Interview
ProjectWise 365 AEC Magazine interviewed Dustin Parkman, Bentley Systems Vice President of Project Delivery, on the release of the company’s most affordable, cloud-based document management service
AEC Magazine: Who is ProjectWise 365 aimed at? Dustin Parkman: At Year In Infrastructure (YII) [Singapore, 2019] we had already announced plans to come up with a new ProjectWise offering, called ProjectWise 365. We launched an invitation only beta to allow early users to do some evaluations, give us feedback, and allow us to be a bit more agile in our response time before we launched it to the general public. This spring we had a global launch and the target audience has been small to mid-sized firms, for people who are not using ProjectWise today — whether that’s a small firm or small workgroup within a larger organisation. It was really meant at that lower end of the scalability, so being able to quickly adapt something at a small workgroup level, and then scale based on to your needs from there. Because it’s a cloud service, it is instant on, there is no prerequisite, there is no infrastructure so to speak that’s required by the organisation that actually speeds their time from decision to implementation, to actual production use. Whereas tried and true ProjectWise, which has 28
May / June 2020
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been around for a number of years, is AEC: How tightly integrated is more of an enterprise level system. ProjectWise 365 with Office 365? So when you’re thinking about traditional ProjectWise design DP: ProjectWise 365 allows integration, you’re usually you to take the engineering thinking about large groups, collaboration capabilities complex work in progress, that are there and embed complex spatial managethat within your day to day ment across a lot of different Microsoft Teams / Office disciplines, whether that be environment. You already mechanical, drainage, civil have a generic collaboration site works, etc. where you’re platform that you’re using; having to manage all that in ProjectWise 365 can fit into one environment and share that rather than be an alterspace, through collision native. What we are really checking, interference, typitrying to focus on, is not so Because it’s a much the generic collaboracal space management type of stuff. Because of that, that cloud service, tion that Microsoft or Zoom tends to be used more so someone like that is going it is instant on, or with larger organisations, to be focused on, we try to there is no larger capital projects. focus on what differentiates Whereas ProjectWise 365, prerequisite, us between them, which is while it can also be used on really the detail for engithere is no complex projects, we didn’t and construction infrastructure neering want to confuse the market correspondence — so the so to speak with how we positioned it. ability to share documents We positioned it at that midand BIM data, the capability tier firm or workgroup, so to spatially analyse and even a large, multinational engineering review information, to capture issues, to consultant organisation could use be able to do markups and review sesProjectWise 365. sions — whether those be 2D PDF and
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www.AECmag.com
01/06/2020 14:05
