Bluebeam Revu is a PDF management, control, and editing tool. It enables collaboration and markup within shared documents across projects’ life cycles and has takeoff and bid creation capabilities.
$240
per year per user
Kofax Capture
Score 5.9 out of 10
N/A
Kofax Capture is a suite of multichannel document capture applications.
The program is great for editing construction drawings, stamping/approving official documents and overlaying revised documents to see design changes. You can use it as an estimating takeoff tool, estimating database, document control, cloud document storage, the list goes on! Bluebeam poses many applications for the user to utilize for the desired needs. There may be some other software that has one specific function that can perform the specific task better, but Bluebeam is a holistic program with many tools for use.
Kofax [Capture] meets our needs and for the most part is easy to use and setup. Configuration could be a little bit easier. The scripting language is a double edge sword if you will. It gives you nearly unlimited possibilities to script what you need, but the downside is you have to script it. Does a good job at batching and scanning documents. The tool integrates well into our workflow which makes our business partners happy and in turn provides for happy customers.
Once you set Bluebeam Revu as your default PDF handler, it launches immediately when clicking a PDF to open. The speed with which it opens documents is impressive.
Creating PDF's out of other documents, such as Word, Excel, JPG's, etc. is simple.
Digitally signing documents is a simple, secure process. You can keep your signature password-protected, yet still access it quickly.
The Bluebeam Revu mobile application ( I use the iOS version on an iPad Pro), is awesome. Not only does it handle PDF's like you would expect it to, it allows for effortless digital signing of documents on the fly. Nice to be able to quickly sign a document and email right back out from the tablet no matter where I am.
The VRS application included with Kofax Capture is the best image pre-processing platform available on the market today. It can handle a wide array of common document problems such as skew, flipping, wrinkles, lines, and dots.
The platform is incredibly scriptable and can be customized to handle all sorts of unusual document contents to allow information to be extracted that many other platforms just struggle on. Table extraction, line item matching, and smart extraction are all strong points with this platform.
Through the use of SBL and .NET the platform can be expanded and scaled quite easily to allow for the software to be integrated into existing business processes and platforms with ease.
If you have several tabs open and you try to drag one out for a side by side view then you do not have all the modification options and you have to combine them back together.
There is a lag time when hitting the print option.
There is also a lag time when opening files, sometimes I think the window is frozen.
I wish the basic version also had basic file editing, as in editing a document as Adobe does.
We struggled with configuring Kofax with AP Automation. We used to receive vouchers in different formats by different companies, by different departments. The people from different departments used to scan those vouchers through regular scanners to a central location, which ended up as image pdfs. We fed these image pdfs through Kofax Capture for character recognition, which was painful as the accuracy of recognition was 50 to 60%.
Having a connectors with a workflow tool would be helpful where people can validate and approve the output.
More samples and documentation related to use of API in .NET applications would be a good improvement, that would help users to adapt the product easily into their organization.
Bluebeam is a powerful PDF viewer and mark-up tool. We are more familiar with it than Adobe Acrobat Pro or other viewers, and it has more features geared towards construction document managers than Acrobat Pro does.
I'm constantly finding that Bluebeam Revu does more than I knew it could. And when I find something that it can't do, I've found that Bluebeam truly listens to its user base and will work to incorporate any good suggestion when feasible.
Its hard for me to give a rating on this one as we rarely have to use the support feature for Bluebeam. However, when we have used it, they have been ultra supportive in helping us get exactly what we needed. I know another engineer was trying to figure out a feature and the rep gave a detailed tutorial on how to complete the task
We feel there is not another program out there that would compare to Bluebeam at this current time. Some of the other programs out there do not include studio or the overlaying process which is one of our main uses. The ease of hyperlinking makes this product stand out the most.
Quality of data capture. Automatic data integration with Oracle and SAP ERP. Automatic image integration with Oracle and SAP ERP. Automatic invoice booking in Oracle and SAP ERP.
A major positive aspect is being able to take your computer home without taking the entire set of paper drawings. They have made it so easy to navigate a set of drawings that I can work at home using only the digital drawings.
Collaboration with owners and architects has been a great feature. Setting up a Bluebeam studio and having everyone get in and mark things up, then having the architect be able to go in and see what markups have been added, has made the constructability review process much much better.
Even when not working on drawings, Bluebeam is a very good tool for working with standard PDF documents. The markup tools are very easy to use.
The negative aspect is the takeoff function because some people would like estimators to use the Bluebeam takeoff because it would make their job easier down the road; however, the actual act of doing a full scale takeoff in Bluebeam would require much more time.
We were able to decrease personnel expenditures as there was not a need for individuals to index documents prior to incorporating them into the record.
