Cadalyst - October 2007 - (Page 47)

aecinfocus Digital-Asset Management in AEC/O Users can access to digital information wherever and whenever they want. By H. Edward Goldberg, AIA T he AEC/O (architecture, engineering, construction, and operations) industry spends an estimated $500 million or more each year moving plans from one discipline to another via such courier services as FedEx. Not only is this practice costly in terms of dollars — the cost in terms of its carbon footprint and time is probably in the billions. With the advent of the Internet, digital project management has become an economical standard for all types of industries, and it is rapidly expanding into the AEC/O arena. The entire construction train has been interconnected electronically, and standards for interconnectivity are evolving for the interchange of 2D and 3D CAD data through IFC, DWG, and DWF formats. Add e-mail, bitmap pictures, Word documents, and PDFs, and you have a problem with digital-asset management. In other words, to manage the physical project, you first must manage the information project. Recognizing an available niche, several developers have designed software specifically to manage AEC/O digital assets. This is not to imply that we are making big inroads toward the paperless office — unfortunately, we’re not — but software products are available to control projects through digital-asset management. Figure 1. attolist helps architecture firms organize their construction-administration information in a central location that is easily accessible through any Internet connection. attolist www.attolist.com New to the market and conceived by a registered architect, attolist was designed to help architecture firms organize their construction-administration information in a central location that is easily accessible through any Internet connection. Believing that construction administration is inherently filled with redundant, costly tasks, attolist developers wanted to eliminate that redundancy. This software is 100% Internet based; it has no CDs or updates to install on individual computers. The application resides on a Web server that can be hosted by attolist or by an architecture firm (figure 1). attolist doesn’t have per-user licenses; fees are based on a per-month/per-project basis, which makes it affordable for a firm of any size. The application works on any browser and does not require any plug-ins such as Active X. To gain access to a project, each user needs a username and password and must be invited by the architect to view a project. Different types of access levels are available. Architect users have unlimited access to a project, but contractors and owners have read-only access. attolist currently provides a submittal and request for information (RFI) log. The RFI software is 100% electronic. PDF and JPEG files can be attached to RFIs for quick reference. Attolist also has integrated automatic e-mail notification and built-in automatic weekly to-do lists. After a user has been added to the project, merely selecting them as a recipient results in the automatic generation of a submittal and a PDF transmittal. Autodesk www.autodesk.com/experiencecpm Autodesk delivers its collaborative project-management solutions, Buzzsaw and Constructware, as software-as-a-service 47 www.cadalyst.com | cadalyst | October 2007 http://www.attolist.com http://www.autodesk.com/experiencecpm http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - October 2007

Contents Editor's Window Cad Central Tech Trends: First-Hand Architecture in Second Life Rev It Up — Graphics Cards Pack Power for Today’s Hottest Designs TurboCAD Pro 14 — 3D Modeling Software SimEnterprise R2 — Design Simulation Software CADopia 6.2 SP3 Professional Edition — 2D and 3D Modeling Software Cad Manager: Programming Resources for CAD Managers MCAD Modeling: Customer Service Horror Stories PLM Strategies: Manufacturing Across Time Zones AEC in Focus: Digital-Asset Management in AEC/O Cad Cartoon Issue Indexes Cadfidential

Cadalyst - October 2007

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