Electronic Document Review Overview

Civic Platform integrates with Adobe Acrobat Pro to give agencies the ability to digitally manage PDF documents and plans efficiently and effectively for the entire life cycle of a project. With the Electronic Document Review (EDR) feature, you can attach single or multiple PDF documents to a record. You can then assign the documents for review to one or more reviewers. Reviewers can access and manage their assigned documents either via the record or via their individual My Tasks portlet. Users can use the Global Search portlet to search for specific documents as needed using document-oriented search criteria.

You can open attached PDF documents in Adobe Acrobat Pro directly from Civic Platform. Once open, you can use Acrobat Pro’s annotating tools to review, comment, and mark up plans. Accela provides a set of standard review stamps as a quick start feature you can use for your review. When you complete a review, you can use the Civic Platform add-on toolbar buttons to save your commentary and annotations to the Civic Platform application server. The Accela add-on toolbar also provides configurable online access to ICC eCodes as well as state codes and local codes as required. Reviewers can look up codes and regulations, and use standard copy/paste functionality to cite regulations via annotations that they added the PDF.

To better manage the life cycle of documents, a Document Audit log is available (see Audit Logs for more information). The Document Audit log records all changes made to attached documents, including the moment when Civic Platform attaches a document to a record, as well as annotations and comments that users added, modified, and saved.

Note:

If your agency uses an EDMS system to store documents, an EMSE API function, aa.Document.downloadFile2Disk, is available that your agency can use in scripting to download documents from the EDMS server to a Civic Platform server location, where they can be accessed and sent out as part of an automated email attachment.