BE Conference 2005: Bentley's Annual User Event

This issue of the AECbytes newsletter captures the highlights of Bentley's annual user conference, which is currently being wrapped up at the Baltimore Convention Center, where it commenced on May 8. Named after the BE ("Bentley Empowered") brand launched last year, this year's conference drew a crowd of over 2000. Starting with the development of a basic CAD application close to 20 year ago, Bentley Systems has grown to become one of the leading software providers for infrastructure design. It has a broad-ranging array of products, which it categorizes into four verticals: Building (buildings and facilities), Civil (road, rail, and site infrastructure), Geospatial (communications, government, and utilities), and Plant (industrial and process plants). All these vertical solutions are based on its two main platform products: the desktop-based design application, MicroStation, and the server-based collaboration and management application, ProjectWise. The BE conference typically devotes a day to keynotes and general sessions related to the platform products for all attendees, while subsequent days are devoted to more discipline-specific sessions. Since AECbytes is targeted towards the building industry, I will focus the discussion of the BE 2005 conference primarily on Bentley's Building vertical and the platform products on which these are based.

To compare notes with last year's BE conference, see AECbytes Newsletter #9. While the attendance number at BE 2005 was similar to that of last year, the representation from the Building vertical grew by more than 50% to a total of 26%, indicating a dramatically increased interest in Bentley's solutions for the building industry.

The Upcoming V8 XM Edition

Recall that Bentley unveiled the V8 2004 Edition of its product family at last year's BE conference, which continued to build upon the V8 generation launched three years ago that featured a revamped DGN file format, integration of design history, the ability to work directly with DWG files without translation, and many other enhancements. At BE 2005, Bentley announced the next version of its product family, the V8 XM Edition. (XM, by the way, doesn't really stand for something, although the host of the user awards ceremony did present a whole spoof at the event based on his perceived interpretation of XM as Extreme Makeover!) As with the previous release, the V8 XM Edition continues to be based on the V8 generation, but is a substantial enough update to qualify it as the "second half of the V8 generation," according to Bentley. It is expected to be commercially released later this year.

The focus of the V8 XM Edition of MicroStation is to continue to enhance the capabilities of the application while making the interface simpler to use. It features better graphics with real-time interactive shading, allowing users to work directly in shaded views rather than working in line views and periodically shading them to better visualize the design. All design elements and user interface components such as dialogs can now be set to a desired level of transparency, which can help to reclaim valuable screen space. A new interface feature called Task Modeling has been introduced, which dynamically displays only a subset of the tools and standards that are relevant to the task that is being performed. The navigation capability has been improved in Bentley Navigator, allowing better review of the design in 3D. Modifying the center of interest in a view is also a lot quicker now. Other features that are designed to improve speed and efficiency include element templates, cursor menus, and keyboard mapping. It is now possible to directly link an element in a MicroStation drawing to the particular sub-section in a Word document which describes its specifications, and this link is retained even when a PDF document is created from that set of drawings, Word documents, and other files. This allows integrated project deliverables to be created that are hyperlinked for easy browsing.

The V8 XM Edition of ProjectWise also has several enhancements. For a start, it allows project data, documents, and resources to be organized so that access control, security, and workspace settings can be controlled on a project basis, which will make the management of multiple projects easier. It also integrates with Microsoft SharePoint, which allows firms to see all their project-related information on their websites along with information from their other enterprise systems. The "killer new feature," however, is Distributed Work Files, which allows a shared file to be simultaneously edited by multiple users and merges their changes when they are posted back to the master copy. This enables concurrent workflows to proceed with an ease and efficiency that was not possible before.

While highlighting the individual features of the new release, Bentley also continued to emphasize the importance of its single platform, comprising of MicroStation and ProjectWise, for all tasks including 2D drawing and 3D modeling, all the vertical disciplinary tools, all workflows, and all file formats. The analogy given was that of a home theatre system, for which users can mix and match different components as desired, and which work together because they all have standard interfaces for input and output.

Building-Specific Product Announcements

All the improvements in the V8 XM Edition of MicroStation and ProjectWise will naturally find their way into each of Bentley's discipline-specific building applications. In addition, each application also features some improvements of its own. For Bentley Structural, the big news is the upcoming integration with RAM's structural analysis applications, adding to the already substantial list of structural analysis tools that work with it. The application formerly known as Bentley HVAC will now include plumbing design capabilities as well, and is being renamed to Bentley Mechanical Systems. A whole new application is being introduced for electrical system design and management, called Bentley Building Electrical Systems, and it includes bidirectional interfaces to a variety of industry-standard power engineering and lighting design and analysis programs. Another new product announcement was a low-cost Power/Civil application for the site design of building projects. Integration between all the individual disciplinary applications has also been improved in various ways, for instance, Bentley Facilities now supports the spaces created in Bentley Architecture. Thus, the Bentley Building suite now covers the entire range of architectural and engineering tasks, making it a comprehensive multi-disciplinary BIM solution for the building industry.

One of the most challenging aspects of BIM that hasn't really emerged to the forefront yet but will soon do so is that of content creation and distribution. Bentley has made a start on this by working with some product manufacturers to develop and deploy their content online. It is tackling the distribution problem with a new web-drop capability, which allows design content posted online to dragged and dropped directly into the project file for use.

GenerativeComponents, one of Bentley's key research initiatives in its Building vertical, was again the focus of a day-long research seminar at BE 2005. This technology automatically generates design elements and forms in MicroStation based on certain specified criteria, thereby making the computer a more active design medium rather than simply an efficient means of drawing production. It allows the logic of a design to be captured, which in turn can then be used to change the model more quickly and conveniently. It can be thought of as parametric technology specifically for the creation of freeform shapes. While the discussion at last year's conference centered primarily on describing the technology, the focus this year was on presenting more examples showing it is being used professionally by leading design firms and educational institutions for advanced architectural exploration and building engineering. More information about GenerativeComponents is available here. GenerativeComponents is still being used at the advanced beta stage by some early adopter firms in collaboration with Bentley and is not quite close to commercial release yet.

Other Conference Highlights: Tom Peters, Adobe, the BE Awards, and the Exhibit Floor

The key highlight of the BE conference this year was a highly irreverent keynote presentation by Tom Peters, the well-known management guru, who spoke on the subject of "Re-Imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age." While Tom Peters has a doctorate in business from Stanford, he actually has bachelor's and master's degrees in civil engineering. What is even less well known is that he first started out to be an architect before moving on to civil engineering. Thus, he was well qualified to address the BE conference gathering, where he urged the attendees to think beyond simply coming in on budget and instead pursue innovation, creativity, and passion. Other similarly provocative excerpts from his speech included the exhortation to avoid moderation, make big changes to big things instead of small changes to small things, hire crazies, ask dumb questions, ditch your office, and so on—particularly in light of the increased globalization and competitive threat from other countries. And he delivered all this in a very aggressive and charged manner, constantly pacing the floor of the room and talking directly to attendees up close. His highly eccentric and dynamic presentation style and content, peppered with lots of slang, was quite a contrast with the rest of the executive keynotes that were presented in the usual formal manner. A copy of his presentation slides at BE 2005 can be seen here.

The growing importance of PDF and the relationship with Adobe to Bentley was evidenced by the fact that Adobe was invited to present its own keynote at the general session, which is an unusual honor I've rarely seen bestowed at a vendor's user conference. Adobe's VP of Business Development provided an overview of the latest release of Acrobat, 7.0 Professional (see the recent review of this in AECbytes) and the new LiveCycle Policy Server that can expire and revoke documents, maintain accountability by keeping track of who opens protected documents, and so on. The new capability in Acrobat 7.0 to embed, view, and navigate 3D content, which can be exported to it directly from MicroStation, was repeatedly demonstrated and was clearly a hit with the audience, drawing repeated applause. MicroStation users are excited about their ability to create PDF documents that go beyond 2D to also convey some 3D design information to the project team, consultants, clients, and so on. Even regular collaboration has been improved with the ability to bring markups and redlines created in Adobe PDF back into the original MicroStation drawing.

Another important highlight of the conference were the BE Awards of Excellence, presented in an Oscar-like fashion at a special evening dinner ceremony. 225 projects were nominated across Bentley's four vertical industries in several categories. Most of the awards in the Building vertical were based on the use of BIM. The full list of award winners in the different categories can be seen in this Bentley press release. Just like last year, the overall quality of submissions was high, demonstrating sophisticated use of the different Bentley solutions, both individually and in conjunction with each other. What was different this year, however, was the dramatic increase in the number of foreign nominees and award winners—half of the nominees came from outside the US, and they won two-thirds of the awards, indicating the truly international reach of Bentley solutions. Some of the new award categories this year were for student work and educators, which is a great way of encouraging the use of technology in academics. Another new award category was for the use of Adobe PDF, but the criteria for this remained unclear, making it seem more like an additional means to market the Bentley-Adobe partnership rather than honoring any significant professional achievement.

And finally, here's a quick round-up of highlights from the Exhibit Floor, showcasing other vendors' products that work with Bentley solutions. Adobe was at hand, of course, showing Acrobat 7.0 Professional and the new 3D capability in PDF. Axiom, one the largest third party developers for MicroStation, showed its comprehensive productivity toolkit for MicroStation, including a revamped Title Block Manager and a new Retrieve application for capturing, centralizing, and distributing corporate documents, best practices and procedures. AEC CADCON-TecWorks introduced a new add-on tool for MicroStation, LandscapeDesign, which allows the landscape professional to produce rendered plan drawings that appear hand colored. Another new exhibitor was Chinook Systems which demonstrated QuiCx, a web enabled project delivery software that manages the data transition from design to construction, and through to commissioning and into operations and maintenance.

On the hardware front, 3Dlabs showed new graphics accelerators that will be supported by the upcoming version of MicroStation and will allow dynamic real-time rendering; Z Corp showed its next-generation high-definition color 3D printing system; and Vidar demonstrated a cost-effective wide-format scanner that works with any CAD application or printer. Two leading vendors showed both hardware products and software solutions relevant to design. HP showed its next-generation 64-bit personal workstation, the DesignJet 4000 Printer series for color and black-and-white printing up to 42 inches wide, and a Remote Graphics Software utility that allows you to remotely share your graphics workstation desktop with team members on the same network. Océ showed its new TCS400 system that combines color copying, printing, and scanning capabilities, and the Print Exec LT software for managing the printing of wide-format documents in a firm.

Some General Observations

The last BE conference in 2004 was my first visit to a Bentley user conference, and I came away very impressed with the depth and breadth of technological information that was presented. Most of the sessions, including all the keynotes, had intensive discussions of the technological underpinnings of Bentley's platform products and vertical solutions and relatively less marketing content, which I felt respected the intelligence of the attendees. BE 2005 was similar in that respect. The sessions were still laden with a lot of technical content, which made them very informative and quite a challenge to absorb. At the same time, however, there was a definite upsurge in marketing content as well, starting with Adobe's special keynote presentation, in the other keynotes and the discipline-specific sessions, and a constant reiteration of the "You Deserve Better" campaign that Bentley has recently launched against leading competitor Autodesk. As in BE 2004, Bentley executives continued to emphasize their difference in philosophy from Autodesk in issues such as forced retirement of products, open standards and interoperability, the federated data approach as opposed to the single file approach, and the evolutionary approach to technology implementation versus starting over from scratch (for example, MicroStation Triforma versus Revit, PDF versus DWF).

On many of these issues, Bentley certainly deserves to give itself a pat on the back. It never retires its products, and by virtue of having most of its users on a subscription program that automatically ensures them the most up-to-date version, it does not see upgrades as a revenue generating mechanism. New versions are released at their natural development pace, rather than on a forced annual cycle. Bentley also ranks high on the openness and interoperability factor, with an open DGN format, APIs, steadfast support for IFCs, and above all, direct support for more versions of DWG (AutoCAD's native format) than Autodesk itself!

It is in the other two aspects that Bentley's marketing claims are more questionable. While the federated approach to building modeling—where the data is distributed across multiple files rather than contained in a single file—does have the benefits of smaller file sizes and easier collaboration among distributed teams (which, in turn, makes it capable of being used on large, complex buildings), it can also impose some limitations on the application. (See a discussion of this in two older articles on Bentley Architecture: Cadence AEC Tech News #104 and #105.) Both Bentley users and the industry at large would appreciate Bentley's acknowledgement of these limitations and a frank discussion of the tradeoffs of the federated versus the single file approach to BIM.

However, it is in the constant reiteration of the superiority of its "not starting over" philosophy that Bentley is actually starting to lose some credibility. Innovation is critical to progress in any field, and very often, innovation does involve starting to work on a problem from scratch. A good example of this is Google's email application, Gmail, which is very different from the email applications that preceded it, simply because the developers went back to the drawing board and started with a fresh approach. While it is important to continue to develop existing applications, particularly those used on mission-critical work so that existing users are not left high and dry, it is also equally important to develop smarter and more intelligent applications for the future, which may well involve "starting over." Bentley's decision to continue to innovate within the MicroStation platform will certainly be welcomed by its users who have been using it for several years on large and complex projects and want to continue doing so. But to glorify "not starting over" as a virtue is a disservice to the human spirit of innovation, entrepreneurship, and the ability to approach an old problem in a new light. I would certainly hope that at this very moment, some sharp minds are out there figuring how to develop even smarter and more intelligent solutions and standards for building design, construction, and operation than those that are available today.

Going forward, it would be nice to see Bentley acknowledge its strengths as well as the tradeoffs it has chosen to make in developing its solutions. It would certainly be in tune with the openness that is otherwise so commendable in its product offerings.

This wraps up my overview of the BE 2005 conference. It was beyond the scope of this article to describe all the new features that were demonstrated, so watch out for detailed product reviews of Bentley's V8 XM Edition solutions when they are released.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.

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