We’re excited to announce a major update coming to SmarterWX Locate later this month — a completely reimagined response viewer that’s faster, more intuitive, and built around your feedback! This update brings a host of benefits designed to enhance your experience and streamline how you view and manage enquiries and responses. Here’s what you can expect:

• Optimised use of screen space: The viewer now takes full advantage of your screen, displaying enquiries and responses in full width for a clearer, more immersive experience.

• Faster downloads: Enjoy significantly quicker download times for PDF and ZIP files.

• Embedded interactive web maps: View maps directly within the viewer for easier context and more seamless interaction.

• Future-proof: The new viewer is fully aligned with recent and upcoming changes to the BYDA (Before You Dig Australia) referral service.

Here’s a sneak peek of the new response viewer in action. When you click on an enquiry in the map or list view, the response viewer now opens to fill the entire screen, giving you more room to work with.

You might notice that this looks quite similar to the response viewer in the BYDA Referral Service itself, and that’s intentional. BYDA has introduced several updates this year to improve how asset owners present critical information to enquirers. SmarterWX Locate now fully embeds the BYDA response viewer, ensuring that any new improvements introduced by BYDA are immediately available to our users.

Speedier Downloads

We’ve made significant improvements to the speed of downloading enquiry responses. Whether you’re downloading as a ZIP or PDF, the new viewer drastically reduces wait times. The table below highlights the performance gains for an example enquiry with seven responses:

Long-Term Archival Still Available

The BYDA response viewer retains asset owner responses for 90 days, but we understand that many SmarterWX Locate users need a longer-term record. That’s why we continue to offer the ability to download archived enquiries as either a ZIP or combined PDF for up to seven years (depending on your subscription plan). However, please note that older attachments won’t be viewable in the new interactive online viewer.

Updated Actions Menu

You’ll also notice that the actions menu has moved to the top-right corner of the screen. It includes all the familiar options, such as moving enquiries between teams, changing auto-renew properties, and duplicating enquiries. We’ve streamlined the interface to make sure your most-used features are easily accessible.

As part of these updates, we’ve decided to retire two underutilised features: the option to manually add extra documents to an enquiry and the ability to exclude specific files from downloads. Our data shows that these features were rarely used, and removing them allows us to provide a cleaner and more efficient interface, free of unnecessary clutter.

Anonymous View

One of the most popular features of SmarterWX Locate, the “anonymous view,” remains unchanged. You can still open an enquiry and its responses with a single click or share a secure, tokenised link via email. And with the new viewer, anonymous users will also benefit from the enhanced response and attachment viewing capabilities.

We believe these updates will provide a much-improved experience for everyone using SmarterWX Locate. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts! If you have any feedback, feel free to reach out to me directly at gary@smarterwx.com.

Best,
Gary
Product Manager, SmarterWX