeam Revu comes when you combine its flexibility into an integrated workflow. These workflows often involve walking through a building, getting documents from other programs, or coordinating efforts among many users.
Here are two popular workflows our customers have developed with Revu.
Defect inspection workflow
Use Bluebeam Revu to eliminate steps and preserve brand integrity while performing defect inspections. It can also eliminate the time-consuming task of cutting sketches from the original drawing, blowing them up and photocopying them onto smaller sheets.
In Revu, you always have access to the original drawing and can make extended sketches quickly, easily and on the fly. Information can be widely distributed to as many contractors as they need, at low cost and with less risk of error.
Estimation Workflow
Your estimating process is just one component of the job where you might want to build a custom toolset. With Revu you can create a custom set of tools to suit any task where you want to reuse marking or measuring tools. For more general information, see Working with the Toolbox.
Keep file sizes manageable
With the ability to compress non-viewable document images and data, Revu can reduce the size of PDFs without compromising vectors.
Note that doing this on a page that contains flattened marks will prevent all marks on the page from being flattened.
PDF size reduction
Working with PDFs of 100 pages or more can be a challenge: slow to load, email them, and make sure everyone is working from the latest version.
Using Sets in Revu solves each of these problems.
A set can upload multiple documents to Revu as if they were a single document. Any review is automatically grouped with corresponding pages, and Revu can even read the sheet name and automatically sort documents by discipline.
Most importantly, it’s faster to load and navigate documents with linked files instead of merging them.
Set up notifications
Studio notifications and alerts keep you informed of any changes made.
You can decide when to be notified of changes, including in real time or a daily summary. A daily email includes an overview of all Studio activity related to your account. That is, you will only receive notifications for active sessions or projects that you have previously logged into.
Unlocking the power of Studio and Studio Sessions means your team can improve the speed, accuracy and quality of the projects you’re delivering. Workplace changes that have emerged from COVID-19, such as remote and hybrid work, will become more commonplace, meaning tools that help your workforce collaborate in real time they are more crucial than ever.
Support is also always at your fingertips with our training videos, tips and tricks, FAQs and on-demand webinars. For additional support, you can also join a Bluebeam User Group to collaborate, learn and learn more about industry best practices and trends.
By Tracie Sanim