Do you ever get the feeling while working on a specific project activity that someone else at your firm (or perhaps even you yourself!) has previously researched, created, designed or completed the exact same task on some other active, completed or archived project?
And how much time do you think is wasted re-creating information that already exists in an email, CAD drawing, specification, spreadsheets, cut sheet or presentation in another project somewhere at your company?
The answers we typically hear are somewhere between “Frequently” and “Almost every task” for the first question and 10 to 20% of my time for the second question.
It begs the question: Wouldn’t it be useful if you could search across every project your firm has ever completed and quickly filter through the results to retrieve the information you need, instead of having to re-create the information?
This article will provide some guidance on how to set up Newforma as an enterprise project search tool to do just that. But first, just to whet your appetite, I would like to walk through an example of how your firm might make use of such a tool.
Using Newforma as a “technical project knowledge system”
In this example, you have received a contractor’s RFI via email:
The contractor needs to know if the temporary use of recycled wood in construction qualifies towards the project’s green building certification. If you didn’t have the answer on your finger tips, you would likely need to track someone else down or go hunting through code books. But the thing is, since your firm does a lot of green projects, it’s highly probable that someone in your office, or perhaps someone in one of the firm’s other offices, has come across this before. And information that you could reuse is probably sitting idle in a file or email somewhere.
In the past you had no hope of finding it, but now since each of the firm’s active, completed and archived projects are in Project Center, you could use search as follows:
1) After typing the search term, select the Search drop down, and click on the Selected Projects… option:
2) Click on Select All or pick selected projects only. Notice you can filter by project status, type or other columns to only search certain kinds of projects:
3) Notice one of the “hits” containing all three words in my search term is a PDF of a fax received from the completely fictional “Green Building Authority”. Without even opening the PDF, I can see the answer in the PDF preview:
4) So I right click and send the PDF or perhaps add it as a supporting document to the RFI so that I can include it in my response:
The hardest part about that workflow was just constructing the search query in a manner that returned a relatively targeted list of relevant matches. If your search term is too generic and you search hundreds of projects constituting terra-bytes of data, it’ll be harder to separate the wheat from the chafe. A search across all the firm’s projects is really an advanced search, so you will want to make use of the advanced search parameters in Newforma, which include many of the standard search options available in other search tools (i.e. wildcards, quotes for phrases, modifiers like -, etc.). Consult Help for details on these options.
Hopefully this article has provided a bit of insight into how you might use Newforma’s multi-project search capabilities to leverage the intellectual property that’s currently inaccessible in your firm’s digital project archives. If you are user of Newforma Search, but not an administrator, you can stop here.
Setting up Newforma to search completed or archived projects
Here are the key steps:
Copy any projects you have backed up on tape or DVD back on to a network drive. Newforma won’t be able to index archived projects unless they are spinning on a networks drive. If you already have some archived projects spinning you can get started with those and add additional projects later.
If your current Newforma Project Center server has capacity for more projects, you could add them to that server. Alternatively, you could deploy another Newforma Project Center Server to support archived projects (i.e. an “Archive Server”). If you don’t have access to an “archive server” and just want to get started, you could add them to your existing Newforma server and use “Batch Re-Pin” at a later date when the archive server is available.
To automate the archive project creation process, use the same Batch Project Creation templates you used to drive the projects you created at your initial deployment. If you use the batch process, be sure to set the project Status field for these projects to “Archive”. You can also use Project Settings to set the project status manually as follows:
The list in the project status drop down is a customizable. Administrators can add or edit entries in this list from within Project Center Administration:
You can enter any value into the Status Label field and use the Status Type field to determine whether the project is active, an opportunity or archived. The Status Type determines which icon is displayed in the interface. Additionally, projects with an Archive status are Read only, meaning users cannot create action items or transmittals, file email, etc.
The Status Label is what displays in the user interface. Notice I have added a label called “Completed”, but left the Status Type as Active. This is because even though the project is completed, I want to leave it open for a time so that the team has time to file any post-mortem emails, incoming transmittals, etc.
After you create these archived projects, I am betting the first thing you will want to do is dump all your archived project email into them! There are several ways to batch file project email. In most cases, the easiest method would be to open the Exchange public folder or PST file containing the archived project email messaged and drag them into the Newforma – Items to File project folder, as shown here:
Naturally, if you create a bunch of new projects and then add tens of thousands of archived emails, the Newforma server is going to be busy for a while and any projects pinned to that server are going to be sluggish. If you don’t have a dedicated archive server, you might want to create archived projects and file emails overnight or over a weekend to minimize the impact on active projects. The good news is that once the archived projects are initially indexed, the server won’t be asked to index them again since they will presumably be read only.
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