The Year in Infrastructure 2007 - (Page 73) ciVil distriButed enterprise Projects using Bentley data and document management technology to support work sharing and project management. These projects recognize measurable benefits achieved through improved project quality, process enhancement, decreased costs, time savings, error avoidance, or risk reduction. winner Centralized Data Storage Using ProjectWise StartPoint and Riverbed WAN Optimization the Banks group The Banks Group needed real-time access to design and office documents at many locations. This was achieved in the past by using remote copy procedures or a complicated setup of distributed file systems and WAN infrastructure. But this approach suffered from file locking, versioning problems, and speed of access. The goal of this project was to implement a solution that would allow easy, auditable, and fast access to centralized design data from any location. The firm settled on a combination of document management software and WAN optimization hardware. The WAN device manages network traffic by eliminating redundant data and streamlining data transfer. It also performs bit-level caching of data, which means that only changes to a file are sent back to the data store. Among the immediate benefits was a reduction in backup procedures and costs. The company now has one central data store instead of seven separate ones. Superfluous SANs were reassigned to storing CAD and office documents, and the company no longer requires tape backup procedures at remote sites. Costs for offsite replication of server data for disaster recovery have also been reduced because replication is now done from a single site. The IT department also noted a dramatic drop in the number of data restores requested, a decrease it attributes to the versioning capabilities of the document management software. Problems with missing referenced drawings have also been eliminated. A solution based on ProjectWise StartPoint is now used at all five U.K. offices, three working sites, and via the extranet, which is accessed by consultants who can submit data directly into ProjectWise StartPoint. With all documents being stored in the project portal, team members can go to one place and search on both document name and content. Users say they are saving at least 200 man-hours a week from not having to search for documents. BE AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE 73
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