Documents

Documents is where a project's drawings, specifications, reports and certificates live, with the register that says which revision is current and the history that says what came before it. It is the tool most people on a job open most often, and the one where being disciplined early pays back most.

The register

Documents opens on a register, and the columns are what make it useful: the document number, the title, the current revision, the status, the discipline, the type and the date.

Filtering and grouping do most of the work here. Group by discipline to read down a package, filter by status to find everything still for review, filter by type to see only drawings. Saving that arrangement as a view is worth doing on any project you open daily.

The search reaches inside a document's text as well as its title and number, which matters on a specification you can name but not locate.

Registering a document

Uploading is the easy half. The registration details are the half that decides whether the register is worth anything in six months.

The document number is the identifier your project uses. Follow whatever convention the job has set, and set one on day one if it has not: consistent numbering is what makes a register searchable rather than merely full.

The title describes the document. The revision is its version, in whatever series your project uses. The type and discipline classify it, from the lists your organisation configured. The status says where it is in its life: draft, for review, approved, superseded, or whatever your organisation uses.

Then choose the folder it belongs in.

Folders

Set up the folder structure at the start of the project rather than growing it. A structure that grew is a structure only its author can navigate, and by the time it is obviously wrong there are four hundred documents in it.

Top level by kind (drawings, specifications, reports, certificates), then by discipline underneath. Documents move between folders afterwards, so a wrong guess is recoverable, but a missing convention is not.

Temporary documents

There is a staging area, separate from the register, for files that are not ready to be formally registered. Working drafts, files somebody sent you to look at, anything you would otherwise email to yourself.

Use it as a staging post rather than as a second register. A document that matters belongs in the register with a number and a revision; a document in the temporary area has no revision history and nobody else is looking for it there.

Sharing documents

Three ways out, in increasing order of formality.

Download is what it sounds like.

A public link lets somebody without a Teralo account open a document, and expires after 7 or 30 days. It is right for a one-off. See Inviting people to a project.

A transmittal is the formal one: a set of documents issued to named recipients with a covering note and a permanent record of who received what and when. Use it whenever an issue matters contractually, which on drawings is most of the time. The record is the point, and it is what you will want when somebody says they were never sent the revision.

Where else documents turn up

Documents is not a silo. The same files are attached to submittals, procurement packages, inspections and mail, and the viewer that opens them is the same viewer everywhere. See Viewers and Markups and annotations.

SettingsHost only

Documents is configured at both levels, and the split follows the usual pattern. See Organisation level and project level.

Organisation, then Tools, then Documents holds the classification every project starts from: document types, disciplines and statuses. Getting these right once is what stops two projects using slightly different words for the same thing.

Project, then Tools, then Documents activates that classification and adds anything specific to this job.

The organisation also has a document library of its own, separate from any project: company policies, standard templates, quality management documents, safety procedures. That is the organisation-level Documents register rather than a settings screen, and it is the right home for anything reused across projects.

PermissionsHost only

Documents has more granular permissions than most tools, and the useful distinctions are between seeing, taking away and changing.

Viewing lets somebody see documents in the register. Downloading is separate, which matters where a document can be read but should not leave. Uploading adds new documents and revisions. Annotating allows markups. Reviewing is participation in a document workflow.

Deleting is its own permission and is not implied by any of the others, deliberately. A superseded revision is part of the record, and losing one is not the same kind of mistake as uploading the wrong file.

WorkflowsHost only

A document can be bound to a workflow so that registering or revising it starts a review rather than simply appearing. See Binding a workflow to a tool.

Where the review is of something being submitted for approval rather than issued, Submittals is usually the better tool: it is built around the submit, review, revise and resubmit cycle, and it keeps that traffic out of the drawing register.