2019 OpenAsset Product Review

December 17, 2019

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Inspiring people through visualization of the built world

In 2019, OpenAsset has continued working hard to execute our vision by delivering new features that provide value to firms operating in the built environment.

OpenAsset is the only Digital Asset Management system tailored to the AEC and Real Estate industries. Every aspect of our product development is about helping our clients bring their projects and properties to life, and this year is no different.

Enabling your firm to better visualize its work has been at the forefront of our 2019 development. This year, OpenAsset delivered a major new release that improves the functionality of Projects and its components. The improved projects functionality now connects a wealth of information about each of your projects, such as location, employees involved in the project, and project descriptions.

The built environment thinks in terms of locations and projects; it is at the centre of how firms in the industry work. OpenAsset is the Digital Asset Management solution for the built world, therefore our product will continue to reflect the way your firm works.

Our year in development

We are proud to have rolled out many important new features during 2019. These features have been designed to enhance client workflows and improve commercial productivity.

Project Maps

This year our engineering team has been focussed on improving the user experience of Projects and Properties by delivering new features and workflows that bring these areas of OpenAsset to life. A great example of this is the changes to how you view Project Maps in your system.

By filtering on Project Keywords, you can view a selection of your Projects within the context of their surroundings in Google Maps. Clients are already making great use of this feature, and we have received lots of positive feedback. The Project Maps view offers a unique way of visualizing the impact of your firm’s work on the built environment across a particular city or area. Clients have even used this information between project sites based on their geographical location.

Faceted Search for Projects

Our redesigned approach to searching for Projects makes it much easier to find Projects in your system using multiple search terms. Project Keywords can quickly be selected from a list of available keywords in the filter menu. This enables you to build and revise complex searches with ease, and the newly developed tiles view offers more screen real estate for your project images. The enhanced UI for Project search allows you to generate a selection of Projects quickly. This selection of projects can then be used to generate documents like Project Sheets at speed or to update project information quickly. As our clients’ use of DAM is centered around Projects, we have been focussed on making improvements to how users experience and navigate this area of OpenAsset.

Support for InDesign, Word, and PowerPoint Documents

We understand that Digital Asset Management is most effective when it is used as the central repository for your firm’s images and marketing collateral. Having all of your best project images and documents in one place, easily accessible via search, allows your users to continue to find and use these assets in their work.

We have recently included support for InDesign, Word, and PowerPoint documents, enabling you to store these files in OpenAsset. We think this will simplify the workflows for the creation of marketing collateral, allowing you to store and access images and marketing documents from the same system.

OpenAsset Camera

This year we released OpenAsset Camera, a mobile app for iOS and Android that allows users to upload images directly to their OpenAsset system from their phone or tablet. It offers a great way of capturing images on-the-go and making them immediately accessible to other users.

So far, clients have been making use of OpenAsset Camera for storing images from events like office parties, groundbreaking ceremonies, and charity initiatives, as well as incorporating it into their workflows for taking site visits or snagging photos. The app is free to use; we can advise you on best practices for adopting it into your existing image workflows.

Improved Albums Page

Our newly developed Albums page is due to be released shortly. It will make the layout and user experience of Albums consistent with the recent changes to Projects and Employees in OpenAsset. The improved tile view makes it much easier to browse albums and select the right ones at a glance, as well as making sharing and download tools more accessible. We have also made it easier to organize your Albums, making Album Topics more visible and allowing you to view Album descriptions. You can also quickly toggle on or off your company’s Featured Albums, helping users to access the most commonly used selections of images at the click of a button.

Enhancements to the OpenAsset Employee Module

The Employee Module is designed to be used as a searchable database of employees as well as an engine for generating resume documents. Our engineering team has put significant effort into streamlining the processes and workflows used to find employees in your system and selecting the right information for use in resumes.

For clients who store employee data in Deltek, you can now sync this information automatically with employee profiles in OpenAsset, along with their relationships to projects. This ensures that your employee data is always up to date and available to push into resume documents when required.

We introduced a new workflow enabling the selection of employees by the projects that they have worked on. Relevant project roles can then be chosen for use in resume documents. For anyone who uses the Employee Module for creating documents for bid proposals, this will represent a significant saving in time and effort.

G2 and Capterra reviews

We would like to take a moment to thank all of our clients who took the time to review OpenAsset on the G2 and Capterra review sites. Thanks to your reviews, OpenAsset has been rated as a ‘High Performer’ by G2.

New OpenAsset online resource

In 2019, we introduced two new OpenAsset online resources. At the start of the year we launched our new company website, but most importantly, our new customer success help site.

With optimization for mobile browsing and fast topic search, the new customer success site is more accessible than its predecessor. The help site is available directly from within OpenAsset, too; if you’re stuck on a task, just query the task you need help with into the search bar for instant answers.

Richard Feilden Foundation

Rather than send seasonal gifts and cards to clients, we made a charitable donation to the Richard Feilden Foundation. The foundation uses its expertise in the built world to improve the educational infrastructure, and the teaching and learning opportunities available to children and young people in Africa.

A look to 2020

What do the next 12 months hold for OpenAsset? As always, our primary focus will be product development driven directly by client needs and requirements. Every week we analyze OpenAsset usage and assess suggestions and ideas directly from our clients. This analysis then shapes our product development over the short and long term.