Send Documents To Meridian Portal

Meridian Portal provides a project type named Standard Project that supports a simple document revision workflow outside of the vault. This makes it possible for new revisions to be made by business partners without access to the Meridian vault.

You can easily send copies of vault documents to these projects through the Meridian Enterprise integration with Meridian Portal. When the revisions (and any new documents) are approved in Meridian Portal, they are automatically imported back into the vault.

Documents sent for information are read-only, and should only be sent to users with the Contractor role in Portal. However, some PowerWeb users have sent these documents to Portal users with other roles. This causes a situation where there are read-only documents in the Portal repository, which then need to be removed by Accruent Support.

To address this issue, as of the 2022.3 Cloud release, Portal now blocks documents sent for information to Portal users that do not have the Contractor role.

ClosedNotes about Functionality

  • To perform this task, you must be a member of a group that is assigned to the Document Controller, Project Owner, or Tenant Administrator role that is assigned to the parent folder.

  • This command requires a Package export type publishing job definition in Meridian Enterprise Server. For information about configuring publishing jobs, see Configure a Publishing Job.

  • When a document is sent to Meridian Portal:

    • 'For information', it is not locked.

      Portal blocks documents sent for information to Portal users that do not have the Contractor role.

    • 'For revision', it is locked.

  • Documents sent to Meridian Portal remain locked to the export package in which they were sent until they are returned from Meridian Portal. If the package transfer fails, you can unlock the documents from the package as described in Lock And Unlock Documents. Documents must be unlocked from PowerUser or from PowerWeb with a site cache configured and the ActiveX compatibility mode option disabled.

  • When documents are imported back into the vault, they are subject to the Field-Path definition of the vault's configuration like any other document. This might place the documents in other folders than where they originated.

  • Documents sent to Meridian Portal must first be synchronized to a Meridian Explorer repository. This will be done automatically, if necessary, but it might delay the documents' availability in Meridian Portal.

  • If the Existing documents option of the import profile that is used to return documents from Meridian Portal to the vault is set to New revision and the source document is in a workflow but not in the Released state when the document is imported back to the vault, the import will fail. If this happens, change the state of the vault document to Released and restart the import job.

  • The folder used in this task must be of a folder type that has its Can be linked to Meridian Portal projects option enabled. If you are unsure of the configuration of the folder types in your system, contact a System Administrator.

  • Besides the selected documents, an automatically generated transmittal sheet (Microsoft Excel workbook) will be included in the package.

ClosedPrerequisites

Do the following prerequisite tasks:

  1. If it does not exist already, create a folder in the vault to represent the Meridian Portal project as described in Create a Folder.

  2. Link the folder to a Meridian Portal project as described in Link Folders To Meridian Portal.

  3. If they do not exist already, create project copies of the master documents (and any required CAD references) into the folder as described in Create a Project Copy.

ClosedPowerWeb Procedures

Use these steps for PowerWeb.

If a document is created in PowerWeb and is sent to Portal, the document number and revision number generated in PowerWeb will also be used in Portal. The Document Range for these documents will be set to Automatic.

To send documents to Meridian Portal:

  1. Select the project copies that you want to send.

  2. In the Exchange ribbon, in the Meridian Portal group, click Send to Portal.

    The Send to Meridian Portal dialog appears and lists the members of the Meridian Portal project that is linked to the vault project folder. The command is unavailable if no parent folder in the document path is linked to a Meridian Portal project.

  3. Click options using the descriptions in the following table.

  4. Click OK.

    A dialog box shows the progress as the documents are sent to Meridian Portal in an export package and locked in the folder (if sent for the Issue Reason of For Revision). If you enabled the Include CAD references option, the referenced documents are sent also, even if they were not selected.

    If the Export Packages property page is enabled in your system, it shows information about the export package in which the documents were sent. If the document already exists in the Meridian Portal project, the document is added as a new revision.

    The package includes documents referenced by a reference belonging to a Reference Type configured with the option Include to a Portal package.

ClosedDocument Export Options

Document export options
Option Description

Recipient

Select the recipients that you want to work with the documents in Meridian Portal.

You may select a recipient that has the Document Controller role or the special Project Document Control recipient that makes the package available to all users with the Document Controller role in the project. It will also cause the documents to skip the Acknowledge and Accept states of the workflow in Meridian Portal and go directly to the For Routing state. A notification email message will also be sent.

This feature assumes that all document compliance checks have already been performed in Meridian such as if the Meridian user who is sending the documents is also the person who will receive them in Meridian Portal.

If the recipient has the Contractor role:

  1. The recipient is notified by email,

  2. A package of the documents is assigned to the recipient, and

  3. The recipient can acknowledge receiving the package, which notifies the sender by email.

Package description

Type a description of the package for the recipient.

Include CAD references

Also send any CAD reference documents to Meridian Portal that reside in the same project folder as the selected parent documents.

In PowerWeb, when the user sends the document to Portal with CAD references for revision:

  • editable reference documents are included for revision

  • non-editable reference documents are included for information

If the project copy has CAD references to documents outside the project, these referenced documents are included in the package for information.

In PowerWeb, when the user sends the document to Portal with CAD references for information:

  • reference documents are included for information

Purpose

Select the purpose for sending the package: 

  • For revision — documents that are editable for the user are sent for revision and can be updated in Portal. All other documents are sent for information.

  • For information — all documents are sent for information to a project member with the Contractor role, and are read-only in Portal. Since the document is not a part of the workflow, it should not be sent to internal project members in Portal.

    Portal blocks documents sent for information to Portal users that do not have the Contractor role.

The latest released revision

 When selected, the latest released revision of the document is sent to Meridian Portal instead of the working copy (default).

 

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