Updates on BIM developments and Review of Newforma Project Center v8 (Project Management, Document Management, Project Collaboration)

Dr. Lachmi Khemlani, Ph.D.
(Founder and Editor, AECbytes.com) has authored two recent articles that might be of interest to reprographers who are following developments in “BIM” and who offer, or are thinking about offering, software and services related to “project management, document management and project collaboration.”

I’m going to show the titles of the two articles, along with a few of the sentences contained in those articles. At the end of each article mentioned, I’ve provided a click-on-link so you can access the complete articles.

First article:

“More on the BIMForum Event and a Review of Vectorworks Architect 2011”

“Last month, AECbytes published the first of a two-part series that provided an overview of the AGC (Associated General Contractors of America) BIMForum organization and captured the highlights of its recent event, which was held on February 10 and 11 in San Diego, California.

The follow-up article published this month on the BIMForum event discusses additional presentations from AEC firms such as JE Dunn Construction, HNTB Architecture, and PCL Construction Services on using BIM for the design and construction of building envelopes.

Earlier this month, we looked at the newly released Eighth Edition of Newforma Project Center, which features some ground-breaking enhancements including BIM integration enabled by a Revit add-in, additional add-ins for contract management and mobile access, and several improvements to the core application for document control, contract administration, and project collaboration.”

Link to article:

http://www.aecbytes.com/

Second article:

“Newforma Project Center Eighth Edition”

“The recently released Eighth Edition of Newforma’s PIM (project information management) solution, Newforma Project Center, finally includes the BIM integration I have been looking for in this application since I first reviewed in August 2007. This integration is currently available only for Autodesk Revit and does not extend to other BIM applications, so those hoping to use Newforma Project Center (NPC) to manage BIM data on other platforms are going to be disappointed. But for those using Revit, which is still the leading BIM application in the AEC industry, the ability to extend NPC’s project information management capabilities to also manage model data promises to be extremely helpful.

In addition to the Revit integration, which is available through a separate Newforma add-in, the Eighth Edition of NPC features several enhancements to the core application including new document control capabilities, the ability to record actionable meeting minutes for a project, improved remote access for external collaboration, support for the iPad, and a new activity center for project images such as site photos and renderings. There are also two other separate add-on products in this release: one is focused on contract management tasks, while the other is a new mobile application that provides access to NPC data from smartphones.”

Link to article:

http://www.aecbytes.com/review/2011/NewformaProjectCenter8.html