PDExperts

reviewinsight

Emailing Comments

There could be instances during your project where you require either feedback on a comment and / or a comment to be approved from someone outside of your company network. ReviewInsight allows comment packages to be emailed to anyone around the world. Contained within the comment packages is all the information that is needed to make an informed decision e.g. screen capture image, PDF report with all information displayed, mark-up annotation and 3D clipped volume of the model if the comment was created using ModelInsight integration. All emails are fully managed through ReviewInsight allowing you to know the exact status of your comment emails. The comment package can be opened using Ticodi's FREE ReviewInsight Reader software, allowing the recipient to open the comment package securely, add information about the comment, approve, add mark-up information and email back to you. When you receive the email package back, this is then uploaded back into ReviewInsight adding new information made on the comment, thus ensuring that your ReviewInsight database is kept up-to-date.

Reporting

Reporting is normally one of those areas of an application that is an afterthought and is very rarely given the attention that is warranted, especially nowadays where clients and managers are looking for clear progress reporting. Well this is not the case with ReviewInsight, Ticodi has spent, from what I can deduce, a considerable amount of time and effort on the reporting side of things. ReviewInsight comes with a number of pre configured reports that give you statistics on the number of comments by construction area or discipline, by comment status e.g. unapproved, engineering approval, client approved etc. Along with statistical reports there are a number of individual comment reports that display comment information including screen images, approval information, area for a wet signature. All reports are able to be exported to a number of different formats, the most common generally being Adobe® PDF.

"Well what if we want non standard reports" I hear you say, well that is not a problem. ReviewInsight comes with a report designer module, that allows you to quickly and easily create your own custom reports. It is very similar in design and use to Microsoft® Access, therefore having a very short learning curve for someone who is already familiar with Access. Creating custom reports is a breeze as it is mainly wizard driven, so creating your own bar chart report can take only minutes. Another nice touch I liked about this is that the reports are saved as report templates, which mean that your custom reports can be opened by general users through the standard ReviewInsight reports form. These reports can be used on different ReviewInsight projects regardless of which project you originally created them through, this is possible as ReviewInsight modifies the database connection of the report to suit your current session. All of this gives you a very flexible and powerful reporting tool, which is refreshing to see.

Integration With ModelInsight

We now get to the section that I've been looking forward to talking about, as this is where things get even more impressive, if that is possible. I won't talk to much about ModelInsight from Ticodi as we have reviewed ModelInsight in a separate review here. However a brief overview, ModelInsight is an Intergraph® PDS / Bentley® Microstation DGN 3D viewer, that has the ability to open huge models along with the cleanest rendering I have seen from a product like this. Ticodi has seamlessly integrated ReviewInsight and ModelInsight to create a very powerful relationship.

Conclusion

ReviewInsight in my opinion is the only tool to use, as it is the only database driven model commenting tool on the market. And lets face it this kind of tool needs to be database driven so that you can manage your comments, report on the overall status and have a complete audit trial of decisions. ReviewInsight was released in 2006 and is being used by market leaders in the industry for a number of years now and this shows. The amount of functionality is vast and the flexibility of how and what this application can be used is huge, obviously I have just skimmed the surface of the tool within this review. However I am struggling to think of anything functionality that ReviewInsight is lacking or anything that could be improved, and this is a good sign of a mature product.

ReviewInsight can without a doubt save considerable time during formal model review as it allows designers to immediately see comments that where raised in the meeting. This has a huge benefit as designers can start resolving comment straight away, instead of waiting for the model review meeting to finish and then further delay for the model review comments to be collated and distributed to the project. If you work on the assumption that a model review takes in the region of 5 days, then another 5 days to collate the comments in a report and distribute to the project team, ReviewInsight could save you 10 days per model review. Assuming you carry out a 30%, 60% and 90% model review meeting, ReviewInsight could shave 30 days off your project. A time saving that is not small by any standards, and not to mention the time saving from general day-to-day model commenting.

All I think that is left to say is, don't forget to download an evaluation copy and thank you for taking the time to read this review

Details

Vendor: Ticodi
Website: www.ticodi.com
Download Link: ReviewInsight Evaluation Download