Message Forums Overview

Message Forums assist the team in transmitting information, and are similar to an email system. Administrative users can create categories (similar to a group in Outlook) for different user groups to quickly send out messages to a group of people. Message forums have a few advantages over typical email:

Message forum information is included in the final archive.

The Markup Tools are available for PDF, JPG, DWF, DWG and TIF attachments.

Similar to document types within the system, the message forums can include reference links.

All responses/postings are available to the full group (avoids the situation where an email user forgets to Reply All).

Additional Information

Like email, message forums have locations for the subject, message and attachments.

When creating a new message, the user has the ability to deselect specific users if they are not an appropriate recipient of the message. Once a message is sent, users invited to the forum receive a notification from the system with the subject, message body and a hyperlink to the message forum.

When users leave a comment, others receive another notification which includes the comments and a link to the forum. Therefore, users are able to monitor the conversation without logging into the system.

Sample Uses

The job site is unexpectedly closed and the contractor wants to quickly alert all users.

The design team is considering a wall location adjustment in response to an RFI. They can upload a sketch of the new location, invite the consultants to the forum and reference link the pertinent RFI. The consultants can log into the forum and mark up the sketch.

The contractor wants to schedule a meeting of his subcontractors. They can include potential meeting times and all included users can see the meeting time responses.

The contractor can post updated schedules for the entire team.

Users can post and link comments pertaining to items that do not have a review process in the system, such as meeting minutes or field notes.