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You are probably familiar with the use of “sticky notes” on filed drawings and documents to alert the team of related bits of project information such as RFI’s, sketches, ASI’s and change orders that might be filed elsewhere. Related Items in the Fifth Edition of Newforma Project Center are their digital equivalent. Here is how they work: Any time you markup a project file or add the project file to a project item as a supporting document, a relationship between the file and its related items is created and maintained by Newforma Project Center. Additionally, when viewing files or other items in virtually any screen, Project Center now indicates the existence of these related items. This really simplifies the information discovery process as you can see these related items in many places, including the Project Files activity center, as demonstrated below: It’s not hard to imagine how useful related items can be. For example, if I were responsible for issuing an updated version of a drawing, it would be very helpful to instantly find any related markup sessions, RFI, Action Items, milestones or other pieces of project information. In the example below, I can see there are open action items and markup sessions, which I can double click or right click to open and/or act on: Best of all, most of these relationships are created and maintained as a by-product of using core Project Center capabilities such as Markup Sessions, Action Items, RFI, Submittals, Transmittals and Timeline.  For example, when you use Newforma Markup to create a PDF sketch and send it to a consultant as an action item, the markup session and action item automatically become a related item of the CAD file. There is no additional tagging or grouping required. Let’s take a look at another powerful way to use related items – the managing and pulling together of an ASI (Architect’s Supplemental Instructions). While Newforma in Fifth Edition does not yet explicitly support the ASI workflow, there are still ample creative ways for teams to use Newforma to manage the ASI process. In the example below, I have created a Milestone on the Project Timeline to manage my ASI. I then added the files to be distributed with the ASI as supporting documents. Notice the supporting document file icons contain little shortcut arrows to indicate they are actually live file links. This is an important characteristic of supporting documents because it allows me to create a working set of ASI deliverables without duplicating or inadvertently creating a different version of these project files.  Also notice that any other project items related to the supporting document can be easily viewed and accessed from this screen shown above. Not only does this provide the team with a single spot to review the current files and activities related to the ASI, but it also leaves behind an organized audit trail for the project record. I can then use the Event Log view in the Project Timeline to quickly filter project events by the type of event. The screen shot below demonstrates the use of the Event Log to quickly flick through the items related to the project’s meetings and milestones: And if I need to publish or distribute this information to external team members, I can generate a Related Items report: As you can see, related items in Fifth Edition are quite a powerful concept. They alert team members to the existence of information related to the project files and activities they are working on, providing important insight that might otherwise go unnoticed. http://www.newformant.com/index.php/81/