Working with Electronic Plan Reviews
Your agency can conduct plan reviews that contain electronic plan review cycles.
Review cycles for a permit or planning application can be conducted with or without an integration with Bluebeam Studio™, an electronic document review tool. When you start a Bluebeam Studio™ Session, the plan review cycle is considered electronic. The next cycle can be manual or electronic. You can start a Studio Session when you add a new plan review cycle or at any time during a review cycle until the cycle is complete.
Depending on your agency's protected document handling for permit and planning applications, you may be able to use archived-protected PDF documents in electronic plan reviews. For more information about the agency setup, see Setting Up Agency-Level Options for Permits and Setting Up Agency-Level Options for Planning Applications. For information about working with protected documents in plan reviews, see Managing Plan Review Documents.
Here are the basic steps for conducting electronic plan reviews:
Click Create Studio Session on the Add Plan Review page while adding a new plan review cycle or click Create Studio Session on the Plan Review page for the review cycle you're working with.
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Click Add Reviewers to add reviewers.
Reviewers already in the cycle are automatically added to the session. You can also add reviewers during the Studio Session, but you can't delete them. You must add the email addresses for reviewers found in their agency staff profiles to the Bluebeam Studio™ Prime portal before to adding the reviewers to the review.
For more information, see Managing Plan Reviewers.
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Click Add Documents to add plan review documents.
Documents already in the cycle are automatically added to the session. You can also add or delete documents during the Studio Session.
For more information, see Managing Plan Review Documents.
Mark up documents in Bluebeam Studio™.
If you're viewing a marked-up document copied from a previous cycle, Bluebeam Studio™ allows you to compare prior cycle markups side by side.
When a document is copied back to the review cycle, the state in the Documents grid is Marked Up.
When all reviewers have provided a decision, the Finalize Review Cycle button is enabled. Click Finalize Review Cycle to complete an electronic cycle. For more information, see Managing Plan Review Cycles.
During the finalization process, the marked up documents are copied back from Bluebeam Studio™. Documents marked up by reviewers are saved in the plan review documents grid and in the permit attachments; they can be viewed but not edited further. The documents can be copied into the next plan review cycle.
Manually Closing an Electronic Review Cycle
Plan coordinators can use the Close Cycle button on the Plan Reviews page to manually close an electronic review cycle when a Bluebeam Studio™ Session can’t be finalized after clicking the Finalize Review Cycle button. You can try clicking Finalize Review Cycle again in case the connection issues are temporary, but if the error can't be resolved, there may be a document in the Bluebeam Studio™ Session that couldn't be edited. Click Close Cycle so that the cycle is considered complete and workflow can advance. You may need to manually retrieve PDF documents that were uploaded to Bluebeam Studio.
The Cycle Issues section displays information about documents that the system couldn't copy back to the attachments from Bluebeam Studio™. For example, when the system can’t retrieve edit-protected documents that were added to a Bluebeam Studio™ Session, the documents are listed in the cycle issues.