What do you like best about Deltek Specpoint?
It has a nice way of combining Uniformat and MasterFormat, although there is currently not a way of exporting Uniformat in some type of Preliminary Project Description deliverable that I am aware of.
The way that it breaks down products under each section is also quite helpful. It can be a bit confusing at times, but mostly due to sections being a bit inconsistent in how products are called out. I do know they are fixing sections to have more consistency, but I'm sure that takes time when you have over 900 spec section templates.
The tech support team is very responsive and super helpful. Most of my issues ended up being bugs in the system that needed to be escalated to the development team, but they would regularly check in with me with updates during that process. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Deltek Specpoint?
*EDIT NOTE January 31, 2025*
I meant to change my review to two stars during my last update. Everyone I have talked to from Deltek have been wonderful to work with, and that definitely counts for something. I am now on the Customer Advisory Council to be able to see previews of planned updates and offer my critiques and suggestions with other industry professionals. My understanding is that the major upgrades to the system are in the works and scheduled to start rolling out April/March of 2025. Once that update is out, I will update my review.
*EDIT NOTE December 26, 2024*
The company has gotten in contact with me and we’ve had some very productive meetings where they shared plans for the future of the platform. I know that they were continually working on fixing bugs and adding features as I kept a close eye on all their release update documentation. But it seems they have been working with an independent software development team and are working to release some sweeping changes that should fix a lot of issues. I think they also said they changed up their beta testing process.
I think most of my frustration comes from the fact that I saw the value in the idea of the product and wanted it to work and be successful. Most everyone in my company gave up on trying to use Specpoint and continued to edit in Word, but I kept trying because I wanted to be helpful to them to make the product better. I especially like using the assemblies feature to add products to a project. However, I had so many projects come in with quick turn-arounds that I needed a solution and paid for a competitor’s product out of my own pocket just for my own sanity. Due to my meetings with Deltek, my company decided to renew their subscription to Specpoint.
I still think this is an excellent case study for other software development companies on how not to roll out new software to paying customers, but they definitely recognize that they made mistakes and seem to be working very hard to fix it. I have updated my review below to reflect some of the things they have fixed, and since I will be working with the software again, I will hopefully be able to update this again in 2025 to be a positive review.
*EDITED REVIEW*
Not only have they created an unbearable software experience, they have completely abandoned their old systems of specification format and delivery. I would understand not having backwards compatibility with their old Word files if the software could do everything that the Word files and their Word plugins could do. So now we are in a limbo where the software is incapable of outputting a project manual without needing post-processing manually in Microsoft Word, but the old Word Plugin can't assist in making those corrections. Any time savings during the initial selections is often outweighed the amount of manual work to get exported files ready to be sent to clients. I have suggested that if they don't plan on upkeeping their Word plugin, they should release it on Github as an open-source project since there can still be value in it for post-processing for specialty use cases. For example, I have had to come up with my own Word Macros to go through and add a page to odd-numbered sections with "This page intentionally left blank" since I work with several clients that require that for hard copies of project manuals.
I consistently get errors when trying to add specification sections to projects, I've seen errors when trying to make selections inside the sections, I've had entire sections fail to export, and I've had issues of text appearing in exported files that do not exist in Specpoint, the list goes on...Given that I have a background in IT and software development before going into architecture, I feel like I could make things better by giving detailed reports of every technical issue I had. I had to file a support ticket literally every day I opened the software because something new came up, and the amount of work it takes to write a good ticket was taking away billable time from my projects. I would have to clear my cache, document the steps I took to get the issue, check to see if I could replicate the problem in other sections or when using other browsers, or would sometimes be asked to send logs from the browser. This is the reason most companies give out beta versions for free. Instead, I feel like I’m paying them to be a beta tester.
Regular content updates (which is a huge part of paying for specification templates) have no system in place to pull into already started specification sections. The old way of sending out updates came with a PDF outlining all the added or removed sections, as well as a thorough write-up of the content inside sections that were changed. But that doesn’t seem to have made its way into the software. So unless you download and keep all the PDFs of those changes, you have no way of knowing what changed, when, or why. They have recently updated the office masters page to include dates that sections were updated, but you can only see it by clicking on a specific section, so its not particularly helpful.
When I asked how Deltek's internal specifiers feel about the software for managing the masters, I was told they don't use Specpoint. At the time, they were still editing all the master files in Microsoft Word and then give the updates to the Specpoint team to manually pull into the software. The reason I was told is that they have a very different job writing masters compared to users who use the masters to write specs for active projects (i.e. customers). I think Specpoint should be able to be a system to write masters within it, and even write specifications from scratch when need be. I hear they have been working on getting their internal spec-writing team on the system, but I feel like if they would have built it from the ground up with writing and managing masters to begin with, they could have found and fixed most of the bugs before a paying customer ever saw the software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
