Setting up tenders is a big part of the construction process. Naturally, with the documents already being available on Catenda Hub users would like to set up their project to be used for tendering. Compared to the regular use of Catenda with collaboration of project members this poses some challenges as the party creating the tender will want ensure fair competition. This article contains some

This article contains information about the following topics

​Contractors taking part in the tendering process should be limited in what actions they can perform on Catenda.

Tender users can be given access to only a specific set of documents in the project that they can use as a base. They can be given read access to all the places in the project while they are given no access to the places that they should not see.

In a tendering process it is important that the submitting parties do not know about each other. In Catenda all users can see all other users in the project which can cause problems in a tendering situation.

Depending on how you are able to create account on Catenda there are several ways you can solve this problem.

On Catenda every account is connected to an email address.

One way to ensure that the accounts used for tendering remain anonymous is to create email aliases which are used to create accounts.
Because you control the email address the account is connected to, you can ensure that both username and email address stay anonymous.
You can then share the username and password of the accounts with the parties that need access.

Some companies do not allow their employees to create aliases for their emails.

If it is not important that users see each other, users can be invited the regular way.

On all places on Catenda, other than the members page, there are good ways to make sure that information shared by one member is not seen by another.
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If you are not able to create separate users for each tender submitter, you can also use your Catenda project as a place to share your tendering information from without inviting the submitters.

As seen in the tendering information base section, documents collections and 3D bookmarks can be prepared and shared with external parties to use as a base for submittal.

This way external users can have access to documents and 3D views in the project ​without being part of it themselves.

As the users are not part of the project, document delivery will have to be submitted elsewhere.

The submitted documents can be uploaded to the project by the tenderer after they have been submitted.

Projects often have a lot of information about the building already in them when the when a tendering process begins. It is therefore important to guide the submitting party to the right documents, not only so they do not accidentally look at the wrong document but also to ensure that all submitters are working with the same information.

Creating document collections of the documents you would like to use as a base for the tendering process be a simple way of showing the tenderer which documents should be looked at.
As you can lock document collections to revisions you will be able to ensure that there is no confusion about which version of the document is intended to be used.

If the submitters are not part of the project you can also share document collections externally. This way you can share large files with each submitting party and see a confirmation when they have clicked the download link that was sent to them.

As with documents you can use bookmarks to create a base for showing tender submitters which 3D models to look at.

Bookmarks are a great way to show tenderers a viewpoint of which part of the project in 3D is intended in this case.

Shared with project

Bookmarks will have to be shared with the project so other project members can see them.

With models as documents access can be configured so tendering users only see the models they have access to.

Public bookmarks

Public bookmark are a great way to share 3D views with external parties as part of a tender.

With a public bookmark you can generate a link where tender submitters will be able to see a simple version of the models in the bookmark without the object properties

This is to ensure sensitive quantity information that might be in these objects is not accidentally.

Tendering projects are often private and it is important that no information gets shared with other parties.

One way you can ensure there is no other way to export than downloading is by asking us to disable the public sharing feature of the project.
With this option disabled it will no longer be possible to create sharable links with document collections or bookmarks so that no sensitive information can get leaked from the project by other means than downloading.
You can find this option described more detail here.