AEC Technology Strategies 2007 Conference and the new Adobe Acrobat 3D

Last month, I attended ZweigWhite's AEC Technologies Strategies conference that was held in Las Vegas on June 7 and 8. This is an annual information technology event targeted towards business and IT leaders in architecture, engineering, and construction. Since it is not focused on any one specific discipline, it serves as a good avenue to learn about technology issues and implementations across the broader spectrum of the AEC industry. It featured several keynote and concurrent focus sessions on topics ranging from BIM to project management to interoperability, and a closing keynote panel discussion on what clients and building owners want from technology. This issue of the "Building the Future" series captures the highlights of some of the sessions I attended at the AEC Technologies Strategies 2007 conference that yielded new information and insights.

Last year, I reviewed the first version of Adobe Acrobat 3D, the newest addition to the Acrobat product family that extends the visualization, publishing, and collaboration capabilities of the ubiquitous Adobe PDF format from 2D documents and drawings to 3D models. It allows professionals from the AEC and manufacturing industries to publish 3D design information in PDF format and share it for review with any user who has access to the free Adobe Reader software. A new version of the software has just been released that provides direct support for the DWG and DWF file formats, retains object property data in the PDF, provides better compression, and includes some enhancements for viewing and navigating 3D models. We will look at these and other AEC-specific enhancements in the review of Adobe Acrobat 3D Version 8.

Collaborating with Adobe Acrobat 3D Version 3 will be presented in some more detail in a Tips and Tricks article this month, along with a tutorial providing guidelines on how to undertake effective multi-disciplinary collaboration in Revit. And don't forgot to check out the recent activity on the AECbytes Blog to see the comments from other readers and share your own thoughts.

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > July 2007