IMAGINiT Clarity 2021.1 Release Addresses Real World Work-From-Home and Security Challenges

More customers working remotely coupled with increased frequency in cyberthreats over 2020 has spurred the release of IMAGINiT Technologies Clarity 2021.1 suite of products including new security features.

The task list of BIM project managers has grown, but with Clarity they have  greater control with task creation and automation, can access more insights through smart data and model reporting, and can engage disparate teams while ensuring the model data remains secure.

Matt Mason, technical support specialist at IMAGINiT Technologies, spoke with AECCafe Voice about the adoption rate of Clarity over the past year, as well as the new features that have  fueled user demand.

To note the primary enhancements, from company materials:

Enhanced security advancements include:

• Secure Project Visibility enables Clarity administrators to limit unauthorized team members from seeing projects marked as “secure”.
• File Browse Restrictions & Helpers ensure that individual users do not automatically gain greater access to browse network files by limiting the ability to cut and paste network paths and replacing exact server paths with generic drive names.
• Post Task Action Security gives administrators more control over the launching of scripts.
• Disaster Recovery is made simple with timed back-ups explicitly designed for companies without dedicated IT teams running the full SQL Server. 

How has the adoption of Clarity grown since last year? 

Matt Mason: In terms of number of firms using Clarity, we’ve grown about 30%.
But we’ve grown about 45% in terms of number of projects that are using Clarity. The biggest driver of the project growth is the pandemic, and firms leveraging BIM360 to be able to work remotely.

What new features and how did they come about? User input, etc?

Matt Mason: For the most part, we’re driven by our most vocal and thoughtful customers. They’re always clear on what kind of pains that they have, and what they think Clarity can help them with. Beyond that, in a few cases we’ve invested in ideas that we thought would help customers get more out of Clarity.

In the past year, we’ve focused on improvements in:

• Integrations (such as Google Drive, Procore, BIMTrack, and more)
• Security – giving firms more tools to manage the security of projects and tasks
• Health Metrics – more features for how to identify problem models and problem projects
• Data – exposing more information that we’re able to extract from Revit and make available in tools like Microsoft PowerBI or Tableau.

How has putting all four platforms of Construction Cloud in one place changed client usage or adoption?

Matt Mason: I don’t think we’ve seen the impact of it just yet, but we definitely feel that there will be an impact over a longer timeframe.

What do you feel are the most significant features of the new Clarity release?

Matt Mason:  It’s hard to pick a small number – it feels like each firm has a diverse set of priorities. In one case, it’s the ability to easily migrate data between different BIM360 Hubs and Projects. In other cases, it’s making Revit data available to power users in PowerBI. Sometimes it’s as simple as being able to make PDFs faster than before, with our PDF-Xchange integration.

How much of what is new in Clarity responds to the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of safety, etc.?

Matt Mason: The usage of BIM360 within firms that we work with has massively expanded. That has outshadowed many other aspects. The one other area which is notable coincides with more employees working remotely, but also the rise of cybercrime – in some cases, we’ve needed to tighten up how Clarity runs within the enterprise environment. In other cases, we’ve provided tools to help administrators have better visibility of how employees are working with Revit when everyone is remote.

In the beginning of last year, we saw many of our customers quickly migrate a large percentage of their active projects from on-premise to BIM360. We supplied tools inside of Clarity to assist with that migration process.

This was a massive effort on the part of BIM Coordinators to get active projects migrated into an environment where employees could work-from-home with good collaboration performance.

The other trend that we saw was an increase in cybercrime/ransomware. Several of our customers were hit by attacks, and we ourselves had a minor attack. In the wake of those kinds of events, companies were looking to tighten up security. The focus was on having more restrictive environments for what users were allowed to do- both interactively and in a batch mode. A number of Clarity features came out of those requests, both to restrict features as well as be able to run Clarity in a more “secure sandbox” environment.

What do you see going forward for future releases, and ability for people to do more work outside the office?

Matt Mason: We feel that working remotely is going to remain common for the coming years, so our efforts are all around making Clarity better integrated with the BIM360 / Autodesk Construction Cloud infrastructure.

Tags: 3D, AEC, architects, architecture, Autodesk, Autodesk Revit, BIM, building design, building information modeling, CAD, Cloud, collaboration, construction, covid-19, digital twin, engineering, facilities management, generative design, infrastructure, Open BIM, reality capture, visualization

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