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 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 manage- that 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 checking, interference, typical space management type ‘‘ Because it’s a native. What we are really trying to focus on, is not so much the generic collaboraof stuff. Because of that, that cloud service, tion that Microsoft or Zoom tends to be used more so with larger organisations, larger capital projects. it is instant on, there is no or someone like that is going to be focused on, we try to focus on what differentiates

Whereas ProjectWise 365, prerequisite, us between them, which is while it can also be used on there is no really the detail for engicomplex projects, we didn’t want to confuse the market with how we positioned it. infrastructure so to speak neering and construction correspondence — so the ability to share documents We positioned it at that midtier firm or workgroup, so even a large, multinational engineering and BIM data, the capability to spatially analyse and 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

DWG/DGN types of workflows, or digital twin-based workflows with the new iTwin services Design Review that that comes as a part of ProjectWise 365.

You kind of get the best of both worlds: you’re able to do traditional engineering design, review, QA, QCD types of processes, but you can also do more of the cutting-edge digital twin immersive types of reviews as well, so when you’re in that digital twin modelling environment, your issues, your conversations, your points of interest and observations can all be spatially anchored inside the model. It’s a multiuser environment where everybody can collaborate in real time.

AEC: Compared to ProjectWise, what’s missing from ProjectWise 365?

DP: The thing that ProjectWise 365 doesn’t do yet is a lot of the kind of ‘heavyweight’ features, particularly around things like title block integrations, a lot of the complexity of metadata and attribution on documents that ProjectWise does a really good job with. Also, the batch services for being able to take engineering models and periodically, on a schedule basis, being able to extract that data, create all those ProjectWise 365 The experience that we will downstream contract deliver- offers an immersive, have will be very much like ables through automation. web-based 2D/3D hybrid review PowerPoint or Excel has with

It doesn’t also have all the environment [Microsoft] OneDrive. But engineering application plug- today, you have to go through ins, so ProjectWise has integration built our web environment to upload your coninto MicroStation, OpenRoads, tent, and then start your collaboration OpenBuildings, Revit, AutoCAD — all sessions from there. the Autodesk flavours of products — Tekla and so on. We haven’t yet built AEC: You haven’t got integration links those pieces out, so it is today a bit more into MicroStation or Revit etc. Is that a transactional. It’s not immersive in those technical barrier, or is that a feature set actual design environments, which is barrier and you’re trying to make this a also why it’s positioned as a smaller work more attractive price point? group/ midsize firms solution.

We’re not aiming for these very com- DP: I don’t think it’s really either. Design plex multi-discipline projects with hun- integration was really more about trying dreds of users all trying to collaborate to address capabilities that we felt we and have automation running, producing didn’t already have good coverage on. the deliverables downstream. We will get [ProjectWise] has the best design intethere, but this is our first launch into this gration of any collaboration software for space and we are really trying to address infrastructure design right now, so we the less complex side of the market, or the didn’t really see that as a critical first step side of the market where you’re not actu- for us to address. What we really wanted ally a designer, maybe you’re a stakehold- to address was the people who were not er, you’re a viewer, you’re a QA/QC per- doing the heavyweight design, but the son, you’re a contractor who needs to be broader ecosystem that need to particiinvolved with RFIs and construction cor- pate in that information [workflow], to be respondence — everything but the actual able to collaborate without any toolset. hardcore physical design in a complex Being 100% web, whether 2D or 3D, and multi-discipline environment. just making that information accessible

through a browser, through your phone, to capture that into the review system to DP: It’s $60 per quarter, but right now through your tablet. That was kind of like actually capture measurements and con- we are waiving all subscription fees until the critical first step that we wanted to versations within the context of the proj- September 30th to help out during the attack first. ect, for QA/QC types of processes. Covid-19 pandemic. So $60 per quarter AEC: Does ProjectWise 365 have any AEC: Can subcontractors and supply particular features for civil, architectural chain firms use ProjectWise 365 to be AEC: Any constraints on web space? or structural? per person. DP: It does have some specific civil features for doing design reviews, particular‘‘ We really wanted to address the people who were not doing the heavyweight design, but the DP: Right now, we don’t have a constraint on it, so you have unlimited at the moment. ly the ability to deal with broader ecosystem that needs to participate in alignments and profiles and offsets for civil-based 3D digital twin models — that information workflow to be able to collaborate without any toolset AEC: And how do people get on board with ProjectWise 365? so a lot of the station offset measurements, a lot of things that you would expect to have in a integrated into my full ProjectWise doc ’’ DP: We have made it available to all of our partners to resell and we linear type of model. umentation system? do our own direct sales. We’re working

For example, if it’s a railway system or with Microsoft now to have ProjectWise a rail track system or if it’s a road — any- DP: Absolutely. 365 available on the Microsoft Store thing that’s linear, pipelines, any of that because it is an MS Azure based product. type of stuff — it has capabilities for that, AEC: What’s the price? ■ bentley.com

Bentley Systems - trends during Covid-19 lockdown

AEC: What trends have you seen happening with Covid-19 and people working from home needing to access work data?

Dustin Parkman: What we’ve seen is the organisations that already had ProjectWise and had good global distribution usage of it, we really haven’t seen much of a change.

For the most part, all of those organisations already had a good data policy, they already had good cloud strategies in place and were already working as a global unit. People were on the road a lot so they already had good work from home or good mobile work processes in place, and they already had good data management with ProjectWise, so we didn’t really see their productivity decline too much.

Where we saw probably the largest aspects of decline [software usage], where we saw organisations and geographies get caught a bit flat footed, was particularly in the government space. A lot of geographies around the world did not have a good work from home policy, they did not have a good data sovereignty policy for people working from home. They didn’t have the hardware required in some cases, particularly for graphically intense BIM applications. That was pretty consistent across all government sectors globally — obviously, there were some that were better prepared than others

There were some particular countries that did not have a good work from home policy, even at a labour law perspective. Countries like India, China and a few others, they kind of struggled as well because they had to very quickly create a culture of working from home and because there was already a culture of not working at home they also had the same issues with hardware and bandwidth and things like that.

Now we’re starting to see them kind of emerge, getting their data policy and hardware in place. They’re establishing not only federal and provincial policy, but each organisation is creating their own policies. The encouraging part is, because of the situation, everybody’s figured it out pretty quickly. They had to, in order to survive.

AEC: With Covid-19, have you seen more people up for a more open cloud?

DP: I think most organisations in our space had a hybrid approach. Some of the larger ENR top 50 organisations they were ahead of the game and had already moved mostly of everything to the cloud already. But once you get past that, most firms had a hybrid model and you still get a lot of countries where there are very specific guidelines around data sovereignty. It can’t be a Microsoft Cloud, it can’t be an AWS cloud, it has to be some regional cloud provider.

I think this is, without a doubt, going to be a catalyst to get 100% to the cloud. Most people realise they were not prepared for this from a cloud infrastructure standpoint and it introduced all kinds of challenges in their data offices.

AEC: Have you had any customers that are looking into cloud workstations, so the data is in the cloud, the workstations are in the cloud, and they’re just streaming pixels?

DP: Yeah, we have, we’ve seen a fair amount of that, particularly in areas where it was going to be an issue to get all the hardware. India is a case in point where you know that entire workforce, for the most part, wasn’t ready to work from home — bandwidth issues, most of them did not have the intense graphical hardware they needed with GPUs to do graphical web and BIM.

So the quickest way for us to actually accommodate those users – I’m speaking for Bentley – was to actually use the cloud-based virtual machines to do all that and just stream it through that. So we quickly reacted to a few different primary providers of that – Citrix XenApp being one platform, Microsoft Azure virtualisation platform, and then Frame being the other one.

AEC: Presumably, as a company, you’ve had to be more flexible with licencing?

DP: Yes, it’s been mostly on a one by one basis. What we had in the early days was users trying to use their home computers to do work. And so immediately, a lot of organisations said, ‘please stop that. You know, we’re afraid we’re going to get invoiced and overcharged for new licences and things like that.’

And so we reached out and said ‘hey, during this time of need, don’t worry about that. Later on you’ll need to get it sorted out, but as long as the total usage kind of feels within the same ballpark [it’s OK].’