AEC TECH NEWS: BluVue updates mobile blueprints and construction document collaboration software

Dallas — BluVue released BluVue Plans 2.2, which allows project teams to have anytime, anywhere access to current construction plan documents on tablets, phones, and laptops, eliminating the risk of building off of outdated drawings and accelerating project completion. BluVue Plans facilitates communication among project team members, and speeds collaboration based on up-to-date project drawings, giving work teams the power to view, markup and share plans within seconds.

The update from BluVue adds several key features to make document page access faster and easier than ever before, including many exclusive capabilities only available in BluVue Plans.

The first exclusive feature is the addition of user-selected Favorites. Users can tap to ‘star’, their most-used sheets for quick-pick access from a Favorites list, even jumping to sheets within different projects. Construction professionals often only work with a subset of pages on any given section of the project and Favorites allows them to quickly and simply jump between them. Complementing Favorites, BluVue Plans 2.2 adds easy-to-set sheet filters that effectively reduce the number of sheets on screen to those most relevant to the task underway. Rounding out the jump navigation feature is a sheet view History as well as Back/Forward buttons, which together make working with blueprints in BluVue Plans as familiar to use and navigate as the web.

BluVue Plans 2.2 now supports interactive jumps to callouts on their blueprints and quick 'snap back'. Being able to drill into a detail section with a single tap brings web browser-like navigation ease to the field professional. State of the art image recognition is employed during project publishing to automatically create standard callout hyperlinks so that plans deployed with BluVue Plans are interactive and live, without the delays of painstaking creation by a plan administrator. In addition, users have the exclusive ability to even create a jump out to an Internet URL, linking to an external website or document.

An exclusive attachment ‘zoom to’ feature offers users the ability to quickly locate the area of a plan related to the picture, audio note, or other attachment while reviewing each sheet. Never before have project supervisors been able to navigate to plan areas directly from an attachment providing details on an issue or defect.

“Taken together, the feature updates in BluVue Plans 2.2 make it a pleasure to use,” said Michael Conroy with Miller Electric Construction, Inc. in Allison Park, PA. “The sheet hyperlinking is incredibly convenient for jumping to details, the sheet view History lets me retrace my steps at any time, and the new sheets Favorites feature is saving me time. Each of the product updates raises the bar.”

Time is money when a construction crew is waiting for updated plans or guidance due to changes. BluVue Plans provides a complete solution in one package that includes real-time tools, such as best-in-breed speedy blueprint viewing and annotation markup for teams, and shared notes and snapshot-sharing for communications on construction projects to keep projects on track and moving forward.

“We recognize that construction professionals require sophisticated tools that are easy to use and elegantly solve the problem for which they are designed,” stated Jeff Musa, President of BluVue. “Whenever we make dramatic strides to save time and improve usability for people who need it, it creates a bottom line impact for their company and customers. That has always been our focus, and always will be.”

BluVue Plans, is a purpose-built solution for construction companies to manage and distribute digital plans and drawings, capture annotations, drive decision-making efficiency and help ensure projects are built using the correct plan set thereby mitigating risk. BluVue Plans mobile apps work on iPads, iPhones, Android phones and tablets, and the cloud-based administration and publishing application works on laptop or desktop computers with any major browser.

BluVue Plans provides a free 30-day trial and low-cost monthly plans based on users and sheet volume. To try BluVue Plans, visit www.bluvue.com.