Enlighten me, why does a building department need Bluebeam?
With the advent of electronic submission, (and the ever popular notion of concurrent reviews....excuse me while I cough) it is becoming more and more difficult to maintain document "security". By that I mean maintaining a single set of plans, without removing, adding or otherwise altering the document beyond adding mark-ups and stamps. The system I currently use allows the applicant to submit whatever they want, and allows (requires) any would be reviewer to download it, who can then alter it, add to it, extract from it and re-upload it to the attachments. Without a really robust naming convention and internal project management, this creates a terrible mess, with no continuity. It is also very common for one reviewer to issue comments on his/her
set, while another issues comments on theirs, and so on, and so on. This results in multiple versions of a plan. Worse yet, a re-submission of only a few pages here and there, that either get inserted (bad idea) or forgotten completely. Multiply this by multiple reviewers and pretty soon nobody has any idea what the plans are supposed to look like.
Bluebeam Studio functions can eliminate these pitfalls. I am mired in a system without any protocols for any of this, and when I am asked how to fix it, Bluebeam is the only answer I can come up with. Unfortunately, we just aren't close to that.
BTW, I am surprised at the number of plans I get where the applicant, architect or engineer hasn't placed any security protocols, thus allowing anyone to remove pages, copy content or even copy seals. When I get done I place security on all my plans, that protects my stuff as well as theirs, at least as much as I can.
If your intake isn't a free-for-all and has controls placed on it, either by automation or by human interface, it may be valuable as a pdf review program similar to Adobe (but much better IMHO). But if its like ours, so far BB is the only answer I can come up with.
ALERT-Fatboy, the system you are using is the same as mine, and if it is not built and controlled correctly (if that is even possible) you may end up in the same boat as me. And my boat is sinking. We are upgrading in a week or two, but my hopes are not high. Our problems may be entirely caused by the mis-use of the system, but if the system can be messed up that badly by humans, I tend to think the system is flawed from the start. We'll see.