RealLifeLEED's Greenbuild Wishlist - LEED-Online

With GreenBuild a mere eight days away, I'm excited and hopeful for the new improvements and announcements that few days will bring. In some ways it's like LEED Christmas, and I've decided it might be fun to write a letter to Santa! I started writing this and determined I wish for too much for one post, so I've been forced to split my into many parts, so there's more to come. I've been good this year, so I'm hoping for at least a few of my wishes to come true by the new year!

Looks like a Christmas Wreath To Me

Add some holly and that there logo is a Christmas wreath!

Part 1 - LEED-Online

Since the letter from R.Fed about LEED 2009 mentioned "significant enhancements to LEED Online", I figured I'd start with my wish list for LEED-Online improvements:

  1. No more superslow servers!
  2. Move the "Enter" button far away from the "Remove Access" button on the project selector page... I could tell you how many times I've accidentally removed my self from projects I'm working on, but that would be embarrasing.
  3. List the project number and access code on the project selector page for the "Project Administrators" and "Project Managers"
  4. Fix the error where loading multiple supporting documents doesn't work.  I've had to upload one document, browse away from the credit page and then back to upload a second document more than a few times.
  5. Get rid of the "Expand all credit categories" button and just list everything on the main page.  Why add steps?
  6. Stop requiring that ALL project summary information must be loaded in order to edit ANY information.   A lot of times we only have partial information, and are forced to load incorrect info just to save a few correct portions.  
  7. Stop requiring every little edit to require the page to reload.  When assigning roles the first time around the page has to reload for every single credit!  This wouldn't be as big a deal if it didn't take 30 seconds to a minute for the page to reload.  Why not just have an update button at the bottom so we can make a bunch of changes at once before reloading?
  8. Allow me to pre-assign roles to people I invite to join the project.  It's an uneccesary step to invite them, wait for them to join, and then assign them a credit... It also means that they can't start working until I take the time to assign them a role. 

That's it for LEED-Online recommendations that I can think of right now. In future posts I'll tackle an LEED education, membership, and customer service! Is there something you're wishing for that I missed? Leave a comment and share with all of us!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent post Joel! Perhaps this just restates #7 but here goes.... I wish for a way to change the template information without an act of congress. Over the course of projects, team members come and go. Sometimes they don't complete their templates fully. Usually, one small edit (like listing the documentation) needs to be made and they are gone taking their passwords with them. I think as team administrator it would be nice to be able to override the information or wipe it clean to start over. I know they say it can be done now - but I haven't been able to get it to work right on the two occasions I needed. So maybe I am really wishing to fix the broken stuff?

Can't wait to see the rest of the list.

Jonathan and Sarah said...

Good post...I can tell you with some certainty however that any changes to LEED-Online will only take place with projects registered under the new LEED 2009 moving forward. Any currently registered project will remain under the current LEED-Online platform. They will essentially be separate systems. My firm has received confirmation to this effect from the USGBC. We are also planning to meet with USGBC officials during GreenBuild to try to further rectify this situation. We've had to do a considerable amount of technological scrambling to keep our many clients happy when we can't upload documents. USGBC doesn't get or doesn't seem to care that this is affecting real business.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Joel, does anyone know how significant the the LEED Online changes will be? Will it be a very similar format but just faster and more reliable?

PS. You and I chatted a while back via email regarding challenges with clients working on EB (now EBOM) projects.