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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.
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 prod-
ucts 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 map-
ping, to modeling buildings, roads, mines,
plant and rail.
With so many products, the firm offers
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by Martyn Day
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 inter-
face is the same and all the data can be
managed through ProjectWise, again a con-
sistent interface for project documentation.
Connect Edition
The latest generation of MicroStation-
based platform products are called the
Connect Edition, taking over from the pre-
vious 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
Feature
is to enable a project-centric hybrid envi-
ronment across desktop, cloud, project-
server and mobile. To enable this, Bentley
has utilised Microsoft’s Azure cloud-ser-
vice to connect all users across projects.
Azure also provides a computational back-
bone to provide lightning fast analysis and
‘optioneering’, for computationally refined
designs and ultimately improved perfor-
mance 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 partici-
pant’s role.
These project-specific workspaces can
include cloud-provisioned software or
content, such as catalogs of what Bentley
calls ‘functional components’ and speci-
fications.
Functional Components are a new capa-
bility unleashed with MicroStation
The core premise of the Connect
Edition is to enable a project-
centric hybrid environment
July / August 2015 27
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Bentley Navigator Connect
Edition is an entry point into
the Bentley world
Connect and comes with a suite of con-
straint tools that allow users to capture
design intent and create parametric ‘func-
tional components’ for use in designs. The
new ProjectWise Catalog Service provides
a way to manage and distribute these in
house components to all project partici-
pants via the cloud.
A Bentley Connections Passport pro-
vides authenticated access to ProjectWise
and AssetWise services and software
spanning a user’s hybrid computing envi-
ronment. For example, the Bentley
Navigator Connect Edition provides a user
with the same immersive “hands-on”
interface across Windows, Android, and
iOS, wherever they are.
Documentation Center is a new capabili-
ty that allows team members to aggregate,
publish and share, consistent and combined
deliverables across multiple disciplines.
ProjectWise Deliverables Management
provides an “instant-on” cloud service for
the management of transmittals, submit-
tals, and RFIs. Backing this up, ProjectWise
Transformation Service manages automat-
ed publishing and workflow-driven deliv-
ery of i-models and standardised content to
project and field workers.
Navigator
One of the products that Bentley was very
keen for early adopters to use was the new
Bentley Navigator Connect Edition, as it is
an entry point into the Bentley world and
for a relatively small amount per year pro-
vides some very useful capabilities, such
as i-model viewing, clash detection and
punch lists, features that many other firms
charge thousands for.
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Acute3D
Back in February, Bentley acquired
Acute3D and its software Smart3DCapture,
which automates the generation of 3D
models from high resolution photographs.
These can be taken by mobile phones to
DSLRs being flown around sites by
drones. Acute3D makes it possible to fly
over a city in a morning and have very
accurate 3D geo-referenced mesh in
MicroStation in the afternoon, with mini-
mal intervention from the user. It is also
possible to augment initial datasets with
more close-ups and therefore get millime-
tre accuracy on buildings of interest.
With the boom of Unmanned Aerial
Vehicle (UAV) usage, site surveying is set
to undergo a radical revolution, before,
during and after construction. Greg
Bentley said recently: “You can fast for-
ward to when every engineering project
will have a UAV operator on site. Up to
now Acute3D has mainly worked on city-
scale mapping using images from aircraft.
But all of us can see how UAVs are going
to make this applicable to site-scale.”
Bentley has not taken long to integrate
the technology into the MicroStation
Connect platform and the company is
already using it to map at the city scale for
several high profile uses.
ProjectWise on demand
One of the most interesting solutions
launched recently has been ProjectWise
Essentials, which is Bentley’s popular
design management tool, cloud-based and
leased by the quarter and designed for
smaller firms (up to 40 seats).
Access is immediate and users get to
choose from a number of best practice
templates, following standards, to
streamline workflows and connect team
members. ProjectWise Essentials pro-
vides version control, change manage-
ment, document relationship creation,
search and distribution. It comes with
free Bentley Connections Passport access
to the Bentley range of mobile solutions.
Access is secure and data can be accessed
on or offline. This opens up the tool for
those not in the Bentley ecosystem but
looking for industry proven management
and remote access solutions.
Conclusion
Bentley’s Connect Edition builds on all the
work that the company has been doing
since its inception in 1984. Despite the
front end and the file format not changing
all that much everything in the back-
ground has been re-written, re-worked, re-
wired and turbo charged, against project
road-maps that are longer than anyone
else’s in the business.
To go for over 30 years and change the
file format only twice, while delivering on-
going subscription-based upgrades and
several new generations of code is
astounding.
The naming conventions can get confus-
ing but it is best to think of Bentley’s port-
folio as a platform-based modular system
that can be configured and enhanced on
demand. Connect Edition is not just about
integrating the cloud but regimenting
projects as collaboration spaces and ensur-
ing that the right information is available
everywhere at the same time.
■ bentley.com
July / August 2015 29