My teammate, the session owner, has an upcoming studio session review where the client wants to give their maintenance employees a 2-week window to add comments to the bluebeam session and then after that, lock them from adding new comments.
One possible solution is to create a “group” of the maintenance employees, but I’m testing it now, and creating a “group” is labor intensive: You have to manually type or paste each email into a field rather than selecting the email from a pre-populated list of attendees.
To create a permissions group of attendees,
- Go to “Session Settings”
- “Permissions” tab.
- “Group Settings” icon button below Users/Groups.
- Green “+” button below “Groups”, name the group, i.e. “UB maintenance team”
- With the group selected, click green “+” button below “Members”
- Manually fill the “email” field for each member, one by one.
- “OK” to close the “Group Membership Management” tab and see “session settings” tab.
- Green “+” button below Users/Groups.
- Click the group to add them to the users/groups list.
- With the group selected/highlighted in the users/groups list:
- Under “Applied Permissions”, change the “Markup” permission to “Deny”.
Manually filling the email field for each member one by one seems tedious and error-prone: a typo in the email field, forgetting to add someone in the list, etc. I suggest that when adding names to a permissions group, a display list of active/invited participants is provided rather than a blank field. This is similar to how individual names are added to the permissions list currently (See below).
Workaround option:
- Go to “Session Settings”
- “Permissions” tab.
- Green “+” button below Users/Groups.
- Control+click to highlight/select the emails of all desired members to add them to the users/groups list.
- Select to highlight one of these members now in the Users/Groups list, and under “Applied Permissions”, change the “Markup” permission to “Deny”.
- Repeat the Applied Permissions step for each intended member.
This workaround method could also prove to be error-prone and is an unideal workaround. When changing individual people's permission settings one by one, we could accidentally miss someone in the list, or accidentally restrict markups for the wrong person – someone else listed in the users/groups list. Instead, I'd like to see improvement to the way that names are added to a group in the permissions settings so that names can be selected from a list of active/invited members, similar to how names can be selected here in this method.
There should be a better way to turn markup capabilities on and off for a set/constant group of people with less room for admin user error than the two methods outlined above.
As the bluebeam technical support team suggested when I reached out about this, setting a timed limit to set and remove a certain permission for a group would also be a major improvement over having someone manually alter the permission when the date is reached.
