NBS Create - Adding your knowledge to NBS guidance and suggested values

Our major new specification product is not far away. In May I blogged about being able to create outline and performance specifications and in June I blogged about how the specification is now a rich information model forming part of a fuller building information model. This month I am going to look at how soon you will be able to add your information to supplement the NBS guidance and suggested values.

When completing your NBS specification you are presented with a part-complete template specification clause. Expert technical guidance is provided to the right of the editor window. Clicking the drop down arrows in the clause offers a number of suggested values for you to pick from. You can select one of these or type your own.

Where an office has information they'd like to supplement NBS with they may now add guidance notes against any part of the NBS guidance. For example, below, the user has more information they'd like to add to the Image quality keyword of a performance clause for a CCTV system.

The screenshot shows the user adding their information. Once complete, the user selects whether this guidance note will be available on all future jobs or for a specific job only. They also select whether this note must be visible to all users in the office or just a personal note.

This guidance note now appears inline within the NBS guidance at the appropriate context. Who added the note and when they added it is displayed and this note may be modified at any time.

Within a company it will be possible to control who can add this information through the software permissions model. As the NBS data will be delivered across the web, this information can be shared across sites, so if a company has offices at Newcastle, Glasgow and London - then all users of the system (including home-workers) will see this guidance.

As part of customer focus group activities over recent years, a common request for improvement has been to allow users to supplement not just the NBS guidance, but also the suggested values. The screenshot below shows the user selecting the option "Edit Office Values List...".

The user may then add additional values that will appear on all future jobs and be available to all users within a company.

The screenshot below shows the clause now with the new office values appearing in addition to the NBS suggested values. We believe that the ability to customise these values and the ability to supplement the technical guidance makes will help offices centralise and share their knowledge and make best use of this on their construction jobs.

Further reading...
For all blog articles on NBS 2012 - click the NBS 2012 hyperlink to the right of this page.

To join our Beta Testing Program and help us develop this product, please see:
- http://www.thenbs.com/support/betatesting