Cadalyst - November 2007 - (Page 38)

cadlabsreview Figure 3. Painless management of project e-mail is one of Newforma Project Center’s greatest benefits. For many firms, this feature alone could offset the cost of the software. Figure 4. Mark-up and annotation tools in Newforma Project Center can be used with any document or file type, including CAD and BIM files. Markups are searchable and preserve their information context. tems of unmanaged public folders. Most methods of cleaning one’s inbox render the moved messages nearly impossible to find and retrieve. Few workable and easy-to-use tools can archive all project e-mails within a firm alongside all other project documents. Furthermore, file attachments have grown too large and too numerous for efficient transfer via e-mail (senders and recipients often have maximum file-size limitations imposed by their servers, IT staff, or ISPs). Even absent limits, e-mailing large attachments can be painfully slow. Sending to multiple recipients generates multiple copies, increasing the burden on a firm’s diskstorage capacity. Newforma Project Center’s e-mail functionality (an Outlook plug-in), combined with Newforma Information Exchange (a separate server that supersedes any FTP server or external service), cures all of these communication-file dysfunctions. E-mails can be saved to dedicated project folders with a few clicks. Multiple copies are automatically unduplicated. Everything is easily searchable and instantly retrievable, first by a clever system of content filters and then by a document/file–agnostic full text search (searching even within text blocks on and attributes of graphics, CAD, and BIM files). Anyone who can use Outlook can be fully productive with Newforma Project Center in a couple of hours. External transfers, whether of single files or massive document sets, are virtually idiot-proof (no offense, but even principals can do it). All transfers offer complete control, notification, verification, audit trails, and so on. E-mail, file transfer, and regular transmittals are integrated into a single comprehensive log or record of everything sent from the firm. time wasted across all categories of staff (time lost to managing, filing, and retrieving e-mails and transferring files) as part of a return-on-investment (ROI) analysis for upper management when they were considering whether to try Newforma Project Center. For this firm, the initial analysis “seemed excessively positive” and had to be “adjusted downward to make it credible.” Yet, the actual experience of Newforma Project Center exceeded this firm’s expectations. Even at the full Newforma Project Center Enterprise subscription price, without volume price breaks, many firms will find that Newforma Project Center can pay for itself based on the e-mail time savings alone. When I asked users about their overall satisfaction with Newforma Project Center, the answers all sounded alike: “One of the best things we’ve ever done”; “We couldn’t imagine life without it”; “[Newforma] truly listens to their customers, more so than anybody else out there.” When I asked users if they would recommend Newforma Project Center to other firms facing similar issues, one wag jokingly answered, “Not if they were our competitors.” To my ear, that is the highest possible endorsement. Highly Recommended. c Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the generous user feedback provided by Jill Rothenberg, CIO at ADD, an architectural firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Terry Turner, operations administrator, and Steve Rabits, IT manager, at BRPH Architects, an AEC firm in Melbourne, Florida; and several other Newforma customers who chose to remain anonymous. Industry analyst and consultant Jerry Laiserin helps AEC/O businesses — and the technology providers who serve them — build smarter through the integration of technology strategy and business process. E-mail him at jerry@laiserin.com. Don’t Take My Word for It The IT and operations folks at one customer firm with whom I spoke had rigorously estimated the amount of 38 November 2007 | cadalyst | www.cadalyst.com http://www.cadalyst.com

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

Cadalyst - November 2007 Contents Editor's window Cad Central Conceptual Inspiration for Less Than $200 From Any Angle - Publish and Share Your 3D Designs NX 5, Part 1 - CAD/CAM/CAE Software Newforma Project Center Fourth Edition - Software for Project Information Management CAD Manager's Survey 2007 Sharing and Collaborating with Your Team To BIMfinity and Beyond! Solutions for Sending Large Digital Files Cad Cartoon Issue Indexes Cad Fidential

Cadalyst - November 2007

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.