NBS Create – Keeping up to date more easily

We have recently been releasing more enhancements to NBS Create. It’s been a pretty busy year at NBS and as an R+D Team we have been splitting our time looking at fixes, performance enhancements and also new functionality. I've got a series of five blog posts that look at some of these enhancements. This is the fourth of the five posts.

Earlier this year we released our update functionality that helps users keep their specifications up to date with the latest changes to both NBS and also their office master content. (Note that when you add content from NBS it is always the latest content from our web servers - this post related to how you keep the content you have written up to date).

Although this is hugely appreciated, users have also reported two main frustrations here:

1. Depending on the stage of a project, sometimes you don’t care about updates to NBS. This can now be easily resolved by clicking the “Stop updates for this job” button.
2. Sometimes you just want to accept all updates. You want to quickly bring all content up to date without having to click through each item accepting it.

The first point above has been possible in Create for a number of months. The second point has been addressed in the upcoming release. This blog post looks into this in detail.

Figure 1 below shows a project specification to the left of the screen and an office master specification to the right. Can you spot the difference?

Figure 1 - Spot the difference competition

The good news is that NBS Create “spots the difference” for the user. The four changes between the office master and the project specification are highlighted. The user may choose to ignore or accept on a clause item by clause item basis. Figure 2 shows an example where the security grading for a detector has changed from grade 3 to grade 4.

Figure 2 – NBS Create “spots the difference” for you

There are, however, times when you want to just accept all changes and get on with it. In our R+D department when developing this feature it has had a working name of the “whatever!” feature. Figure 3 shows the user selecting to accept all updates. Figure 4 shows the progress bar as all updates are made within the specification.

Figure 3 - Accept all

Figure 4 – All content is brought up to date in a single click

This feature works for updating project specification that referencing both office master content or NBS content.