[Liz Larsen]

I’ll go first!

Throughout most of my experience using custom statuses, we’ve used a profile saved to a network drive set as read-only (so people can’t unintentionally modify it). This means that everyone’s Bluebeam interface looks the same.

Pros:

• Statuses are automatically available and users always have the latest version.
• Toolchests are also saved on network drive and also are automatically updated for each user.
• If I do a tutorial for the team, everyone’s buttons are in the same place so they can easily follow along.
• The profile doesn’t have the default statuses that come with Bluebeam out of the box. This is a good thing because sometimes some weird things can happen if a user has one of the default statuses active while trying to use custom statuses.
• LITERALLY NOTHING IS REQUIRED FROM THE USERS FOR THEM TO BE USING THE LATEST AND GREATEST.

Cons:

• Sometimes people don’t like being told their interface has to look a certain way.
• Sometimes people like having their own toolchests (beyond the unique My Tools toolchest).
• … That’s it? There are no more cons that I can think of.

I’ve attached a screenshot of what our statuses look like. Red/orange are in the process of being picked up. Blue/purple are questions or coordination items. Gray is complete, meaning either the question has been answer or the markup has been backchecked and no further action is required.

Let me know what you think and if you have any comments/questions on this method!

[Troy DeGroot]

Love this post @lizlarsen lots of info for all of us to learn from each other.

When I deploy custom profiles for a customer, I always recomend a secure folder for everyone to map to for all the same reasons you mention. The caviot to that, is I always recomend an internal user group so progress by one is progress for everyone. This means they don’t loose their personal tools! If the personal tool is a Must Have, add it to My Tools and it won’t be lost. Just as you mension, I build the custom statuses into the profile for distribution. The problem is, the Custom Statuses in the document override the profile, which is really confusing for everyone whether you’re a new user or used it for several years.

How do I fix this problem?

1. I export the Custom Column file from the profile and save to a network location. (Statuses are part of the custom columns)
2. Used my extremely limited scripting skills to create a custom button to import the Custom Column file.
3. Save document.

Hope this thread helps! As I think about all the info packed in, there is a lot of gold here! Thanks again @lizlarsen

[Liz Larsen]

I actually didn’t know document statuses override profile statuses. I’m the only one ever implementing statuses, and even then we only use them within session. So this isn’t an issue I’ve come across.

[Alex Smith]

I don’t mind the “full control” workflow. I’ve ran into issues in a Studio Session environment when I have just the custom status model checked on, but the architect is utilizing the built in “Review” statuses. It leaves me no way to change the statuses, so I have to go to a non-studio PDF and check the built in status model on. It’s just a little clunky at times.

[Alex Smith]

We have a company profile that is stored on a network drive, but gets deployed to the users rather than remapping the profile path to the network folder. It contains redlining tool chests that are network mapped, so updates to the tool chests get pushed automagically. We also have custom line styles that mimic our Revit lines that get network pathed, and we actually overwrite (via separate deployment) the default hatch pattern file to add a few custom ones (1% dots, 5% dots, steel, grout). The network folder has its permissions set so only I can write to it; it’s also set to read only so it triggers the pop up in Revu.

We have a custom status model that is built into the company profile too. Just a simple redlining one that has “Redline”, “Picked Up”, “Backchecked” as options. We don’t utilize the coloring options, our redline tool chests includes grouped text/shapes and snapshots from Revit and neither behave particularly well (see below). We also have a Studio tool chest that follows our internal color coding for redlining (red is a redline, blue is an engineering comment to an engineer/PM, green is a general comment).

I was the brave soul that asked about custom statuses in Studio Sessions on MCR. I’m thankful for all the discussion that occurred, though more than anything it just confirmed that Bluebeam has some work to do to make it easily implementable company wide. I have a hard enough time getting users to set the page labels or using the date as the file name prefix before uploading to a Session, you think I’m going to be able to have them do anything more??

I’m going to do some testing internally regarding custom statuses in Sessions as I’ve received feedback internally that more project teams want to use it. But ideally Bluebeam would implement the ability to have custom statuses (and probably other things, i.e. tool chests, custom columns), assignable on the back end of a Session PDF. That way, no matter how the PDF was processed before being uploaded, and no matter what Profile the (external or internal) user has set, all users have a single source of statuses available to them to use in that Session. I know a few years ago during either the Revu 19 or 20 beta program, there was a TON of discussion around requests for improvements regarding Studio Session. I even pitched a new tool concept that would be a “status setting tool”. Even though there was a lot of hype among the users, everything seemed to fall on deaf ears.

[Liz Larsen]

Thanks for joining the discussion!

Question: Is the P_ markup a textbox or a snapshot? Either way, I am surprised it behaves that way.

All tools in my toolchests are created from markups and *none* of them have white fill unless it’s a text box. I actually use white filled text boxes as a way to whiteout the background because it’s one of the two things that won’t change color with statuses (the other being fill pattern). But other than that, no fill colors because it clashes with my status colors.