This week, Be Inspired took place in Amsterdam. What makes this event fairly unique is that it showcases how various individuals and organizations are using Bentley technology to respond to challenges and solve problems that impact many people today. One prime example is the special recognition award delivered to Codelco for the recent (and very successful) rescue of 33 miners, who were trapped underground in Chile for 69 days. What is not known by...

In the software business, that acronym often stands for the phrase "Can Not Reproduce". When it is used in response to a reported problem, it often results in frustration... not only for the person who reported the issue, but also for the person who investigated it. In most instances where situations like this occur, one or more vital details are eventually provided that help change "CNR" to "Ah ha! Now I see!" It has...

The 2010 Philadelphia (Regional) Future City Competition took place at the Sheet Metal Workers Union Hall in Philadelphia on January 23. 36 teams of mostly seventh- and eighth-graders from schools in the region entered, and the competition was intense. The theme this year was a city that had affordable living spaces for people who lost their homes due to disasters or financial emergencies (a timely theme given the natural disaster in Haiti, although...

One real good definition of anniversary (thanks Google!) is "the date on which an event occurred in some previous year". Some people have a tendency of forgetting anniversaries (oops), while others would prefer to not remember them. An important Bentley first anniversary that I wanted to point out happened on November 6 -- it was the joint V8i and Be Communities launch that took place last year in Philadelphia. Why make mention of it? Well...

My, how time flies. Bentley Systems, Incorporated is 25 years young in 2009. To some, that may seem like a lifetime... that's if they have even reached that milestone! To others, that may seem like nothing. In the grand scheme of things, 25 years is likened to a split second, but in our business, it is a long time. Keith Bentley's recent blog article made me think, wow, 25 years. Has it been that long? And then I pulled out the 9-track tape that I...

I have been meaning to write something about this for a while, and now seems as good a time as any. Over the years that I have been involved with computers and software, I have communicated with many people from all over the world and seen and heard a lot of things. One such thing that is indelibly stuck in my memory is this Change Request: "Make the product better" No kidding. That was it. I think the reply to that was "Where do you...

Our V8i launch event in Philly unveiled the industry's most comprehensive software portfolio ever assembled for infrastructure professionals. IMnsHO, the most exciting part was the new MicroStation. Keith Bentley gave a great presentation highlighting a lot of the really cool stuff in MicroStation V8i. Not only did he talk about the techniques used in MicroStation V8i for creating 3D models, but the visual presentation that goes along with his speech...

User Preference Files (UPFs) often get blamed for a lot of things -- in fact, it would not surprise me if they were seen by some as the cause for sun spots :). Seriously, that blame is very often misdirected. How? Well... there is a very big difference between cause and effect. Alleviating the effect (i.e. deleting your UPF) often does very little (if anything) to remedy the cause, which could be something much deeper and many times more serious....

"The great thing about standards is that there are so many of them." To some, that statement might seem comical, but it rings very true. The main concept behind standards (at least in the AEC and geospatial context) is to bring things to a common, consistent end, minimizing confusion brought on by chaos that would otherwise result. In the world that we are in, there are various ways to achieve this, each having their own pros and cons. These...

Ultravox released a song about the capital of Austria in the 80s, and since then, I have always wanted to travel to it. Well, as chance would have it, that opportunity presented itself recently. On September 11-12, we hosted the 2008 Bentley International Partner Summit in the Austria Trend Eventhotel Pyramide , which is just outside Vienna city limits in a town called Vösendorf. The event officially lasted a little over a day and a half, although...

This blog post brought to you by the letters B and E and the number 2008. Phew... what a week! BE Conference 2008 in Baltimore... DevCon 2008 a short distance away in Exton... hmmm... which one to choose, which one to choose? Hey... what about both! That is precisely what a number of folks did (including myself). In case you might have missed this, some of the BE Conference highlights (at least from this perspective) were: The "Athens" product...

Have you ever answered the same question from 20 different people? Have you ever come across a tidbit of information and thought "I bet there are others who might benefit from this"? If you are like me, you probably have -- sometimes all too often -- and from people internally and externally. Have you ever wondered, "Someday, there will be something that will help get this information out"? If you have, you will be glad to know...

First, it was freezing in Moscow (even without the wind), now it is about the same in Beijing... with snow, no less. We are here to help our Bentley China colleagues with a three-day programming workshop. About 30 developers from various organizations around China are attending to learn what APIs and SDKs are available to develop on our products. This is the second such workshop that we have done in China in 2007, and we plan to continue them in 2008...

Well... actually, for the first time. And Moscow is more accurate, which is now Russia. But other than that, it is pretty close to the song lyrics :). This is the furthest that I have gone into Eastern Europe (not counting Asia, because, well... that is not Europe!) For a while, I was not sure if I would actually make it, since the visa application process was, without a doubt, the most tedious, time-consuming one that I have experienced to date....

...but people are still riding bicycles all over the place, then it must be Amsterdam. This is the first stop for me on another around-the-world trip involving Bentley events. One of the various reasons for my short visit to our international headquarters in Hoofddorp, which is outside of Amsterdam, is to give a presentation on the BE Community to my European colleagues. I also met with a number of folks to make last minute plans and preparations...

After Tokyo , the second-to-last stop on this trip around-the-world is in Budapest, Hungary. The purpose for our being here is to do an exploratory site visit for the 2008 Bentley International Partner Summit (to date, we have not decided exactly where that will be, but it is likely to be somewhere in Central Europe). This event is where we come together with Bentley Channel and Technology Partners for a couple of days to communicate sales, marketing...

(this is a recap, of sorts, for when we visited Tokyo for DevCon 2006 in November, 2006) After we completed our sessions to DevCon 2006 Japan attendees, we had a couple of days before returning to the US. Besides visiting our offices in Ikebukuro (mainly to catch up on various things and communicate SELECT Server XM Edition to our colleagues there), we were able to take in some of what Japan has to offer. We tried dinner roulette one night. Dinner...

Speaking of Water, water everywhere... , the next stop on this round-the-world trip lands us in Tokyo, where DevCon 2007 Japan is taking place. We narrowly missed Typhoon Fitow (the name means "beautiful fragrant flower" in a Micronesian language), which passed to the north of Tokyo two days before we arrived. The rain has pretty much continued since arriving... sometimes in very heavy downpours, which is a bit unusual for this time of year...

With the difference in time back with the home office, we were able to take advantage of the down time between the end of the day and start of the next to do some site seeing. Our colleagues in China organized a trip to a place called Huangguoshu Waterfall, which is a two-hour drive (take or give) west of Guiyang. The waterfall is part of a National Park and is the largest of its kind in China, as well as one of the largest in the world. What was...

The Greater China BE Meeting and Bentley Partner Conference 2007 event is taking place this week in Guiyang, China. If you have never been to Guiyang before, it is to China what Kansas City is to the US -- smack dab in the middle of the country. It is a three hour plane ride from Beijing (for those like me traveling from the US, that is in addition to the 13+ hour flight to Beijing over the North Pole -- and, no, I did not see Santa or his castle...