IMAGINiT Technologies Releases New Utilities

In an interview with Matt Mason, director of software development at IMAGINiT Technologies division of Rand Worldwide, we discussed the newly released IMAGINIT Utilities for Civil 3D 2016, IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Client 2016 and IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Server 2016, all of which are now compatible with Autodesk 2016 products. There are two new tools in IMAGINiT Utilities for Civil 3D: Pipe Grade and Multi-Part Swap. IMAGINiT is also introducing enhancements to IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Client and IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Server as well as a new tool in IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Server, Vault Command Line.

IMAGINiT Utilities for Civil 3D: Multi-Part Swap

IMAGINiT Utilities for Civil 3D 2016

AECCafe Voice: What will the ultimate cost be of the Utilities for Civil 3D, after the 14-day trial period?
Matt Mason: Standalone License $345, Network License: $995.

IMAGINiT offers a total of five tools in IMAGINiT Utilities for Civil 3D, including the new Pipe Grade and Multi-Part Swap. All applications run directly inside Autodesk Civil 3D and currently help over 1,100 users automate time-consuming, repetitive manual tasks. The two new tools are available for Civil 3D 2016 only.

Civil 3D Multi-Part Swap

Pipe Grade saves time by making it easier to re-adjust the grade or slope of a series of pipes. The tool can hold the invert, centerline or crown as well as deal with drops in structures.

Multi-Part Swap automates repetitive tasks by allowing users to change the Family and Size of many pipes or structures on the network – all with one click.

AECCafe Voice: What are some of the comments made by users of these utilities?
Matt Mason: IMAGINiT customer Site Resources Inc. notes some of the benefits of IMAGINiT’s Utilities for Civil 3D below:

• Import images from Bing/Google allows us to quickly view the site in real world coordinates and scale. This has been very useful during conceptual design.  In addition, this allows us to share the imagery with users of earlier versions of AutoCAD.
• We have been waiting a long time for the ability to swap multiple parts with Civil 3D and now it is here. The time it takes to swap out multiple parts has been reduced by at least 50%.
• The Pipe Grading tool saves us time when we need to change the slope along several lengths of pipe by enabling us to simply select the pipes we want to adjust and defining the slope.

AECCafe Voice: As the two new tools are only available for Civil 3D 2016, what will users of previous versions of Civil 3D be doing as far as workflow to get these tasks accomplished?

Pipe Grading

Matt Mason: These will still be painful manual processes in Civil3D prior to 2016 (click each of 500 items, change, next, etc) – or do your own calculations in a spreadsheet and transfer them painstakingly to each pipe.

In general, we rarely go backwards and add more features to a previous version of our utilities. In some cases, it is only when the Civil3D API opens up further in a new release that we are even able to make certain utilities possible.

IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Client

AECCafe Voice: Will the enhancements for 2016 include options for 3D PDFs as well?

Matt Mason: Not at this time.

AECCafe Voice: When you say that this service is free to customers who purchased Autodesk Maintenance or Subscription through IMAGINiT, what will the cost be for those who do not purchase it through you?

Matt Mason: Standalone $395, Network $995.

AECCafe Voice: What sort of workflow will those customers who do not upgrade yet to 2016 be relegated to?
Matt Mason: In general, there are still manual workflows to be done to send out notifications of lifecycle changes. Some of our enhancements have more impact on the IT organization as well (the ability to process tasks on a central job processor, rather than on each individual workstation).

 IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Server

AECCafe Voice: What do you think will pique the interest of the users of the previous software to possible upgrade to 2016 in order to use these enhancements and tool?
Matt Mason: It is more likely they will move to the new version of Vault for other compelling reasons, over time. When they arrive, they’ll find some improved features from us.

AECCafe Voice: What is the most important new feature of the Utilities for Vault Server?
Matt Mason: From an IT perspective, bringing automated defragmentation to the Vault database will keep performance from degrading over time. But I think the interesting one is the new Vault Command Line tools, which makes automating certain IT workflows like publishing files, releasing models and other tasks much more approachable by IT staff.

AECCafe Voice: Can you give an example of what kinds of security tasks users might be using this utility for?
Matt Mason: For larger firms, it is not uncommon that a couple times a year they must audit themselves and their systems to ensure that their security settings and assigned permissions are still appropriate. This is necessary for a wide range of regulations (from Sarbanes-Oxley to other certifications). This was a long and painstaking process to do manually, user-by-user and folder-by-folder within Autodesk Vault.

The reports that we produce have been used to document compliance with company requirements.

Tags: AEC, architects, architecture, Autodesk, Autodesk Revit, Bentley Systems, BIM, building design, building information modeling, CAD, Civil 3D, collaboration, construction, design, engineering, IMAGINiT Technologies, Revit

Categories: 2D, 3D, 3D PDF, AEC, AECCafe, AIA Convention 2015, architecture, Autodesk, BIM, building information modeling, collaboration, construction, engineering, IMAGINiT, infrastructure, plant design, project management, sustainable design

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