Getting Started with Document Management - Document Organisation and Saved Views
Overview
Background
Most document management tools use folders to keep documents organised and accessible. Folders can be problematic because each document revision actually has to exist within the folder and can’t exist within two or more folders at once. While this can work for work-in-progress documents with limited access, it becomes an issue once documents are submitted for review and then either rejected or published to a broader audience. In construction, it’s essential to maintain a single, traceable history of a construction document’s revisions and their status changes over time. If you have to manually copy or move revisions between folders meant for different purposes or audiences, you lose that traceability and risk teams operating off of outdated information.
With Procore's Document Management tool, document revisions are tagged with attributes that describe them and search filters can be used to quickly find them. For example, you can use filters to find the latest approved architectural drawings or see rejected documents that originated from your company. You can save these search filters as “saved views” to make documents easier to find for you and your team, which provides the benefit of a standard project folder structure without the risks and drawbacks of file duplication.
How it Works
organisation based on Document Attributes
After document revisions have been submitted, users will be able to access them on the All Documents tab. Permission groups and rules that have been set up for the project automatically control which document revisions can be viewed by each person. The metadata associated with each document ensures that users can quickly access the documents they need and that they will only see the documents that they have access to.
Saved Views
A saved view in the Document Management tool is a saved search (often referred to in other systems as "smart folders"). Document revisions can show in different saved views and update automatically as things change over time, which means that you only ever need a single source of truth in the Document Management tool for an individual document revision.
Saved views can be created for common document consumption use cases, such as published drawings and specifications or for specific documents that you want project teams to easily reference. Permissions will always govern what someone has access to within a given saved view, meaning there's no risk of oversharing.
Note: Saved views are separated into Project Views (created by Admins for everyone in the project) and My Views (personal views that you created and are only visible to you).
VIEW TUTORIALVideo
Best Practices
Before you get started configuring your saved views, consider the following:
- Do you typically use a standard folder structure for your projects? If so, you can create saved views to replicate the folder structure and efficiently control access to documents.
Note: Additional capabilities, such as nesting and ordering of saved views, are coming soon. - What type of documents do you want your team to have quick access to?
- What construction documents do you want to make available to site teams?
Example
Instead of needing to manually reorganise documents within folders, saved views are driven by filters. This means that the list of documents will update automatically.
Let's say that a document controller named Paul wants to create a saved view for Approved Architectural Drawings. Paul will select the following filters to create a saved view from:
- Discipline: Architectural
- Type: Drawing
- Status: Approved
Next Lesson: Document Organisation with Saved Views - Set it Up
Set it Up
Now that you've learned about how documents are organised in the Document Management tool, you're ready to complete the following action in Procore:
ACTION ITEMS
Create Saved Views
For any groupings of documents that you want people to have quick access to, create saved views as 'Project Views'. Note that only Document Management tool Admins can create Project level saved views, but that everyone can create their own personalised views.
Note: Currently, project saved views must be created within each project individually, but in the future you'll be able to standardise saved views across multiple projects within your company.
