reviewinsight
For some time now within the plant design industry we have struggled with a fundamental issue of commenting and managing comments on a 3D model. With large amounts of companies utilising resources within offices around the world we have needed a way to communicate our design comments to our work share offices. Traditionally this has been done in the form of taking a screen shot of the model, hand marking it up, scanning and emailing the comment to the designer. This same practice is even used between disciplines in the same office on the same project. As you can imagine this causes an admin nightmare when it comes to keeping track of all the emails, ensuring the comments have been actioned, and don't even get me started on the QA team.
In an industry that has shifted from a drawing board environment to 3D CAD electronic age, a shift that should enable us to be, as much as possible a paperless office. However we still allow ourselves to slip back to the paper environment in certain instances, mainly because there is not a solution to allow us not to. Well that time has passed, as Ticodi has realised this issue and have stepped-up to address the problem of model commenting in the form of their ReviewInsight software.
Introduction to ReviewInsight
ReviewInsight from Ticodi is a review commenting tool, tailored to the plant design industry that allows designers / engineers to comment on the 3D model and manage the complete comment lifecycle. ReviewInsight allows the capture of any CAD design graphics in the form of a screen capture image, combining this with the ability to enter a large amount of comment data ensures your design team have detailed information about the comment. Ticodi also offers complete integration of ReviewInsight into their ModelInsight 3D viewer which not only saves a screen capture of the model automatically, but a clipped 3D volume of the model. We cover this integration on page 4 later in the review, so please stick around as you have to see this in action, it's brilliant. Anyway back to this bit of the review, ReviewInsight gives you the ability to manage your comments at a designer level by filtering the comments by unit, department, type of comment, comments to be actioned etc. ensuring that you designers can easily find and prioritise there comments. Comments can be fully managed at senior level as well, allowing the comments to be approved at both senior and client level if required, ensuring that comments are closed by both parties, which will keep the QA and management team happy.
Installing ReviewInsight
Installing ReviewInsight was a breeze, which is no different to most software on the market nowadays. ReviewInsight uses Microsoft SQL Server databases to store all the comment data which sometimes makes people nervous as they imagine that they need to start bothering the I.T. department to install SQL Server on their machine. Well don't be deterred, the ReviewInsight installer took care of all of this for us by installer SQL Server Express (Microsoft's free version) on our computer and configured the whole lot, which was refreshing to see. So within about 5 mins I was up and running with ReviewInsight and ready to start using it.
Getting Started
With the evaluation version of ReviewInsight that we are reviewing, getting started was a breeze. The demo project that came pre-configured with the installer meant that we needed to do absolutely nothing to get ReviewInsight up and running. There is some simple configuration needed if you are using ReviewInsight for an actual project, and this will be covered later in the administration section of the review. However as far as our review, or if you wanted to evaluate ReviewInsight goes it is all set-up ready for you to just get on and use.