Welcome to Aconex Documents.

Every project has hundreds of drawings, specifications, and other files. But where is all this information kept?

In Aconex, every organization has a private Document register to store its documents.

Think of it as a virtual filing cabinet. It's kept in your office and only available to people in your organization. 

You can store as many files as you need, of any size or type, and it's all securely kept for your reference during the project.

Once you register a document, everyone in your organization can see it.  This allows for easy collaboration and ensures everyone works from the current revision. 

You can also make sensitive documents accessible only to specific users in your organization.

And just like a filing cabinet in your office, other organizations on the project won't see your documents until you decide to send those documents to them. You do this using a mail type called a Transmittal.

By default, a transmittal automatically shares the document to the recipient's document register. This makes the documents immediately visible to all users in their organization. 

If the documents are sensitive, you can choose to send them confidentially, making them only available to specific people within their organization.

Remember, their document register is private too. Even though it's for the same project, you can't see their documents until they choose to share them with you.

This creates trust, encouraging everyone to collaborate and be on the same page.

Whether you're uploading one or hundreds of documents, Aconex helps you input information quickly. 

Metadata such as the Document Number and Revision is automatically populated from the filename.

And setting the Document Type ensures you'll always include the right information for what you're doing.

Entering accurate details makes it easy to find and report on your documents later. It also helps you add them to processes such as Workflows and Package Reviews.

If a document needs to be updated to fix a mistake or upload a new revision, it's easy to keep track of the history. All previous versions are kept so you know who's done what and when. You cannot remove or misplace your documents.

And if you need flexibility, Aconex provides that too. We know each project has different needs, so each Document Type can be configured to the way you work, both at the start and during the project. 

Now you know what Aconex Documents is, and what it can do, <pause> give it a try.

Classifying documents is probably not something we think about a great deal, but it's important to the success of a project. Different words are used to describe the information stored in the document fields. Criteria, tags, and metadata are common examples. But whatever the term, they allow us to associate additional information to each document, and this is essentially classification. We're using this additional information to group together or classify documents to make them easier to find later.

There are some mandatory tags that every project must use, and these ensure a minimum amount of classification for each document. Then, each project can add additional fields to meet their own classification requirements. Remember that the more fields you have, the greater the risk of them being used incorrectly. Everyone must make the effort to ensure the relevant information fields are used correctly when uploading a document. Get it wrong, and it'll make it difficult to find the document later. Poor classification is the most common cause for not being able to find documents.

Here are the fields that are standard across all projects. So it begs a question, doesn't it-- where can we find this information that we use for classifying the documents in Aconex. Let's have a look at a couple of different documents to explain, starting with a drawing. These form the greatest percentage of total documentation for projects, so it's important to classify them correctly.

Drawings almost always have a title block, and this will contain the information you need. Now, these title blocks will vary from company to company, but they tend to have the same basic information that we need. With documents, it can get a bit trickier. The most common places to find the details are in the footer of the document, or maybe the document has a cover page with the information. Now, not all the information is necessarily there, but the important details should be.

The last thing we'll discuss is the document number. Now, the document number must be unique within the project and is the one true identifier for a document. Drawings almost always have a number, but other documents may not. And this is something a team should decide on, so that everyone knows how to number documents being uploaded to the project.

Here are two examples of document numbering conventions. The first one is a simple one, and it uses three parts-- organization prefix, a document type, and then a sequential number. A more complex one adds a project ID and a discipline, and this convention is quite typical of those used on larger, more complex projects. Numbering conventions will vary from project to project, but the key to success is knowing what conventions are in use and sticking to them. Ultimately, a single, unified convention is best.

You now understand that good, consistent classification of documents is important, especially if you want to find them later. But if it's not obvious as to what you should be doing, here are some suggestions-- first, check any policy or manuals for the project. These could provide at least basic guidelines as to what is expected. Next, ask the document controller or document control team, or maybe check with the project administrator or other project team members.

Unfortunately, it's all too common for everyone to assume that everyone else knows what they need to do when managing the project information. But make the effort to find out what is actually required and help that collaboration on the project run more smoothly.

The file names applied to documents outside of Aconex are related to classification, not directly, but they can assist to make managing and retrieving documents easier and more efficient. Take a look at these examples.

Have you seen file names like this? They may be obvious to the creator of the document, but, to others, they could be confusing. Often we don't give much thought to naming our files. If we do, we might add some indicator for ourselves like a meeting date or a brief description. And that's OK if you're the only person dealing with those documents, but what about others?

When we download documents from a project at some point, we won't have all the tagged information or classification details to help us. We'll just have the file name. If that file name has no obvious meaning, we'll have to open it to find out what it is. For example, does anyone know what a 27B slash 6 form actually is. If you're responsible for managing large volumes of documents, that could be very time consuming.

Therefore, it pays to use a more disciplined file naming convention. Here's an example this file name includes the document number, its title, and its revision. This provides much more information when dealing with the document outside of Aconex. If we were to download multiple documents from a project, this convention would make it much easier to check that we had everything we need. Now, this is just one suggestion, but make sure you spend some time and think about file names and how they're understood by others. It doesn't take much effort to be disciplined and you never know when it might come in useful.

Today we'll learn how to quickly find the documents we need.

We'll also use search, to build a report from the results, such as Drawings updated in the last week.

And, we'll create a saved search, to run the report regularly for our weekly meetings.

We'll start in the Document Register. It's under the Documents menu.

Here we'll see all the documents our organization has received or uploaded on this project.

Of course, documents marked confidential for someone else can't be seen.

We can see the number of results listed, here.

In the main search bar, we can search by document number, document title, file name, and file contents.

Today we're looking for an air duct drawing. We can enter all, or part of the word.

This returned quite a few results, so let's filter to find what we need.

By default, all filters are pinned.

We can unpin filters we don't use, so only our favorites are visible. We can always pin a filter again if our needs change.

Aconex remembers our pinned filters for next time. But we can reset them to match the project default, as configured by our Project Admin.

Now we're happy with our filter setup, we'll use them to narrow the search results.

We're looking for a drawing, so we'll select those in the Type filter.

Under Discipline, we'll pick Mechanical.

We can also fillter multiple date types, such as date created, or date modified.

Let's hit Search.

To open a document we click the file icon.

There are other options here.

The Event Log tells us who has updated the document, and when.

To start over, select Clear All filters, and we're ready to search for the next document.

Now we'll use search to build a report from the results.

The Status is important, so we'll pin that to the left.

Now it's always visible when we scroll.

We'll also need to know if the documents have been transmitted. 

Under Add/Remove columns, the currently displayed columns are on the right. Let's move the transmittal columns across.

OK, now we'll search all drawings that changed in the last week.

We'll export the results to Excel for review later. Under Reports, let's choose Export to Excel.

We need to run this report often, so let's create a saved search. This keeps the columns and filters in place, so next time all we need to do is run and export it.

If we have the right permissions we can share the search with our organization or the entire project.

Our saved searches are listed here.

Congratulations you now know how to search for documents, create a saved search, and export reports.

In another video, we look at how we can see basic document activity. For more detailed information about what's happened to a document, we can use the event log. Let's jump into Aconex and show you how.

We use the context menu here to open the event log. This will show us everything that's happened to the document, but only from our organization's perspective. It won't show us what other organizations have done with the document.

We can see if a document has been viewed, downloaded, updated, et cetera. There are convenient links for opening things like related transmittals. Again, just remember this is only from your organization's perspective.

For documents that have a lot of actions and activities associated with them, we can use the boxes above the columns to filter the results just like we do in the document and mail registers. The event log is the audit trail for a document, and it will tell you everything that's happened to it from your organization's perspective.

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