April 2022 Release Notes

PDF Viewer and Markup

The UI presentation technology for Kahua’s PDF Viewer/Markup Tool has been updated. The general functionality provided by the viewer has remained the same for this release, however this update offers the following benefits:

• A cleaner and more modern and intuitive UI
• Significantly improved performance, especially when accessing Kahua through a browser or on a mobile device
• Significantly improved cross-platform interoperability and consistency between Desktop, Browser and Mobile devices
• The new viewer platform enables much richer capabilities in our future releases including Measurements, Overlays, Stamping and Pinning.

Licenses

A search option has been added to easily find users with an assigned license. 

New! Materials Catalog

The Materials Catalog app is available in the Cost Management section. Company contacts are used as the material Vendor. Additional product information can be tracked in the Manufacturer, Product Number, Product Type, Unit of Measure, Unit Price, SKU, UPC, and Lead Time fields.

Export a template to use for bulk importing your supply list.

The Materials Catalog is optionally available for use with Purchase Orders and Purchase Orders Change Orders.  

Purchase Orders and Purchase Orders Change Orders Update

Optionally use the new Materials Catalog app when filling out Purchase Orders and Purchase Order Change Orders. The materials column list is filtered and available for use based on the selected Vendor company in the Vendor’s section. Product details, from the Materials Catalog, are copied into the Items section. Additional information can be found in the Item details under Product Info.  This information displays in the Invoice item’s detail as well, if the material catalog is referenced. 

The document-level activity code field above the items list is the default value for new items in the items grid and will be applied to any existing items without an assigned activity code. 

The setting “Use Materials Catalog” in the Purchase Order and Purchase Order Change Order configuration app allows you to easily fill in the details of a purchase order and purchase order change order by copying the pre-populated supply information from the Materials Catalog app into the line item.

Updates to Host Application

• Added dialog to prompt for saving changes when closing Kahua with unsaved form present

• For users with accounts tied to multiple networks, added network selection as part of the sign-in process

Updates to Media Application

• Updated Media Manager to support downloads per specification
• Updated image upload to retain the resolution of the original rather than compressing automatically

Updates to Offline Functionality

• Kahua’s offline capabilities have been updated to allow data to sync seamlessly when the user comes back online rather than the user initiating the sync. Additional changes include applications that are not available being greyed out rather than hidden in the user interface.
• Media section added to Offline capabilities

New Setting for Regional Date Format

When creating a new, or modifying an existing Scheduled Report, there’s now a setting that will enable the Date Format to be specified.   The default format is that associated with the user who created the Scheduled Report.

Multiple Improvements

Several improvements have been made to the Design Review app:

• An additional Review step, call “Interim Review” has been added to the default Design Review workflow process (there can now be up to 4 Review steps in the Design Review app instead of 3).   Note that the number of Review Steps is is highly configurable within each Design Review Set, and can be setup as simply as a single Review step or can optionally use any of the additional review steps when needed. 
• Lead, Interim, and Final Reviewers are now restricted to Domain Users (enables tasks to be used)
• Multiple Reviewers may now be assigned to the Lead or Interim Review step (previously this only allowed a single reviewer)
• Sortable columns
• When Reviewing Drawings, it’s now much easier to navigate through the set (next/previous), while at the same time allowing Markups/Comments to be made.  Drawings can also be viewed ‘full screen’ while still having the ability to navigate to other drawings.

Multiple Improvements

• Type Field - A new "Type" lookup has been added to RFIs in both the base app and extension. This field is hidden by default.

  

• Using Attribute to Number Records -  Administrators can now set up numbering for any app based on a field on the current record. In the example below, the RFIs app is configured to number records based on the "Type" field.

  

  

• Using Calendar to Set Default Due Dates in RFIs- Domain admins can configure their company calendar on the "Calendar" tab of configuration. Admins can set up office days and job site days as well as add in holidays and exceptions.

  

• In RFIs configuration, admins can set up default values for both "PrimaryReviewPeriod" and "SecondaryReviewPeriod." These values will now use the calendar configuration to calculate due dates for primary and secondary reviewers upon submission to the reviewer.

  

• In RFIs configuration, on the settings tab, admins can select whether these review periods should calculate using Calendar Days (365 days), Office Days, or Job Site Days.

  

Multiple Improvements

• Package Level Submitting Vendor Field - A new, package-level submitting vendor field has been added to both workflows in the Kahua packaged submittals extension.

  

• This field is used to automatically fill in the submitting vendor fields on all items within the package. If "Track Items with Package" is enabled on the submittal package, users will only be able to edit the submitting vendor field at the package level and the individual submittal items' submitting vendor fields will be disabled.

  

• Adding this package-level field grants users the ability to quickly add multiple submittal items to a package with a specified submitting vendor, fill in required information for each item, and workflow their submittal package without having to open the detail view of each individual item to add a submitting vendor.
• Package Response Locks Item Response, Response for Items, and Package Response Notes - Three fields from the Owner Directed workflow have been added to the submittal items section of submittal packages in the default workflow of the Kahua packaged submittals extension. These fields streamline the package creator/submittal coordinator/official reviewer's ability to fill in responses for submittal items within a package.

• The Response for Items field allows the user to select a response at the package level which then propagates to multiple items in the submittal items grid.

• If the "Package Response Locks Item Response" checkbox is not selected, only items with empty responses are updated by the Response for Items field.

• If the "Package Response Locks Item Response" checkbox is selected, all previously inut responses on the items will be overwritten by the response for items field selection, and item-level responses will not be individually editable.

• The package response notes is an additional notes field which allows users to add response notes at the package level. This field is unique to the package and does not replace any response notes fields on the items.

• All three new fields are enabled both on the workflow record in new status and in the coordinator triage task.

• Official reviewers can also fill in Response for Items and Package Response Notes in their review task, however they cannot toggle the "Package Response Locks Item Response" checkbox, which must be set either in the workflow record or coordinator triage task before the official reviewer receives their review task.

• Include References on Revision Checkbox - In the default workflow, when revising a submittal package or item, users can now select whether they would like references from their package and revised items to copy to the new revision or not using the "Include References on New Revision" checkbox.

• When revising a package with multiple items, only revised items will have their references removed on the new package revision if the checkbox is not selected. This functionality is not currently available in the Owner Directed workflow.

On June 11th, 2022  our new browser-based Mac experience will be available to all Kahua users and our current mac host will be discontinued.  For more information, visit Kahua Support.

To continuously improve our best-in-class Kahua provided extensions, we will be updating offerings to include the following features. If your organization has built custom extensions to meet your specific business requirements, it is likely that your extensions can be updated to use some or all of the same functionality.