Conversations are Team Meetings

What the construction industry is counting on is technology to make our communications clearer.  Industry leaders use video conferencing to have conversations – important to capture body language cues and readily available, apps abound on many smartphones and social networks today.  Seems like the project managers I know send an email following a conversation to recap and document what they just said.

Project Documents are Changing

Our documents are  easily accessible from Sharepoint, Construction Imaging, project management team portals, or Box.net as all generations are wanting access from anywhere, anytime.  (If you haven’t made the transition to electronic documents you better be thinking about it before you get busy again.) Mark-ups and edits occur on documents frequently and the construction plans seem to pose the biggest challenges.  Versioning control is a decision everyday.  Your records management integrity depends on it.

Collaborative Construction Communications Technology

What do construction team meetings look like today? They’re collaborative, mobile and transparent.  At least the successful ones are.  If you expect to collaborate solely with email you will need more hours in your day.  It’s time to transform your methods and it needs to work for internal and external teams.  One such solution is gaining respect in the industry.  It’s called Bluebeam Studio and I’m luckily part of their partner program.  Watch this short video and see what you think.  Your socks are about to be blown off!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTo2q8NllLc

The value is in working simultaneously or on your own time.  If you can’t make it to the Studio session it can be left open for you to chime in later.  If you’re running a pre-construction meeting you can meet virtually and work together. The flexibility is all there.  Have you used Studio?  Would you like to experience it for yourself?  Leave a comment and I’ll invite you and your team to a Studio project and collaborate together today.

This crosses all workforce generations and makes a visual record that’s easy to learn, review, share and save to your project document repository.

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Construction communication challenges often arise as preferred technologies (BIM, IPD, CAD) often leave non-techie types out of the conversation loop. Everyone in construction operations is visual and depends upon drawings, plans and models to convey ideas. Being proficient in all these technologies can take a lifetime and the project only lasts 12 months. How do you get everyone speaking the same language and invite every team member to engage in the conversation? The solution has to be easy to learn, offer a place where a multitude of document types can be shared and offer a simple way for mark-ups and conversations to be captured. If you want everyone to use it it also has to be affordable and documents should be easily shared without need for special software. Remember the PDF?

The PDF standard hasn’t left the construction industry. Most general contractors still exchange plans in PDF format because everyone can open them. The problem arises as you share plans, typically via email or offer an FTP download. Now there are 100s of copies and everyone is marking-up their own set. Have you ever tried to look a 4 versions at once and compare the differences? It’s challenging and frustrating. It’s even more challenging in the pre-construction process as you need to get all the project subcontractors in one room along with the engineer and architect. Inevitably a few people miss the meeting or must catch-up later. There is a simple solution…

To see the Bluebeam Studio solution in action as part of Bluebeam Revu. Start at minute 5, if you’re not interested in how to set-up and invite others to this on-line web collaboration studio session for construction teams or watch this 14 minute video from the beginning to see all the steps.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h88NwxbZAnw]

Disclosure: I’m convinced that every construction firm should be familiar with this tool and am a Bluebeam Partner myself. If you’re interested, comment or email me and I’ll invite you to a Bluebeam Studio Session – yes you can invite your team too!

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Let’s take a look at a Bluebeam Studio Session. In this example there are questions concerning the placement of lighting. Note that the chat session captures all annotations and jumps to the view of that persons workspace when they added that annotation.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmCdb_Ws3pI]Bluebeam® Studio Server™ allows you to connect, create and collaborate with anyone, anywhere, at any time. Simply upload your PDFs to Studio and invite attendees from across the globe to view and comment on your PDFs. Chat and add markups to the same PDF together in real-time or separately on your own. Markups and chats are tracked in a Record that links back to the PDF to easily review session activity. You can even create a report of your Studio session to archive or share with your team. With Bluebeam construction collaboration delivers complete version control and report access that you can upload to Sharepoint or ingest into your Enterprise Content Management System automatically using a monitored folder.

Whether you need clarifications from the architect, engineer, General contractor, owner or principal, subcontractor or supplier you can capture the suggestions from each participant, whether you’re all on-line simultaneously, or invitees join later with new ideas or alternatives. If revisions occur later, you can receive email notification that more revisions have been added to the session. Bluebeam has more PDF collaboration power for the AEC industry. In Part 3 we’ll discuss AutoCad and Revit.

If you missed part 1, you may want to read the previous post PDF Secrets: Estimating takeoff from PDF. If you can’t wait for the rest of this series, You probably want to watch this video:
Bluebeam PDF Revu 9 – The Acrobat Alternative Or just Take Revu, Bluebeam Studio or Q for a spin with a 30 Free A Trial

Disclosure: Bluebeam software impressed me so much that I recently became an authorized reseller.

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Just thinking Microsoft could have more Kinect sales if you could use it to Skype. #business

With the official announcement, Microsoft has plans to add Skyping to more than the Kinect and xBox but that alone can convert to huge revenues. By the time Christmas rolls around Microsoft will have kids complaining they can’t use their game consoles because their parents are hogging it for video conferencing. For the small business owner, contractor, and consultant with a home office, this will justify the Kinect purchase as a business expense – so the kids that don’t have a Kinect and Xbox yet, are almost certainly guaranteed a new toy.

With 170+ million connected Skypers around the world many seem worried that their long distance family time will be interrupted. Not to worry as Microsoft is sure to serve up ads on the free service to help them sell gaming consoles and games – 207 billion minutes of voice and video conversations in 2010 is a whole lot of advertising airtime. I suspect that they’ll somehow determine from customer usage patterns or social profiles that small business Skypers should also see Office 365 Ads and every other cloud based offering Microsoft develops. Most IT staff are Skypers too so the potential Ad reach is targeted to Microsofts core audience.

So does this mean LiveMessenger and LiveMeeting are dead? Not by a longshot. Wired Magazine doesn’t think this was a great business technology purchase in their Why Exactly? article, but there is overlap.

There are other factors involved that are mentioned by Forbes Combine all this with the mobile smartphone Ad reach and you see why Microsoft was willing to spend so much money.

Will you be using your gaming console at home to Skype? Will small business owners and contractors move their Xbox into their office? We’d love to hear from you and look forward to your comments.

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Video conferencing with Skype displays on your computer at approximately 8 frames a second.  A true digital video phone runs at approximately 28 frames a second (broadcast TV is just over 30 frames per second).   No delays or freeze frames.  It is live streaming “business quality” video conferencing.   If your firm considered this years ago but found the costs astronomical, it’s time to rethink your position.   I’ve seen some firms pony up $10,000+ but you no longer have to with the ACN videophone.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEHt1IQK2Kw&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

The ACN videophone is a digital videophone, meaning it has to be routed through high speed internet. It doesn’t run through your computer, it looks and acts like a phone. ACN has their own Video, not voice, over internet protocol so it is a secure system. The Video OIP was built out for ACN by Cisco Systems and covers 4 continents and 22 countries around the world. They have phones that start at just $99.99 plus a $29.99 monthly service fee for unlimited local and long distance calls throughout the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico. In addition the phone can be connected to your flat screen TV so you can have a large video image. High Definition is expected later this year.

It is suggested that your internet speeds be at least 256 kbps and probably closer to 1.5mbps for optimal picture quality.  Anyone with multiple offices can now enjoy a great video conferencing system with more security and greater reliability.

Business people do use it to travel and stay in touch with their office and family from all around the world.  The calls are free from ACN-ACN phone anywhere in the world.   Here’s the real “big bang punch”…It is inexpensive and easy enough for any business to really impress and keep a client by supplying them with a videophone to stay in touch face-face. Yes it is a “business relationship” tool that takes advantage of video to reinforce your connection.  The next generation phone coming out this summer will allow the screen to split in 4 quadrants so you can hold a 4 way phone/video conference with all parties able to see one another. In a business world where everyone is talking about social media, I think this may be the best “live” tool you could ask for to cement your client relationships.

I want to thank a friend of mine, that some of you may know, Doug Singer, and ACN rep here in Arizona for this great information.  I’ve known Doug for years and he’s always looking for ways to make businesses stand out.

I’d like to hear about what video conferencing solutions you find most cost effective.  Please share your experiences by leaving a comment.  Thanks for all your input in advance.

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So did you know that Skype 4.0 (and subsequent releases)  has video conferencing available with screen sharing?  This is completely free but if you need to have large groups, and send invites ahead of time you’ll want a 3rd party add-on called InnerPass to make it more business friendly.   You’ll need to pay for InnerPass, but for a significantly smaller fee than you pay on the popularly advertised web conferencing systems.  I learned about this from an OPEN Small Business Forum from American Express but since 95% of all contractors are small businesses, and larger firms have suppliers, customers  and outsourced IT guys that would find this helpful, I thought it appropriate to share it with you too.

You’ll need a headset & microphone from your laptop, and a webcam if you want video.  This solution works great with Outlook and Xobni too.  Try it out for your next one-on-one instant web conference and you won’t be sorry.  I’d like to encourage you to share your experiences and add your comments to this blog entry after trying it out.

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