What’s new in Lunr?
The Lunr team has been hard at work over the last six months developing a suite of new functionality. We’re particularly excited about two new feature sets: Enhanced project collaboration and XRAY.
XRAY
Document search is generally as good as the quality of your meta-data. If a file has been named correctly, or carefully attributed with title block values in AutoCAD then it’s typically easy to find. What about a scanned image or PDF from 1980 with an inconsistent naming convention? Documents like these make up a large portion of many Engineering content datasets and can be a nightmare to find.
To solve this problem we created XRAY. XRAY uses Microsoft Azure cognitive services to OCR images and PDFs automatically as they’re loaded into Lunr. The OCR text is automatically added to Lunr’s full-text index to make the documents available for searching. This means that just by adding documents like this to Lunr you automatically make them easy for users in your organisation to discover.
Enhanced project collaboration
Lunr views the document life-cycle in two distinct phases, the project phase, and the operations and maintenance phase. During the project phase, contributors (comprised of internal engineering staff and external contractors) work together over multiple revisions. With the latest improvements in Lunr all team members can collaborate throughout the project life-cycle by redlining and commenting directly on the documents under change. With each project minor revision documents are validated for compliance with your CAD title block, XREF, and external meta-data rules. At the end of a project the documents are submitted for two-stage review by a project manager and document controller before being released to masters.
This set of changes tightens the feedback loop for drawings modified by contractors, allowing you to avoid the large project delays caused by documents sitting with a key stakeholder or delays in documents being submitted.
The secondary benefit of commenting directly on project revisions in Lunr is that the comments are always seen in the context of the document they relate to, rather than being lost in various email inboxes that may disappear when staff moves to a different project.
What’s next?
The team is continuing to enhance the project experience in Lunr. To this end you’ll soon see key updates related to project completion and handover reporting, along with vector compare for uploaded drawing revisions. Stay tuned, we’re excited to start sharing more details about these projects soon.
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