With any organization, different employees are at different stages of their technical journey. Technical product experts often help newer or less technical employees learn how to interpret specifications.
To accommodate this dynamic, SonicSpec offers two user types: Administrators ("Admins") and Contributors. Admins have library-editing permissions whereas Contributors do not. Contributors can utilize the company's library to read specs faster and more accurately, but they may not edit or save new responses to the company library. Changes made by Contributors are saved locally within a project specification file and may be sent to an Admin for consideration of being added to the library.
In this article, I explain how a Contributor can review a specification within a specification file and then send his or her responses to an Admin to be saved to the organization's library.
Step 1: Contributor reviews specifications locally
As a Contributor, you may edit library responses within a specification file, or add new responses to new spec phrases that do not have a library match. However, these changes will be saved locally to the project file and will not affect the company's library.
Once the Contributor is ready to send his or her work to an Admin for review and consideration to be added to the company library, the Contributor can click the "Send for Review" Button:
The Admins will be notified once the "Send for Review" button is pressed by the Contributor (see below).
Step 2: Admin reviews project responses, makes changes (if necessary), and saves changes to library
After the Contributor clicks the "Send for Review" button, the Admin will see a notification on their Projects screen when they log in next:
The Admin can click on this notification to be taken to the project that is to be reviewed. Notice that the base product that has been reviewed by the Contributor is listed in the notification.
Once the Admin clicks the notification and selects the relevant base product, he or she can review the specification interpretation and consider adding the displayed markups to the company library.
The Admin can review the Contributor's work and make any needed changes.
Once the Admin is ready to add the Contributor's work to the library, he or she can take the following steps:
Press the "Learn Specs" Button:
Select the product lines that you wish to apply the changes to. You can save the selected responses to more than one product line library if you wish:
Select the spec phrases that you want to add to the library. You can 'select all' if you are comfortable with all responses in the file being added to the library. It is okay if existing library responses are selected. Just be sure to de-select any responses that should not be saved to the library.
Once ready to save, press the "Learn Specs" button to save all selected responses to the organization's library.
Congratulations! You just saved the responses to the company's library so that you and your colleagues can share knowledge and work more efficiently in the future!