Autodesk's AEC Technology Day and a Viewpoint on Collaboration

Last month, we looked at the highlights of Autodesk’s 2011 product portfolio launch webcast, which summarized the main enhancements in the 2011 versions of AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, and 3ds Max but did not cover any of any of the products in depth. Earlier this month, Autodesk hosted a separate AEC Technology Day for selected media professionals and analysts to provide a more detailed overview of its 2011 AEC Solutions portfolio. This all-day event was hosted at the new Autodesk AEC headquarters at Trapelo Road in Waltham, MA, which also provided us with the opportunity to see and experience firsthand this much-publicized BIM/IPD/LEED-Platinum-certified project. The event also included two customer presentations providing the opportunity to learn more about the use of various Autodesk solutions in practice. The highlights of this AEC Technology Day—the first ever planned by Autodesk—are captured in this month's issue of the AECbytes Building the Future series.

This is followed by a Tips and Tricks article that takes an indepth look at the user interface of the newly released Revit Architecture 2011. Recall that in the 2010 release of Revit, the traditional UI of toolbars, menus and design bar was replaced by a ribbon-based UI, which created quite a stir among many seasoned Revit users. Many have managed to get used to the new UI, similar to the transition most had gone through with Microsoft Office 2007. With the 2011 release of Revit, Autodesk has made many improvements to the UI, many of which are undoubtedly in response to user feedback. This Tips and Tricks article highlights the changes made to the 2011 UI in comparison to the previous release.

Rounding up the offerings for this month is a Viewpoint article entitled "Collaborating in the New AEC World" authored by Al Douglas, President of A.D Douglas Associates, a private consulting firm in Kanata, Ontario Canada. It's clear that the AEC industry is undergoing technological and methodological changes like never before, and the main vehicles delivering this change are BIM, IPD and a developing open standard called COBie. This article zeroes in on an important component that is required to make all of these effective—content management and the collaborative role it plays in the lifecycle of a building.

As always, please continue to check out the AECbytes Blog for reader comments and the VendorHub to get a consolidated view of all the technology providers in AEC.

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > April 2010