New Versions of Newforma Project Center and Autodesk Design Review

Following last month's relatively unusual book review of the "BIM Handbook," AECbytes returns back to product reviews this month. We start off with a look at the new version of Newforma Project Center, the unique project information management and collaboration application specifically developed for the AEC market. In the short span of four years after launch, the application has gained over 20,000 users in over 200 companies, 60% of which have deployed it enterprise-wide. We will explore the new features in Newforma Project Center Fifth Edition, including the enhanced features for project monitoring, new support for RFIs and contract administration, greatly expanded collaboration capabilities with external team members, and improved email management with automated email filing capability. We will also take a step back and see if the increasingly complex business of project management can be at all simplified with BIM.

The other product review scheduled for this month is Autodesk Design Review 2009, the free tool for team members to view, print, measure, mark up, and revise 2D and 3D designs that tightly integrates with all Autodesk design software. Based on Autodesk's DWF format, Autodesk Design Review has gained a lot of momentum and is being downloaded over 200,000 times per month.

Also on the agenda is a contributed article entitled "Organizing the Development of a Building Information Model" by Jim Bedrick, Vice President, Virtual Building and Design at Webcor Builders. It describes the work on a Model Progression Specification (MPS) that Webcor Builders starting working on in 2004 in collaboration with VICO Software. This was subsequently expanded to include the viewpoints of architects, contractors, engineers, subcontractors, owners, and software developers, and has now been incorporated by the AIA National Documents Committee into a new E202, an exhibit which formalizes the processes for development and use of BIMs for a specific project.

The Tips and Tricks section this month features two tutorials: one on choosing color themes with Adobe's Kuler and Live Color applications, and an exercise on how to use various options of the Intersect tool in SketchUp.

Thank you for your interest, and do continue to check out both the AECbytes Blog for reader comments and the VendorHub to get information about the technology providers in AEC.

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > September 2008