Feature
Bentley Connect Edition Bentley Systems hosted a two day event in Manchester to focus on its early access program for the Connect Edition of products, which share the MicroStation common environment. by Martyn Day
B
entley has two great strengths. The first is its ecosystem — no other design developer has the breadth of applications across AEC, Plant, and Infrastructure (Civil), with all the management and ‘glue’ in place to bring project teams together. The second is the MicroStation platform, which is a consistent platform throughout the product range and rarely changes its DGN file format. In fact only twice in the company’s history, which started in 1984. This has not impacted development and the latest release remains true to form. The Bentley Systems pitch is a holistic one and suits large firms that are seeking a one stop shop for design tools and project backbone. Beyond MicroStation, ProjectWise is probably the company’s biggest brand in the industry, having been used on many high-profile projects, such as London’s CrossRail and Olympic Park. However, there are many other products and technologies that do not get as much press. The company pretty much has a solution for every major and minor infrastructure design vertical, from mapping, to modeling buildings, roads, mines, plant and rail. With so many products, the firm offers enterprise licensing so customers can use whatever solutions they need and through
online training can provide expertise to apply it. Because most of the applications are based on MicroStation, the core interface is the same and all the data can be managed through ProjectWise, again a consistent interface for project documentation. Connect Edition The latest generation of MicroStationbased platform products are called the Connect Edition, taking over from the previous generation V8i. Bentley has dabbled with Microsoft naming conventions (95) to straight versioning over the years, this represents a break from all previous branding. The Connect Edition has already been made available to early access participants, and the rest of the Connect offerings will be released throughout 2015 and 2016. The good news is that the current generation of solutions (V8i) will work happily with the new Bentley tools, so transitioning to the latest generation should be fairly seamless. ProjectWise Connect Edition services, along with the Bentley Navigator Connect Edition application, will be available for Early Access by year’s end. The core premise of the Connect Edition is to enable a project-centric hybrid environment across desktop, cloud, projectserver and mobile. To enable this, Bentley
has utilised Microsoft’s Azure cloud-service to connect all users across projects. Azure also provides a computational backbone to provide lightning fast analysis and ‘optioneering’, for computationally refined designs and ultimately improved performance of designed assets. Azure also is the platform for Connect Select Services and Select Open Access, through quarterly term licensing. Each user of the Connect Edition gets what has been called a Bentley Playlist of applications and apps, which are specific to their project role within projects, including access to structured learning tools and ‘just-in-time’ recommendations. Projects also have project-specific ‘Bentley Playbook’ with appropriate applications and apps to fully address the project’s requirements and to support each participant’s role. These project-specific workspaces can include cloud-provisioned software or content, such as catalogs of what Bentley calls ‘functional components’ and specifications. Functional Components are a new capability unleashed with MicroStation Connect and comes with a suite of constraint tools that allow users to capture design intent and create parametric ‘functional components’ for use in designs. The new ProjectWise Catalog Service provides a way to manage and distribute these in house components to all project participants via the cloud. A Bentley Connections Passport provides authenticated access to ProjectWise and AssetWise services and software spanning a user’s hybrid computing environment. For example, the Bentley Navigator Connect Edition provides a user
The core premise of the Connect Edition is to enable a projectcentric hybrid environment
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