Welcome to AECWeekly! The release of Autodesk Design Review 2007 has been dubbed a “significant” product release for Autodesk, and replaces DWF Composer. The additional features in the new version address challenges customers are having with collaboration, “specifically dealing with islands of information, various partners and suppliers and other stakeholders with workflows that are often disjointed, costly, complex and not secure,” remarked Jonathan Knowles, Director of Worldwide Market Development for DWF for the Collaboration Solutions Division. Read about this new product in this week's Industry News.
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AECWeekly is a news magazine featuring important industry news profiles, a summary of recently published AEC product and company news, customer wins, and coming events. Brought to you by AECCafe.
AECWeekly examines select top news each week, picks out worthwhile reading from around the web, and special interest items you might not find elsewhere. This issue will feature Industry News, Alliances/Acquisitions/Agreements, Announcements, Contract Awards, Awards, People, New Products, and Upcoming Events.
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Industry News
Autodesk Design Review 2007 Replaces DWF Composer
by Susan Smith
The release of Autodesk Design Review 2007 has been dubbed a “significant” product release for Autodesk, and replaces DWF Composer. The additional features in the new version address challenges customers are having with collaboration, “specifically dealing with islands of information, various partners and suppliers and other stakeholders with workflows that are often disjointed, costly, complex and not secure,” remarked Jonathan Knowles, Director of Worldwide Market Development for DWF for the Collaboration Solutions Division. This division is responsible for platform technologies specifically around collaboration and collaborative project management for each of the other divisions.
For many organizations, not only is the information complex but the workflows are iterative, dealing with CAD and non-CAD users, spending a lot of money moving paper around inefficiently via courier or FEDEX. They are concerned about protecting their intellectual property, and also increasingly challenged with sharing the design intent, since today CAD tools are capable of delivering more information that simple arcs, lines and circles.
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“Autodesk Design Review 2007 takes advantage of the DWF platform,” said Knowles. “Previous versions of the product were called DWF Composer, so we're changing the name to Autodesk Design Review 2007. Direct customer feedback indicated they wanted to know just what the product does in its name, and they don't need any fancy names.” This product is specifically aimed at design review workflows.
Example: An architect or designer publishes out to DWF from their native application. All Autodesk design applications publish out to DWF. The AE guy decides what information should be published out to that DWF, i.e. what layers and what sheets, so they can control what information is going to go out as well as they're concerned with sharing files in their native file format. “That's their intellectual property and they want to protect it,” Knowles pointed out. “They're also dealing with non-CAD users and are meeting people who are participating in the design review workflow to provide feedback. But those people don't have CAD and never had CAD, yet are critical to the design review workflow process. There's the compression technology built into DWF as well.”
“We've now shared our design intent with the people in our extended team. They now provide their feedback on top of that DWF. We click the button again, and the DWF goes back to the architect/engineer. This step is called roundtripping - the ability to send the information back into the design application, overlay it on the native file and make the changes appropriately in the native application and be able to keep track of the details and exactly what time and date someone made a request, who addressed it, what time and date it was addressed, what changes were made and what changes were not made, and why. All that information is captured, so later on you can go back and look at all the decisions that were made.”
There are generally more people further downstream in the process who need to only access, view, navigate and print, for whom the new version of the DWF Viewer is available.
Knowles said that many customers are now just publishing to DWF instead of sending information via FEDEX. Because it's print ready and ready to be output on large format printers, they can email the DWF content to those who have Design Review or even the DWF Viewer who can then output it on their large format printers. The information is thus moved at the speed of the network and they save money on shipping costs.
“With the introduction of 3D there is more printing going on on large format printers ,” noted Knowles. “And some of our hardware vendors are actually baking support for DWF into the hardware and into the printer itself to enhance that performance.”
Overall, with Design Review, Autodesk addresses other workflow issues. The publishing component is given away free and is integrated into all Autodesk design applications. There are also plug-ins that allow you to create or publish to DWF from competitiors'2D and 3D CAD applications. With this release Autodesk increases its 3D party application support and will continue to make sure non-AutoCAD design applications can publish to DWF appropriately to get them into the workflow as well. You can publish from any Windows application. When you use Autodesk plug-ins for the other CAD applications, you capture more than the geometry.
DWG Viewer and DWG TrueView 2007 are the viewer components. 11 million copies of Viewer have been downloaded to date, and Knowles pointed out that figure doesn't take into account the fact that companies like Siemens downloaded it once and distributed it to thousands of people. “We are at a run rate of one download every six seconds,” he said. “Finally there's the DWF developer toolkit, as DWF is an open published and standards based specification. We make it available without charge, without royalty and without licensing fee, the specification as well as our software libraries that allow other people to create DWF applications.” The first DWF Developers Conference took place at AU 2005 and drew 110 attendees.
New Features
With Design Review 2007 you can now combine 2D and 3D sheets into a single DWF. When you publish from the design application into DWF you take the hyperlink information along as well. You can see all the properties and have the ability to use standard engineering and can also bring in other information such as Excel spreadsheets.
Another new feature is being able to take Excel in and out of the product in tabular form. one of new aspects of product is the way we're handing Excel information now we're able to take Excel in and out of the product in tabular form. You can also do a bill of materials and click on something in the design and then have it highlight in the bill of materials, and vice versa.
Animation is supported in Design Review which can be used for assembly instructions or in PowerPoint or Word files. You can also put DWF inside an HTML document and deliver it over the web using some of the new APIs that are delivered with this release.
Another new feature is the accuracy in the measure tools. While creating DWF images, math instead of DPI is being used so that actual scale and distances are accurate inside Design Review. It will do point to point measurement as well as area measurement for doing this kind of calculation, this differentiates Autodesk from PDF, according to Knowles. (AutoCAD 2007 will have support for output to PDF).
The ability to do cross sectioning is now in Design Review. Using the new turntable tool, you can spin the model around and look at different perspectives. There is a new pull apart tool, allowing you to be able to grab things and to take them out of the model . You can take off a roof, but not change anything, yet it allows you to interrogate and get inside and see what is inside the model.
Summary
Clearly, more products are being designed these days for the non-CAD user. Design Review is “much more like a Microsoft Office tool than a CAD tool,” summarized Knowles. It doesn't take much for non-CAD users to get up and running on this product, in fact they can start using it within minutes. “With a 30 minute intro they are familiar in depth with the product,” Knowles explained. “It was absolutely aimed at the non-CAD user: no command lines, not a lot of CAD terms as they move across the tool tips to figure out what they're doing. Within minutes, people are using the markup tools, within a few more minutes, they're doing more sophisticated things like pull apart and sectioning. Now that 3D is becoming more pervasive, it turns out that non-CAD users just don't think about 3D stuff.” Where they do get a little hung up is on the x,y and z axis, but once they spend a short amount of time on it they know which way x, y and z go.
Design Review 2007 is available for US $199 through Autodesk's reseller channel and at the Autodesk store. Purchase information is available at here.
Alliances/Acquisitions/Agreements
At this inaugural BE Conference in Europe, Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced that it has acquired GEF-RIS AG based in Leimen, Germany. The company provides geographic information system (GIS) solutions used in the design and management of multi-utility infrastructure. Users of its products include E.ON Hanse, swb Bremen, Drewag Dresden, Wien Energie, and EVM Koblenz.
GEF-RIS's sis family of products is led by sisNET, an integrated solution for the design, documentation, and management of electricity, gas, water, and district heating networks. sisNET is built on Bentley's MicroStation and maintains data in commercial spatially oriented databases such as Oracle.
Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced that it has acquired the map publishing and finishing products, including CADscript and MAPscript, from Corporate Montage Pty. Ltd. of Perth, Australia.
Commenting on the acquisition, Styli Camateros, vice president, Bentley Geospatial, said, "Most maps and infrastructure designs are printed at some point, and the ability to produce high-quality printed output is vital. With CADscript and MAPscript, our users will be unconstrained and can express their work through visually creative and often stunning electronic or printed representations."
Informative Graphics Corporation (IGC), a provider of content visualization, secure publishing and collaboration technology, announced its partnership with Seemage, an emerging leader in the Mockup, Visualization and Publishing (MVP) market. Seemage is headquartered in France, with U.S. operations based in Boston and offices in Chicago and Detroit. Seemage provides a portfolio of products and solutions targeted towards mechanical design, specifically for automotive and aerospace industries.
ibruk of Kongsberg, Norway and myVR Software of Oslo, Norway has entered into a strategic partnership agreement to promote the use of interactive high resolution 3D VR models with Internet streaming capabilities for use in ibruk's extensive range of online documentation and training tools.
Announcements
Bentley Systems, Incorporated released its May 2006 Annual Report. The report, which is titled "Empowering Distributed Enterprises for the World's Infrastructure," is available online at www.bentley.com/annualreport.
Primavera Systems, Inc. announced that the South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT) and its leading contractor Tidewater Skanska used Primavera's award-winning project management software to deliver the Cooper River Bridge (formally the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge) in Charleston, South Carolina one year ahead of its originally planned completion date.
Dean Evans & Associates along with Automated Energy and Facilities Management Group, announced the successful integration of the Event Management System (EMS) facility and resource scheduling program with the heating and cooling system at a church campus in Texas via AEFMG's new ThermoNightHawk (TNH) interface. The interface uses room occupancy information from EMS to control thermostats throughout a facility, automatically bringing a room to the desired temperature prior to a scheduled meeting or event and then shifting to a more energy-efficient temperature setting when the room has been vacated. Energy consumption figures at the Texas site show savings of up to 22% ($2000-3000 per month) in a 70,000 square foot facility.
DataDirect Technologies, provider of data connectivity and mainframe integration and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation, and the International Association of Software Architects (IASA), have teamed to produce the Expert Series Architect Tutorials 2006, a four-city event designed to address emerging standards and technologies used to build high-performance software applications. The free seminar series is designed to provide attendees with first-hand knowledge and how-to advice from industry experts skilled at developing modern IT architectures which support advanced application development for critical business systems. www.datadirect.com/architect_tutorials.
Oce, a provider of digital document management and delivery solutions, and the School District of Palm Beach County announced they have enlisted six local published authors to participate in the district's first- ever free summer camp for local 9th and 10th graders interested in becoming authors. Participating authors include Mary Monroe, Max Ruback and four well- known journalists -- Scott Travis, Eliot Kleinberg, Frank Cerabino, and Leslie Gray Streeter.
The purpose of the camp is to improve students' writing skills and provide them with a hands-on understanding of how authors become published. Students will gain insight into the process of writing, editing, and digitally publishing books along with an understanding of real business processes through interactions with published authors.
Contract Awards
Intergraph Corporation announced Dung Quat Refinery, Vietnam's first petroleum refinery, has selected SmartPlant Enterprise as its standard software for management of plant design, maintenance and operations of the plant.
Awards
Avatech Solutions, Inc. announced that Jimi Oladimeji and Brian Tuffin, two of their Autodesk® Authorized Instructors, won Authorized Training Center (ATC®) Regional Instructor Awards from Autodesk. ATC awards are given to the top three trainers in each region, based on hundreds of student evaluations. Tuffin won in the central region and Oladimeji won in the eastern region, each in competition with hundreds of other eligible trainers.
People
Deltek, the provider of enterprise management software for project-focused organizations, announced that Janet Perna has joined Deltek's board of directors.
Ms. Perna is a 30-year veteran of IBM, the world's largest information technology company. Most recently she served as the General Manager of Information Management for the IBM Software Group. Under her leadership, IBM was named the worldwide leader in database management software, and Ms. Perna increased the group's revenue by more than 150 percent. She was also instrumental in IBM's decision to acquire the assets of Informix Software's database business in 2001, which doubled IBM's distributed database business. Ms. Perna has also held several senior positions within IBM's software development and IT management groups during her tenure.
New Products
Bentley Systems, Incorporated released the newest version of its market-leading ProjectWise - a system of collaboration servers that enables distributed enterprises and related organizations to successfully deliver infrastructure projects.
The ProjectWise V8 XM Edition provides powerful new tools specifically for organizations running a portfolio of projects, including:
-- A project framework offering capabilities to find and reuse content across projects
-- Standards management tools that increase the quality and consistency of work on all MicroStation- or AutoCAD-based projects
-- Load balancing and clustering for scaling the solution to a portfolio of projects and optimizing performance across a distributed enterprise
Sage Software announced the availability of the Peachtree by Sage 2007 product line, which includes the new version of Peachtree by Sage Premium Accounting for Construction. The latest release includes a new navigation interface, faster access to key information for easier day-to-day operational management and improvements for even simpler set up.
Sage Software announced the availability of Sage Timberline Office 9.3, the newest version of its award-winning, integrated financial and operations software for the construction and real estate industries. Sage Timberline Office 9.3 includes many new features to significantly reduce implementation time, and provides enhancements that improve the efficiency of daily operations for users.
Autodesk, Inc. is introducing Autodesk Civil 3D 2007 Extension for Google Earth-Technology Preview. This publishing utility -- the first of its kind -- is designed specifically for civil engineers and surveyors who need to keep all constituents involved in a project, from the planning stages through public approval, apprised of the latest design information. With a wizard-driven interface, engineers and surveyors can rapidly publish Civil 3D objects and design data in Google Earth, allowing all project constituents to create, manage and share design projects with extended teams and enhance the materials they publish with rich and interactive context.
Kubotek(R) USA announced the immediate availability of its third major release of Kubotek Spectrum(TM), a free downloadable software tool designed to provide quick access to design data stored in the most popular computer-aided design (CAD) formats, including AutoCAD, CADKEY, CATIA, Inventor, KeyCreator, Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks, UGS NX and more. Several new file formats have been added to this new release, plus ease of use and view manipulation enhancements.
Upcoming Events
| 15th US National Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, USNCTAM '06 | |
| Date: | June 25 - 30, 2006 |
| Place: | University of Colorado at Boulder
Boulder, CO USA |
| USNCTAM'06 will last six days, from Sunday, 25 June through Friday, 30 June 2006. As seen in the table below, administrative sessions will be scheduled on Sunday afternoon and the first two weekday evenings. A Congress registration period and welcoming reception will be held on Sunday evening. Four weekday mornings will begin with a plenary session. Technical sessions will be held all five weekdays, with a free afternoon on Wednesday. |
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| Triennial Conference - Safety, Security and Sustainability: Can engineers rise to the global challenge? | |
| Date: | July 3 - 4, 2006 |
| Place: | London, United Kingdom |
| The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers (CSCE) and ASCE are hosting the Triennial Confrence in London July 3-4, 2006.
Solving global problems requires civil engineers to work in partnership crossing disciplines to ensure that key decision-makers take a global view of sustainability issues and enable global solutions. This conference will contribute to the growing scientific and political debate surrounding global warming. |
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| Science Buildings Canada 2006 | |
| Date: | July 17 - 18, 2006 |
| Place: | Vancouver, Canada |
A host of new Canadian research buildings and science teaching facilities (recently completed, and nearly completed) demonstrate innovative, cost-effective solutions for a broad spectrum of growing and fast-changing science programs. Specifically, they reveal how scientific vision, design concepts, and building operations plans are shaping decisions on:
Attend this conference to get ahead of the planning curve for your next major science building project, facility renovation program, or facilities management initiative. Please note: All conference proceedings will be conducted in English. |
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| 2006 CACE Annual Meeting | |
| Date: | July 17 - 21, 2006 |
| Place: | The Monona Terrace Convention Center
Madison, OH USA |
| This meeting will be one of many opportunities for both new and seasoned executives to learn from one another. The blend of activities includes thought-provoking presentations by members of the AIA family and sessions on effective component programs and activities, and a celebration of the achievements of our colleagues.
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| DesignDC 2006 | |
| Date: | July 19 - 21, 2006 |
| Place: | Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
Washington, DC USA |
| Experience design in the Nation’s Capital. DesignDC is Washington’s premier event for Metro area architects, designers, engineers and contractors. Learn about the latest tools, trends and technology to give your design business the competitive edge.
Produced by the Washington Chapter/AIA and Potomac Valley AIA, this conference and expo is specifically tailored toward helping design industry professionals fulfill continuing education requirements, network with colleagues, and meet vendors who can make your job easier and more productive. |
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| Workshop for the 2006 Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities | |
| Date: | July 20 - 21, 2006 |
| Place: | Hotel Allegro
Chicago, IL USA |
| Designed for architects, engineers, facility managers, project managers, and contractors, this two-day program reviews codes and standards for health care facilities, including changes and new material in Guidelines 2006, and features a lecture format with open forums and question-and-answer sessions.
At the conclusion of the program, attendees will be able to: - Explain the underlying intent and current interpretation of existing and newly revised text in the Guidelines - Identify, locate, and use the information relevant to your health facility project quickly and easily - Discuss how your state applies the Guidelines - Determine how the new Guidelines will affect the design and construction of specialized patient care areas |
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You can find the full AECCafe.com event calendar here.
To read more news, click here.
-- Susan Smith, AECCafe.com Managing Editor.