Version 11.2 | SmartBidNet
Monday, January 16, 2012 at 4:54AM BID PROJECTS: A new viewing option called "Extended by Alpha" has been added to Tabs 6, 6b, 7, and 8 under Bid Projects.
BID PROJECTS: Released new quick viewer for plan files.
MINORITY REPORTS: Address, City, State, and Zip fields have been added to the Minorities by Category and Minorities by Alpha Report export.
MINORITY REPORTS: A new report has been added that combines the Activity report with the subs' minority certifications.
REPORTS: When viewing All Communications under Reports, there are now check boxes next to 'Failures' in order to select and resend all failed communications at once.
NOTIFICATIONS: The Notification tab will now appear automatically for logged in users until it has been read.
NOTIFICATIONS: Every time a sub submits a proposal, a project note, RFI response, or a prequal, a notification will appear for managers (bid project and prequal) in the notification right panel.
COMMUNICATIONS: The communications widget, displayed on the right side of the dashboard, now includes information on update requests, general, and prequal communications.
UPDATING COMPANIES: A column titled "SBN Update Key" has been added to the Show/Search/Export excel export option and Bad Emails Reports, Bad Faxes Reports, Companies with Incomplete Profiles Reports and Companies with Address Problems Reports and when filled in, or edited, and imported back into the system, the corresponding company contact record will be updated with the information from these columns. This feature is also available for exports and editing Companies via the Show/Search/Export screen.
COMPANIES: A "Select All" option has been added on the State screen selection under Areas Of Work for national companies.
COMPANIES: When searching company profiles, users can now filter by Rating criteria.
COMPANIES: An option for 'Show Only Deleted Companies' has been added to the Show/Search/Export functionality.
SUBS: When subs are filling out the Zip Code field under Areas of Work, the default text now reads 'Enter Zip Code' instead of a default number.
SUB ACCESS: SmartBidNet will now transmit an access key with each communication for sub contractors to use to login if they don't know their username and password. Starting in Mid February, SBN will no longer transmit a sub contractors username and password - just the access key. This will allow subs to assign a username and password that nobody ever sees.
PREQUAL: The request for information (RFI) functionality is now available in a single review step, within the Initial Review, to allow for a quicker review process.
PREQUAL: A Contact Fax field has been added for subcontractors submitting contact information.
PREQUAL: On all pages of the Initial Review screen, the name of the company being reviewed is now visible in the header for easy identification.
Reader Comments (2)
Not sure of the full functionality of the Access Key, but if the system will no longer send Usernames and Passwords (which makes some sense), there could be some annoyance with the access keys... The last software that we used utilized access keys per project, per (subcontractor) user. It was a nightmare tracking down the Access Keys. I'm curious about how this will ultimately function, hopefully it works better than the previous experience I've seen with this. Otherwise, the rest looks cool.
Some thoughts about the Quick Viewer:
1. It is certainly fast.
2. It would be great if you could "turn the page" forward or backward from the file.
3. Perhaps adding a check box on the page that provided an option to "Select this page for printing or downloading", or a simple "print this page" button.
4. It would be more helpful if the menu options didn't fade out after a few seconds, since people (presumably) multi-task more and more, I may look away for the 5-10 seconds that the options are on the screen, now I'm hunting to see if there even ARE controls.
5. A rotate function wouldn't hurt either, since not every set comes the way that plans are desired or easiest to work from.
All in all, I like this added function.