Wednesday 17 March 2010

Adding User Guidance to NBS

One great way of making the NBS master specification system work even better for your practice is to add your office knowledge to it.

NBS supports this through the "User Guidance" feature.

Adding user guidance notes to an office standard works especially well as these notes will come through to all designers in the office that create project specifications using this office standard.
Fig 1 - Creating a user guidance page

Figure 1 shows the user has selected to add a guidance note. This is being made "high priority", which means that it will take priority over the NBS Guidance and the Manufacturer information.
Fig 2 - Editing a user guidance page

Figure 2 above shows that within the NBS software the user may perform simple editing on the note to add their practice knowledge to their local NBS system. This is ideal for information tailored to the specific practice and this enhances the technical guidance provided by NBS.
Fig 3 - Adding an external link as user guidance

For practices with web based Intranet systems, the ability to link to web pages works really well. Figure 3 above shows that instead of a basic user guidance note being added, a link to an Intranet page may be selected.
Fig 4 - HTML user guidance notes

Figure 4 above shows the advantage of writing user guidance notes as Intranet pages and then linking to them:
  • All formatting styles that HTML allows may be used.
  • Images, tables, movies and advanced hyperlinking can be used.
  • These practice notes are edited outside of NBS, this is possible without using up an NBS licence seat.

1 comment:

  1. Stephen; if you want to suggest a graphics package, then consider the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). It's coded by enthusiasts, arguably as feature-rich as (and indeed better than) expensive high-end packages like PhotoShop, etc, and completely free!
    Check it out @ www.gimp.org

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