Feature
Bentley Systems technology update Bentley Systems launched its new CONNECT technology at its annual Year In Infrastructure conference in London, laying the ground for engineering data and applications to be much more dynamic and pervasive. by Martyn Day and Greg Corke
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he recent Bentley 2014 Year In Infrastructure (YII) event in London provided the platform for the company to launch its next generation MicroStation, CONNECT Edition, together with updates to its comprehensive range of engineering products and services. The last generation, MicroStation V8, was launched in 2001 with subsequent editions V8.5 and V8i. Even though Bentley hasn’t changed its file format since 2001, the DGN format stays the same with this new generation, which is an impressive feat. That said, in the company’s pitch for the new release you would be hard pressed to hear much about all the work that has gone into the new geometry engine. Bentley’s portfolio of solutions is now more about project management, data mobility, connecting teams and information modelling. After 30 years in operation, Bentley Systems has pretty much nailed CAD drawing and modelling so is now aiming to tackle both higher and deeper problems, such as information longevity from concept to a facilities operation as well as to provide compute-intensive ‘optioneering’ analysis to find the best performing or more cost-efficient design solution. With this change in focus, Bentley’s vision and messaging shifts to centre on ProjectWise. This is the company’s project integration environment, either hosted in the cloud or behind a firewall. ProjectWise manages and distributes information on demand to all project participants, in a controlled manner.
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November / December 2014
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In large, multi-billion pound engineering projects, such as London’sCrossrail,ProjectWise has been used as a data backbone throughout all phases, and was attributed to saving more than 5,000 man-hours in just 12 months on the tunnel project alone. Bentley CONNECT Edition is project centric, rather than file centric, so every model or piece of content that is created has to be part of a project.
CONNECT Editions With this new generation of products Bentley moves a step closer to providing a more seamless, integrated end-to-end environment, where data is created in projects, managed and distributed to wherever it needs to be viewed, edited, interacted with and marked-up. Similarly the data can be searched and filtered from any point of access with a choice of architectures, behind the firewall, private cloud or public cloud. While much of the finesse appears to be in the new modern interfaces, a lot of the development work is in the background, connecting up the applications, hiding
Technology highlights ■ Bentley CONNECT The successor to Bentley’s V8i software generation will feature a common project environment and offer cloudbased capabilities to deliver a new ‘connected user experience’ ■ Bentley and Trimble Two firms now working even closer together to extend the benefits of the BIM model from design into construction ■ ProjectWise Essentials
Cloud-based, industrialstrength collaboration application for smaller firms (up to 40 seats) that is leased by the quarter ■ MicroStation CONNECT A brand new user interface, a project-centric workflow, 64-bit support for larger models, plus a range of constraint tools for creating functional components ■ Codename Graphite
A brand new platform technology which Bentley Systems is using to create new products for multiple operating systems ■ Scenario Services Using the power of the cloud to test out hundreds of different designs in the quest for a truly optimal solution
product silos and making a hybrid cloud/server project backbone. Bentley calls the products ‘software at your service’. The company’s flexible licensing provides access to its entire product suite through configurable application ‘playlists’, flexible licensing and hourly usage billing. For mobile, Bentley has built up a pretty extensive portfolio of apps over the last few years with a view to putting data into the hands of the site worker. Greg Bentley’s ‘data mobility’ mantra, the theme of YII 2011, has become a reality. Two of the mobile applications demonstrated at the launch were of special interest. ProjectWise WorkSite CONNECT Edition provides comprehensive remote access to data stored in ProjectWise and supports file viewing, mark-up, forms, and complex searches. Users can access latest project documentation with review and redlining capabilities. And they don’t need to worry about where data is stored as every user is given a single task-based view to all of their project data. Bentley Navigator, for viewwww.AECmag.com
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