Bluebeam vs. IT Glue

As stated before, the mobile application is a great companion to the desktop version. Either one works great in viewing, editing and saving documents. While the measurement tool is handy to have, we have found the precision to be lacking when measuring scaled drawings (construction design drawings). While it is a good rough place to start for measurements, we wouldn't recommend relying on the precision of the measurements taken on something with a very large scale.

Incentivized

IT Glue is well suited to any size managed service provider that requires a secure central knowledge base. IT Glue also integrates well with N-Central to automatically populate the configurations tab with all the relevant Workstation, Printer, and Server information making client on-boarding a breeze.

Incentivized

• Overlaying pdf drawings to identify changes made by architects.
• Scaling dimensions when the architect has not provided required dimensions to proceed with work in the field.
• Hyperlinking construction documents with required information makes it much easier to look through multiple sheets in less time.

Incentivized

• Flexible Assets are custom questions or forms that you get to create to keep the kind of documentation that *you* want. Our team has done this, and have developed a comprehensive system in our documentation that is better than anything we've ever had.
• Tagging. This feature is so helpful when interlinking related items in the documentation system. IT Glue makes it so easy to tag other configurations, including printers, firewalls, phones, etc.
• Public sharing of knowledge base articles. Often our clients need to know how to do something. We can add pictures, step-by-step walkthroughs that save us and them a ton of time.
• iFrame embedding. There's some flexibility to the web pages that have been helpful for putting other things, such as Cognito Forms in.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• So far we have enjoyed the functionality of ITG with one exception:
• The search feature is severely lacking. We have thousands of articles in this knowledge base but the search window is about 1" wide and only shows the first few words of each article. Within our system, those first few words are often the same "SYSTEMS: How-To...". If we are searching for a system, we will have no alternative but to manually try to find this document by browsing through folders within ITG.
• Unfortunately ITG has not responded to a flurry of enhancement requests around this feature, that go back quite a while.
• The functionality that would make this a killer app for us would be a dedicated search page that displayed results like a Google search page.
• Ability to export all client documentation if the client moves to another provider.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Overall IT Glue meets every need that we need it to. IT is easy to use and convenient and we have not had very many issues with it since the inception. I would easily recommend it to anyone who needs this software.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The interface is excellent and very easy to use. As long as the text you input into the system can be easily read, you will have no problem finding it with all the different categories offered. Sometimes, the slider on the right can blend in with dark backgrounds, making it hard to see.

Incentivized

Other than a few access outages, ITGlue is always up and available to us. Their ability to export Playbook, that contain our customers data, and securely send those over to them is amazing and are produced pretty fast. We have IT Glue linked with several other services and software and we have not found that it slows anything down.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

No problems with support when needed it. Their answers on how to handle DR/BC situations when ITG is down are not stellar. They don't seem to get the business risks of their suggestions to just give the xls backup to engineers (aka give all passwords of ALL clients to engineers in an unencrypted flat-file where it is easy to copy, print, etc.)

Incentivized

Bluebeam is a diverse program with many functions and tools, whereas competitive programs only specialize in one or few tasks. Although there are many tools within the program, users can still quickly learn how to use the program to best fit their needs. There is always a help tab for any assistance needed.

Incentivized

Currently, we are evaluating using Sharepoint instead of IT Glue as documents and items are searchable within the document instead of by title. We feel that by only searching by title and the type it hinders the speed at which information can be found easily.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We've had a number of false starts on getting all of our clients' assets documented. The culture shift just has not happened yet and there is a general lack of trust in the data.
• It's nice to not have to go hunting for information about client assets anymore. We can be much more productive this way.

Incentivized