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About transmittal management

A transmittal is a set of documents that is sent from one organization to another, often to fulfill the requirements of a contract between the sending and receiving organizations. Transmittals are typically used in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry as well as other industries to exchange documents that are under change. Besides documents, a transmittal usually includes a transmittal sheet that lists the documents and their revision numbers being sent and also the name, telephone number and address of the sending and receiving parties. The sender of a transmittal may include a message or instructions on the transmittal sheet that describe the purpose of the transmittal, a response request, and sometimes, a due date. Other types of document transactions may be possible with Project Portal but are not described in this guide.

Project Portal can be used to create transmittal packages that are compressed archive (.zip) files. The transmittals can then be sent as email messages. A Project Portal transmittal package contains the following:

A digital transmittal sheet
Copies of one or more digital document files contained in a folder named Documents.
A separate Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file named documents.xls that contains metadata about the documents. The spreadsheet may contain the filename, document name, author name, author email address, document number, revision number, WBS code, target date, comments, and so on, as configured by a system administrator.

All transmittal information sent by Project Portal is logged for future reference and auditing purposes. The recipients of transmittals can only see the data that is intended for them and any files sent are stored permanently in Project Portal.

The recipient of a transmittal may be required to return documents to the sender that have been changed according to the instructions in the transmittal sheet. The metadata file can be edited by the recipient to reflect the changes made to the documents. When returned to the sender, it can be used to update Project Portal. The package of returned documents, which may include additional documents, is known as a submittal.

Transmittal management is the performance of these tasks throughout the life cycle of transmittals. The typical tasks in the life cycle of a transmittal and submittal are listed in About transmittal workflow. Project Portal automates many of these tasks.

The following topics describe how transmittals work and how to configure Project Portal to manage transmittals.