To BE or not to BE: Bentley's 2004 User Conference

In This Issue:

• Bentley's V8 2004 Edition
• Generative Components and Parametric Cells
• Future Directions: Web Services, .Net, PDF/E, and 3DIF
• Other Conference Highlights
• Overall Impressions

Earlier this week, over 2000 Bentley loyalists congregated in Orlando for the company's annual user conference, which included training courses and technology updates, keynote presentations by Bentley executives, and the annual user awards showcasing the work done with Bentley solutions. 2004 marks the launch of the Bentley's BE brand—an Intel-esque acronym for "Bentley Empowered"—and is now being used by Bentley for its user conference as well as its annual awards, newsletter, and magazine. Formerly called the Bentley International User Conference, this year's event was simply and succinctly named the BE Conference. This issue of the AECbytes newsletter is devoted to capturing the highlights of the conference and my overall impressions about it.

Bentley Systems Inc. has software solutions in four main vertical industries, all related to the development of infrastructure: Building (buildings and facilities), Civil (road, rail, and site infrastructure), Geospatial (communications, government, and utilities), and Plant (industrial and process plants). Since this publication is focused on the AEC industry, I will focus the discussion of the conference primarily on Bentley's Building vertical, and the platform products on which all its vertical solutions are based, MicroStation and ProjectWise.

Bentley's V8 2004 Edition

The BE conference marked the launch of the next release of Bentley's product family, which continues to build upon its V8 generation that was launched two years ago, and is referred to as the V8 2004 Edition. V8 represented a generational change for the Bentley product line with a revamped DGN file format, integration of design history, the ability to work directly with DWG files without translation, and many other enhancements. (See my review of MicroStation V8 in the July 2002 issue of Cadence magazine.) Upcoming releases, codenamed Mozart and Monet, will also be built upon the V8 generation.

The 2004 Edition family is scheduled for release in stages. The base CAD platform product, MicroStation V8 2004 Edition, was released a few weeks ago. Its main enhancements include better support for Adobe PDF creation in the form of a new extension, PDF Composer, which supports batch creation of PDF files, preserves level and reference file information, and can include hyperlinks, digital signatures, and bookmarks; improved digital security; addition of revision control to the design history capability; better DWG compatibility, including support for AutoCAD 2004; new tools for standards management; and other improvements in referencing files, 3D modeling, and drawing aids.

MicroStation can now be configured to conveniently include the various vertical extensions, including TriForma for the building vertical. These were previously available only as add-on applications that had to installed separately. The 2004 Editions of the different discipline-specific building applications— Bentley Architecture, Bentley Structural, a completely redesigned Bentley HVAC, and Bentley Facilities—are scheduled for release over the next few months. While an individual discussion of the improvements in each of these applications is beyond the scope of this article, what they share in common are two new technologies that were the subject of much discussion at the conference: generative components and parametric cells. These are described in more detail in the next section.

Generative Components and Parametric Cells

At a day-long building research and technology seminar led by Bentley's Director of Research, the audience learnt more Bentley's research initiatives to develop new technologies for building design, engineering, and construction. Presenters included academic researchers as well as design practitioners working in collaboration with Bentley to test and implement early versions of these technologies. The focus was mainly on GenerativeComponents, which automatically generates design elements and forms based on certain specified criteria, thereby making the computer a more active design medium rather than simply an efficient means of drawing production. An interesting example of the use of this feature was demonstrated by Greg Lynn's design firm, GL FORM, for a 500 unit housing block project in the Netherlands. The design called for 122 unique load bearing trusses on the building façade to carry a series of escalators. With each truss consisting of 44 main structural members and 110 minor elements, all of them being unique, the entire façade contained over 20,000 different components. The firm used the GenerativeComponents technology to automate the generation of each truss based on a parametric relationship with the escalator it was supporting. This technology is scheduled to be released in the building applications later on in the year.

The second key feature that makes the building applications more intelligent and efficient is the parametric cell technology, which is included in 2004 Edition release. Using a new interface called the Parametric Cell Studio, individual building components such as doors, windows, beams, ducts, and so on can be created and put together into larger assemblies using parametric or associative relationships. For more on the new parametric technologies in Bentley solutions, see the Viewpoint #5 article in AECbytes.

Future Directions: Web Services, .Net, PDF/E, and 3DIF

The technology keynote presentation gave a preview of some of the future directions for Bentley solutions, based on strategic partnerships with companies such as Microsoft, Adobe, and Intel. Bentley's project management and collaboration solution, ProjectWise, will begin to incorporate more of the Web Services technology using Microsoft's .NET platform (see my recent article on Web Services in AECbytes Newsletter #8). This will allow ProjectWise to be integrated with Microsoft's SharePoint solutions, which in turn will enable portions of ProjectWise functionality to be deployed by users as required on their own websites.

Bentley is also partnering with Adobe and several other industry vendors to develop engineering-specific enhancements to the PDF format. Referred to as PDF/E, these enhancements will address CAD-related issues such as accuracy and scale; IP, security, digital rights, and digital signatures; fonts, colors, and plotting; levels/layers, linking, and cross referencing; redlining and forms; encapsulation of metadata so that object properties can be embedded; and the ability to represent multimedia and 3D. (For more on PDF and this specific initiative, see my recent review of Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional.)

Bentley and Adobe are also getting involved in the Intel-driven 3D Industry Forum (3DIF), initiated to specifically address the issue of 3D information representation over the Web and develop solutions for it. While this effort is still relatively in its infancy, it is anticipated that the combination of 3DIF and PDF will be very compelling and be a strong competitor to the DWF format once that extends to 3D. (For more on PDF versus DWF, see AECbytes Newsletter #2.)

Other Conference Highlights

Other highlights of the conference included a guest keynote presentation by Col. Gregg F. Martin, who led U.S. Army combat engineers in Iraq and commands the 130th Engineer Brigade of the Army's 5th Corps, involved in the rebuilding of infrastructure in Iraq. The Colonel described the abysmal conditions of the infrastructure they found after the end of combat operations, caused by years of neglect, and presented an overview of the reconstruction efforts that were seriously underway. He also emphasized the importance of technology in these efforts, particularly that of GIS, which allowed the engineers to visualize and understand the terrain and connect to U.S. teams for analysis.

Then there were the BE Awards of Excellence, presented in an Oscar-like fashion at a special evening dinner ceremony. 164 projects were nominated across Bentley's four vertical industries; 21 of these won awards. The full list of award winners can be seen in this Bentley press release. In the Building vertical, the award categories were: BIM for Architecture, BIM for Architecture and Engineering, New Technology Adoption, Visualization, and Managed Environment. The overall quality of submissions was very high, demonstrating sophisticated use of the different Bentley solutions. In many cases, the work involved collaborative use of multiple applications, emphasizing Bentley's strength in providing well-integrated, cross-disciplinary solutions.

And finally, here's a quick round-up of highlights from the Exhibit Hall, showcasing other vendors' products that work with Bentley solutions. Adobe was at hand, of course, showing Acrobat 6.0 Professional and the PDF Composer in the new release of MicroStation. Matrox was displaying its Millennium and Parhelia family of graphic cards for 2D/3D workstations, designed for working across multiple displays as well as improving rendering quality and speed. Axiom showed its comprehensive productivity toolkit for MicroStation, including tools for fixing corrupt files, easy import of Microsoft Office content, standards checking, reference management, cell management, and so on. Another set of add-on tools for managing titleblocks and managing menus was demonstrated by Advanced CAD Systems. NavisWorks showed its suite of applications for 3D design publishing and review that work with MicroStation DGN files (see my review of NavisWorks3 in AECbytes). Another tool specifically for creating interactive walkthroughs that was being demonstrated was Walkinside. ArchVision showed their new RPC content libraries that can be used to populate MicroStation models for more realistic visualizations, and also gave me a preview of their upcoming Composer product for efficient creation and management of RPC content. And finally, I saw for the first time a 3D display on a regular computer, without the use of special glasses, in the Sharp Actius RD3D notebook. It was amazing to see how rapidly technology is progressing.

Overall Impressions

This was my first visit to a Bentley user conference, and what struck me the most was 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. It was quite an intellectual challenge digesting all this information, and the fact that these sessions were well attended indicated to me that the average Bentley user was considerably savvy and advanced technologically. In view of the fact that the company was started based on the software written 20 years ago by the two co-founders who continue to drive the development of its products, the emphasis of the company on its technology is not surprising.

Unlike the AIA-TAP conference last October (see my write-up on it in Cadence AEC Tech News #108), where BIM (building information modeling) was still being discussed and debated, I found that at the BE conference, BIM was literally all over the place. Two of the award categories were related to BIM, and there were several nominated works for those categories. It was almost taken for granted that BIM was the way to go about doing things in the AEC industry now, and the focus of the discussions was not on whether to do BIM or not, but instead on how to do it better.

Another noteworthy impression was the constant reference to leading competitor Autodesk that kept cropping up, particularly in the keynote presentations. The Bentley executives continued to emphasize their difference in philosophy from Autodesk, most notably with respect to their support for open standards. The openness of the DGN format was contrasted with the proprietary nature of the DWG format; the same for PDF versus DWF. Adobe's recent partnership with Bentley was constantly highlighted in the presentations and driven home with some very catchy advertising in the conference brochure. There was also continued emphasis on Bentley's philosophy of "not starting over," of providing new functionalities on top of their existing products. Given that most of the attendees were already users of Bentley's solutions, these reminders seemed to me somewhat like "preaching to the converted." Interestingly, Graphisoft was not mentioned at all, indicating that Bentley does not see it as a serious competitor. Considering that ArchiCAD is an established BIM solution in the industry that is being seriously evaluated by many firms as they explore their BIM options, this under-estimation of the underdog may come back to hurt Bentley.

In order to fight the long-term BIM battle in the AEC industry, Bentley needs to go beyond evangelizing its products to a committed user base and reach out to a wider audience. Also critical is the need to improve the ease of use of its solutions, which are complex and difficult to master (see my overview of the previous release of Bentley Architecture in Cadence AEC Tech News #104). Based on previews shown at the conference, upcoming releases promise to give priority to this issue with a redesigned interface and new capabilities.

Overall, I came back from the BE conference very impressed by Bentley's strong focus on technology, its commitment to improve and develop within its chosen platform, its advanced and technologically savvy user base, its nurturing of academic research as a means to push the envelope and incorporate cutting-edge capabilities in its products, and its partnerships with leading technology companies such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Intel.

For more on Bentley's new releases for the building industry, watch out for detailed product reviews in the coming months.

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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