Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced an expansion of its strategic relationship with Microsoft Corporation. Through its commitment to the Microsoft Azure Platform partner program, Bentley is bringing a broad range of Azure-cloud-based services for sustaining infrastructure to architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) worldwide at an accelerated pace.
Initial offerings on Azure will include the new Bentley Transmittal Services, enabling AECO organizations to accurately and securely package, and deliver, receive, and track transmittals through a dashboard portal. These shared services will benefit the users of both the ProjectWise collaboration platform and the AssetWise platform for operations information modeling by reducing risk, saving time, and providing greater visibility into project status.
Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft, said, “Bentley Systems is one of our preferred partners in the delivery of software and services through the Windows Azure platform to the AECO community. Together, Microsoft and Bentley are serving the needs of our joint customers by offering a cloud strategy that encompasses private and public clouds and on-premise deployments. We have seen how this highly effective approach is driving greater efficiencies for these organizations and helping their businesses become even more successful.”
Bhupinder Singh, senior vice president, Bentley Software, said, “Most of our users have invested significant resources on manual processes or enterprise systems to handle the crucial task of managing transmittals and submittals. Unfortunately, most generic approaches aren’t well suited for this infrastructure project need. Bentley Transmittal Services streamlines and automates this critical business process, enabling users to reliably access and include in the transmittal the correct versions of design content, transformed as appropriate. And, because transmittals need to flow across organizations and their firewalls, our users will find our cloud implementation to be a natural solution.
“Bentley’s ProjectWise is the system in which major AECO organizations create and entrust their work products. Further, at Bentley we are uniquely positioned to deliver (through i-models) and secure (through ProjectWise and AssetWise) information mobility for AECO content. Therefore, extending the scope of ProjectWise and AssetWise through Bentley Transmittal Services constitutes a vital milestone for Bentley and our user organizations in minimizing risks within AECO workflows. Accomplishing this through the Azure cloud is a winning scenario for Bentley, Microsoft, and, most importantly, for our user organizations.”
Said Stuart Nicholson, I.T. and work systems specialist, Halcrow Group Limited, “Bentley Transmittals is an exciting new development that promises to close the gap on the delivery and review of documents and design content.”
Bentley Transmittal Services includes a dashboard that provides notifications and links to a secure transmittal portal where organizations can see all the transmittals that pertain to their projects. Users will have the option to deploy the portal onsite or online and connect with their existing ProjectWise or AssetWise implementations. The same dashboard serves as a transmittal registry, which records all acknowledgements and tracks all status changes.
Bentley Transmittal Services will include the following functionality:
- Transmittal creation and publishing – to create a transmittal package directly from the engineering data source, and send email notifications to external recipients;
- Transmittal delivery and response – to view a transmittal package, acknowledge and download the package, and respond with decisions, text comments, markups, and attachments, all through a portal;
- Transmittal response tracking and status – to view responses per recipient to find out who has not yet acknowledged/responded, to send reminders as email notifications about due/overdue acknowledgements or responses to external recipients, and to show in which transmittal and/or submittal packages a specific work-in-progress document was included.
Availability
Bentley Transmittal Services is currently available onsite with AssetWise. Bentley Transmittal Services for ProjectWise is available onsitetoday through Bentley’s early adopter program and will be commercially released in Q1 2012. In addition, Bentley Transmittal Services for the Microsoft Azure platform will be available online in 2012. Bentley Transmittal Services online can (and often will) be configured with ProjectWise and/or AssetWise onsite.
