9 posts tagged release

Only a few short months after launching Monaqasat.com 2.0, we are happy to introduce Monaqasat.com 2.1, a major new release that introduces some often requested features and optimizations, available starting today to all our existing customers.

Built-in Fast Document Viewer

Documents are a big part of the tender process and we continually strive to simplify that process as possible. Working with PDF documents had however a few major flaws until recently:

• clicking on documents would automatically download them to your device, something that could take a long time depending on the size of the documents,
• finding the history or review notes for specific versions required opening up different views or popups.

Of course, documents can still be downloaded for archival or offline viewing.

Company Performance Reports

Many of our clients use Monaqasat.com to manage dozens or hundreds of tenders simultaneously. Properly measuring performance of their organization becomes key. Monaqasat.com 2.1 introduces a new section called My Reports that allows Company Administrators and Auditors to quickly and precisely measure the performance of their company and users and evaluate whether tenders and documents are progressing at the anticipated rate.

Faster

Monaqasat.com’s goal is to help all its customers streamline their operations and reduce costs as much as possible. With that in mind, we constantly strive to make our service faster and more responsive. With this latest release, we have spent a lot of time optimizing some of the most important pages of the application such as the tasks page, the public tenders page and the tenders index page making them much faster to load and operate thanks to some intense caching.

For the more technologically inclined, we will be posting some more in-depth articles very soon on how we go about optimizing such pages along with some numbers.

However, we are not yet done optimizing the application and you can expect some more dramatic improvements in the upcoming releases.

Other Updates

Dozens of other improvements and optimizations have been included in Monaqasat.com 2.1, including:

• allowing all users to manage the frequency and type of notifications they receive by email,
• enabling company admins to set minimum durations for each phase as per their requirements,
• being able to bulk-download any set of documents or bidder documents in one click,
• allowing documenters to submit explanatory notes along with their documents, thus allowing them to better communicate with verifiers,
• …

We trust that every single one of our customers will benefit from the new release, and we will continue to improve our solutions and services based on your feedback and suggestions. So please use our customer support portal to suggest new features, report bugs or offer testimonials.

In an effort to centralize all your tendering needs into one powerful and easy to use platform, we are very happy to officially launch today our ‘Public Tender Announcements’ section of Monaqasat.com.

By working closely with our key partners located throughout the MENA region, we have created the definitive tender listings, with an average of 300-500 tender announcements added on a daily basis from every country in the Middle East and North Africa.

The Monaqasat Public Tender Announcement service delivers fast and accurate information that you need to generate new leads and win contracts issued by all levels of Government as well Utilities Sector, Hospitals, Schools, Ports, NGO’s, etc. This full searchable database is updated 365 days a year, with close to 3,500 new opportunities being added each week.

While the main listing is available for FREE to all guests and users of Monaqasat.com, access to the detailed tender information is only available to registered members. To start finding new business opportunities, simply click on the ‘Find Tenders’ link in the main navigation menu.

Dear Monaqasat Users,

We are very happy today to announce the release of Monaqasat.com v2.0. More than just an upgrade or a minor release, this release is a major rewrite of the MENA’s favorite eTendering engine in order to drastically improve its speed and set the base for a series of features that will once again revolutionize how tendering is done.

Here is a small overview of the hundreds of new features:

1. Brand new Design

To celebrate Monaqasat’s 3rd birthday (and the 10 billion processed bids mark), we wanted to refresh the overall layout with a more dynamic and fresh look. The new layout is cleaner, more vivid and showcases better what Monaqasat.com is all about: being the best Cloud eTendering solution for companies of all types.

2. Improved BOQ Controls

To better control how bidders fill each item within the Bill of Quantities, Monaqasat.com introduces per-item security items:

• Can a particular item be replaced by one or more other items?
• Can the item’s quantity be changed by the bidders?
• Is a particular item mandatory or optional?

A picture is worth a thousand words, or in our case, an Interactive Graph is worth a thousand Excel Sheets. One of the most time consuming aspects of the tendering process is opening bids, ensuring that the bidding was done according to specifications set forth by the tender issuer and analyzing the bids to understand the pricing structure. Monaqasat.com v2 takes the pain away and makes this process much easier thanks to its new Dynamic Reports section that automatically presents the data in interactive graphical format, allowing you to see the information any way you want it to.

4. Support for Multiple Currencies

Monaqasat.com is growing and is expanding outside of the UAE. As such, it now supports payments and tender prices in all major currencies in the MENA region, such as AED, BHD, EUR, JOD, LBP, OMR, QAR, SAR, USD and YER. We will work on adding more currencies in the coming months, so please let us know which ones you require.

5. Smart BOQ & Bid Editor

Documenters, Verifiers and Bidders know how time-consuming it can be to create, edit or fill a Bill of Quantities. To make their lives easier, we’ve completely redesigned the BoQ and Bid editors to make them as quick and efficient as possible. 

For Documenters:

• Bids are properly migrated when a new BOQ is updated, saving hours of work,
• BoQ and Bid are now automatically saved every 5 minutes,
• Much improved performance and controls,

For Bidders

• Bulk Editing of the one or more items,
• A new ‘adjustment’ column has been introduced for bidders, allowing them to quickly apply percentage or value adjustments to each element or to categories,
• Real-time highlighting of the items that have yet to be priced, allowing you to focus exactly on what is left to be done,
• Easy exporting of the Bill of Quantities document to Excel for offline studying

You are based in the UAE but you want to build a project in Qatar or in Morocco. What are the best contractors or sub-contractors to invite to your tender? That is one of the main goals of the Monaqasat.com platform and will be one of the major areas of improvement over the next releases. To get your company ready for this functionality, start building your own company profile by going into your Administration area and adding as much information about your company as possible.  

7. Support Page

Our customers have always been at the core of our business. To better support our growing customer base, we’ve migrated our support portal to a much more complete and dynamic system that can be accessed at http://support.monaqasat.com from where you will be able to read answers to known questions and problems, browse discussions or suggest new topics. Every person in the company will be actively monitoring the forums and ensuring that every query, every idea and every comment is taken into consideration. So ask away!

In order to complete the documentation of a tender, Documenters must often upload dozens of individual documents. Up to today, this was a time-consuming activity as it required the end user to enter files one by one, regularly check their upload progress and repeat for every file.

Today, we are happy to introduce the Multiple Uploads functionality to all our Windows users (Mac & Linux coming soon), as long as they have the latest version of Flash installed.

When opening the Upload File dialog, you will be prompted with a new form that will allow you to choose multiple files at the same time and watch as they are uploaded to the server one by one, without any interaction from your side. You can now launch your uploads at night and sleep easy knowing that Monaqasat.com is continuing to work for you.

Too much email is as much a cause of lost productivity as not enough. As such, we have today rolled out a new option for Monaqasat users to allow them to configure exactly what kind of emails they would like to receive, and how often.

To configure your settings, all you have to do is follow these 3 easy steps:

1. Go to your User Profile page,
2. Check or uncheck what type of notifications you would like to receive,
3. Adjust the slider to let the system know how often you would like to receive notifications.

Almost one year after Monaqasat officially launched, we are happy to announce that we are about to release Monaqasat 1.5, which includes dozens of new features, fixes and improvements. Our goal was simple: make Monaqasat Easier, More Efficient and More Secure:

• New Task Management system which allows you to prioritize your work,
• Per-Document Assignments so that every verifier knows exactly what documents he has to verify,
• All tables can now be sorted, making finding information that much quicker,
• Rich Text Input for Review Notes and other fields, allowing bullet points, numbering and text styles,
• Hundreds of little improvements to the User Interface to make it more streamlined and easier than ever,
• Smart Bid Highlighting, allowing bidders to see exactly what items are left to be priced,
• Completely redone Support Pages with step-by-step tutorials, more questions and answers and support forms,
• Internet Explorer 8 is now officially supported,
• Major speed improvements. Pages load faster and feel more dynamic.

Monaqasat 1.5 is now in closed beta phase and will be available for general consumption on November 1st, 2009. We would like to thank all of you for you ongoing support and feedback, making Monaqasat.com the largest eTendering site in the U.A.E.

Registration Fees Change

Monaqasat.com is growing at a very rapid rate. There are now over 350 companies using it on a daily basis to manage their tenders and find new business opportunities. As a consequence of the high volume of data, our costs are increasing and we have no choice but to slightly increase the registration fees accordingly. As such starting November 1st 2009, the yearly registration fees will be AED 2,000 for all new registrations and renewals.

We would like to thank all the Monaqasat.com Community for its ongoing support and feedback.

As of today, over 540 Bill of Quantities (BOQs) have been uploaded to Monaqasat with an average of 465 items per BOQ. As any Technical Documenter will probably confirm, creating and managing these relatively large BOQ is quite an intensive work.

To make your life easier, and based on your feedback, we have updated the “Import CSV” popup to include more information regarding the actual error. As of today, when importing an incorrectly formatted CSV, the system will display, for each error:

• the specific line that contains the error,
• a description of what the error is.

Thank you your ongoing feedback and support, 

Your Monaqasat Team

Welcome to the updated Monaqasat.com!

As part of our regular updates to the system, we have brought in some major improvements to the way the application looks and feels. Here is a description of the biggest changes:

Fluid Layout that automatically adjusts to your screen space.

Tabbed Menu, allowing you to easily move between the different parts of the application with greater ease.

Streamlined Tenders and Documents Listings, showing you only the most important information, but allowing you to get more information at the click of a button,

Document Sets: Similarly to what happens in real life, documents are not exchanged between tender participants as individual documents, but rather as complete document sets. Technical Documenters can take now their time to submit documents and only “Submit All For Review” once they are confident all the Tender Documents are ready to be reviewed.

Technical Verifiers can assign multiple verifiers to the documents, all of which can submit their review notes on each document. A Supervisor can then review each note and submit a comprehensive Review Set back to the Documenter.

Best Regards,

Your Monaqasat

We are proud to announce the immediate release of version 1.2 of Monaqasat, with over 30 new features or corrections to known problems. We have listened to your comments and have worked very hard to incorporate as many requests as possible. Here is a short summary of the new features:

Monaqasat is growing. In order to keep it fresh and to prepare for some of the hot new features that we are working on for the future, we have started to revamp the user interface. Currently, it is only used in the external pages, but they will be expanded to the rest of the application very soon. Please feel free to send us feedback about it!

While notifications are a good way to keep track of your ongoing tender, they are not useful is you want to quickly get an overview of all of a tender’s history. To address this need, we are today introducing the Tender History panel located at the bottom right hand of each tender from which a Tender Owner or Auditor will be able to track all the latest events in a tender.

Company Admins now have the ability to select who they want their employees to invite to a tender using the new “Invitation Filters”, available from the Admin section. Three options are available:

• Invitations can be sent to all companies in the system
• Invitations can be sent to all companies in the system except the ones specified by the Company Administrator
• Invitations can only be sent to the companies listed by the Company Administrator

 Documents Lock / Unlock

Tender Owners now have the ability to individually lock or unlock specific documents once they have reached a stable version. Once blocked, documents can only be read and documenters and verifiers will not be able to update them unless they request it to be unlocked.

The Auditor role can now be assigned to companies that were already assigned as Documenter or Verifier, allowing consultants to oversee the tender process even if they are not the tender organizers.

We have made huge improvements to the way large BOQs are processed in the online viewer, resulting in lower wait time when uploading large CSV files.