Keeping up-to-date and reducing risk with NBS Create

With NBS Create, all technical content is delivered from the web. This has the huge advantage that the content is always up-to-date within the software as the NBS technical staff update it throughout the year. In turn, it makes life much easier for IT administrators that previously had to receive CD updates and then push these out to all users across an organisation. With all of the best will in the world, the content sometimes did not always make it to the specification writers as the CD remained on someone's desk and didn't get deployed.

The screenshot below shows that now, when a content update is released (like yesterday), the end-user is informed that this has happened in the software start-up screen...

Communication of new updates within the start-up page

From the NBS Guidance homepage - a summary of all of these changes is a single click away. The screenshot below shows that all of the updated systems are listed. The user can drill down to look at the updated items in further detail. In the example below, the content has been changed due to the technical author reviewing BS 1342 and BS 7976.

A list of all modifications to NBS content

When the software is opened, the office master clauses are all checked for currency in the background. When a specification is opened, again, this is checked for currency in the background.

The software checks office master and specification content against the latest NBS

If a specification is out of date with NBS and/or the office master, the user may see a summary report of all differences.

Within the specification the updates are clearly displayed

The user may then go through these changes and make an informed decision as to whether these modifications should be accepted or rejected. In the example below - the NBS technical author has changed the default value of a clause item from "6mm (or depth of tile if less)" to "Full thickness of tile".

Updates can be accepted or rejected at a clause insert level

Depending on where the specification is in the project timeline, it may become fixed and the specifier may no longer wish to update this. In this case, the user may simply click "Stop updates for this job". Equally, if the user does not want to go through each update one-by-one, they can click to "Accept all changes".

At times you may want to stop updates for a particular specification or "accept-all" in one click