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There is little doubt that the design of every infrastructure project today involves the collaboration of many individuals and organizations across multiple disciplines. It is with this context that we have developed Bentley Cloud Services to facilitate successful project outcomes for you and your organizations. Bentley Cloud Services helps you produce better designs by facilitating collaboration, interoperability, standardization, and skills development. For an organization and enterprise, Bentley Cloud Services provides greater insight and control over project design, deliverables and the people working on them. In the sections that follow we look at some of the capabilities and services that are delivered today, with more being added every week, with Bentley Cloud Services to help you achieve even greater project and personal success.
The core premise of Bentley Cloud Services is to facilitate successful project outcomes through common capabilities and shared services across desktop, mobile, server and cloud. To enable this, Bentley has utilized Microsoft’s Azure cloud service to connect uniformly and consistently with and across users, projects, and enterprises. To enable the value and your success on Bentley Cloud Services it is imperative that users register for a complimentary CONNECTED account, sign in when using your CONNECT Edition products and associate your design models with a CONNECTED Project. Let’s take a look at why you should do this…
Today the CONNECT Edition Product user gains five major advantages by signing up and in, namely:
Each CONNECTED user is provisioned with a CONNECTION Center on the Bentley Cloud Services site. This portal provides you access to each of these services and more. See the section on CONNECTION Client Sign In for more details on how to access this and other Cloud services.
CONNECTION Center
One of the key capabilities of CONNECT Edition products is the ability to receive update notifications and initiate updates directly from your desktop for all versions within the same generation of the product line. Users no longer need to sign into Software Downloads to look for updates of their product but will now be able to check for updates and receive notification of updates from within their products.
The value of Cloud Services just starts with the CONNECTED User advantage. Of course, users and organizations work together on projects. If an Organization chooses to register their projects with Bentley, those projects now become CONNECTED Projects. With CONNECTED users and CONNECTED projects, the ability for project-centric analysis, dashboards on who is working on the project where and how much, shared documents, deliverables status and more are now available through the ProjectWise Portal.
The CONNECTED Project Advantage
ProjectWise Projects Page on Bentley Cloud Services Website
Today ProjectWise Projects provides four major advantages for CONNECTED Project Organizations:
At this level, enterprises that have CONNECTED Users working on CONNECTED Projects with their CONNECT Edition products become CONNECTED Enterprises. Information that was once disjointed or unavailable is now placed in context with Key Performance Indicators brought to the forefront to help our accounts improve project performance. All that from just signing in as a CONNECTED User and associating work with CONNECTED Projects.
The CONNECTED Enterprise Advantage
You can get more information on Bentley Cloud Services by subscribing to the Bentley Cloud Services Community
This is a single sign in to all Bentley web pages and Cloud services. If you don’t have one already, you should create a Bentley profile. This will let you:
Once you are a CONNECTED user your organization’s administrators should register a CONNECTED Project. This is a way of keeping track of everything you and your team members do within that project. A CONNECTED Project doesn’t contain your project data, it is simply a universal common ID to link together all activity within a project. It also contains information such as Name, Number, Industry, Asset Type, Location etc.
The first time you open or create a file, you will be prompted to select a Project. All activities relating to that file will be associated with the project.
This is a range of services for learning, file sharing, project sharing, transmittals, project analytics and more. Some of the key components you will use as a part of Cloud Services include –
To take advantage of the values of CONNECTED users must be registered and signed in, CONNECTED projects must be available and CONNECT Edition/Service products must be used to associate product work with CONNECTED Projects. Let’s look at how to do each of these items.
In order to access the Personal Portal, or to sign in to the CONNECTION Client you must be a CONNECTED user that is associated with an Organization in User Management. There are 2 ways to register:
If you have installed any CONNECT Edition/Services product then you have installed a CONNECTION Client. This client shows up as an icon on your taskbar.
Double-click the icon or Right-Click>Open on the icon to expose the CONNECTION Client Sign in Screen.
CONNECTION Client Sign In
Select the Register Now button on the window to show the Create Profile Window shown below. Provide the details for your account paying particular note to your Work Email and Profession (Role). The former will impact the users that will be considered part of an organization and the latter will impact services and notifications you receive that will be particular to your role. Completing this screen you will be sent to the Bentley IMS profile page to set a password and other information as you desire.
Create your profile
Profile Creation
You can also log in directly from the Bentley website from https://ims.bentley.com. Doing this will send you to a sign in web page as shown below where once again you can select the Register link to enter your profile information as password as in the CONNECTION Client case previously mentioned.
Sign In Web Page on Bentley Website
Once you have registered as a CONNECTED User and are properly associated with an Organization (see previous section) you can proceed to sign in. Sign in can be performed from one of three places:
Enter the same email you provided in your registration and your password.
Each CONNECT Edition product has a new CONNECTION Widget in the frame of the product window. Most products have this widget on the upper right or status bar of the window.
Select the widget dropdown and choose the Sign In command to expose the CONNECTION Client Sign In window. Follow the direction as provided above for the CONNECTION Client.
You can also log in directly from the Bentley website from https://ims.bentley.com. Doing this will send you to a sign in web page as shown below where once again you can sign in.
Once signed in from any of these places you will be signed in for all services.
If you don’t recall your password simply select the “Forgot Password?” link on the sign in window and your password will be reset through email.
A fundamental requirement of Cloud Services is the creation of projects. Only Account Administrators, Co-Administrators, Group Administrators, or CONNECT Services Admins are allowed to create projects. Contact your account administrator or co-administrator to assign you rights to add projects yourself. See the Managing User Rights Section below. Projects are typically added to the Bentley registry for your company through any of the links on the ProjectWise Portal, CONNECTION Center or Project Chooser Dialog window.
The CONNECTION Client shows up as an icon on your taskbar.
Right-Click select the icon and then select Links>Personal Portal then click the + sign in the Recent Projects tile to register a new project or click the magnifying glass then the Register a Project button as show below. Hint, you can also navigate to the Project Portal from your CONNECT Edtion > Assign Project to Workset dialog in your desktop product. Select “Register Project” to add a new project.
Projects Selection Web Page on Bentley Website
Select “Register a Project” to add a new project. See the section “Managing User Rights” if you do not have the rights to add a project.
New Project registration screen
The project attributes should be entered accurately to obtain the greatest value from Cloud Services.
This same screen is accessible directly from the Cloud Services ProjectWise Portal through the Project Dropdown on the top of the ProjectWise Portal window by Selecting +New.
Register a New Project through the Project Portal Dropdown
Right-Click select the icon and then select CONNECTION Center to expose the CONNECTION Center. Select the + sign in the ProjectWise Projects Tile to Register a New Project. See the section “Managing User Rights” if you do not have the rights to add a project.
Register a New Project through the CONNECTION Center Link
The project Chooser window is accessible from the File menu command. To register a new project select the +Register Project link on the upper left of the Project Chooser.
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Register a New Project through the Project Chooser Link
User rights in an organization are administered by the site administrator or co-administrator in your company. This is typically the main contact for your company at Bentley. This user can assign you the Group Administrator or CONNECT Services Admin role through the User Management Portal https://ims.bentley.com/usermanagement. Select the Manage button on the top of the window and search for a user. For more information on user roles see User Management.
Manage User Portal
Select the user and click “Modify Roles” to expose the roles window. Scroll down and select “CONNECT Services Admin” to allow a user to add and manage projects.
Set User Rights through User Management Portal
The last remaining critical step to reap the benefits of Bentley Cloud Services is the step of assigning the project files with a specific CONNECTED Project. If you are signed in all Products will automatically display the Project Chooser when you start a new model or open a pre-CONNECT version of a project. The Project Chooser is also accessible from the Bentley Cloud Services menu command in these products.
Simply select a project to be associated with your work. See the Project Chooser documentation for more details on the various capabilities of this window. All use of this file in the current product will now be associated with this CONNECTED Project.
Bentley CONNECT Edition products enable a whole new world of connectivity helping facilitate better project outcomes by providing users with timely insights, consistent project settings, and easier project collaboration capabilities. Organizations benefit from greater visibility and control into their projects with key performance metrics accessible from a single portal. CONNECT has and will continue to be a major investment at Bentley. We encourage you to dive-in and leverage the capabilities, share in your experience on our Bentley Communities site and reap the current and future value of the Bentley Cloud Services experience. Please visit the Bentley Communities site to learn more:
Bentley Cloud and Web Services
The key benefits for a Profile are access to learning content about your software, the ability to track software usage on your projects and the ability to share files with others and with your mobile devices. More benefits will be added in future as we add more cloud services.
Yes. If you are not online, the software will work as usual and you can run without signing in or selecting projects. When you reconnect and next open your file, you can assign it to a project at that point.
First, click the Refresh button at the top of the dialog box. If there are still no projects, click on the Register Project button at the top left of the Assign Project dialog box. This will take you to a webpage where you can register a project.
If you do not have permissions to register a project, ask your Site Administrator or Co-Administrator to give you the CONNECT Services Admin role in your Bentley Profile.
Click the Refresh button in the Assign Project dialog box.
While it is strongly recommended you do so, you are not required to associate your file with a project. However, you will only get the benefit of software usage tracking in your project if you associate your files with a project. If you don’t associate a file with a project at first, you can do so later using the Associate Project command. We will continue to add new cloud services in future which will use the project association to provide helpful reporting to you and your colleagues.
No. Your files are saved on your local hard disk or network drive as usual. If you are using ProjectWise to store your files, they will continue to be stored there. The only change is that the ID of the CONNECTED Project is now stored in your file so use of the file can be associated with the project. The ID is a randomly generated complex 32 character string of characters, it does not disclose any information about your project.
While it is not required to sign in to use the software, we strongly recommend that you do so. Sign in is required to take advantage of current and future cloud services. Sign In may be required in future.
There are settings in the CONNECTION Client preferences that will allow you to prevent it from starting on system startup and automatically signing you in (see CONNECTION Client Preferences for more information). However, If you are not signed in when the Assign Project dialog is displayed, you will be prompted to sign in. It is not possible to turn off this prompt.
Bentley is not storing any information about your files nor the files themselves. We are only storing basic information about your project including name, number, industry, asset type, and location. When you run the software using a file that is associated with a project, usage information is stored so that you can track which software is used when, on a given project. Bentley is not able to see the name of the user using the software, only the unique machine name is stored for licensing purposes. This is unchanged from previous versions of the software. Your information is kept confidential to you and your organization.
All project and usage information is stored using encrypted data sent to and stored in the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. This is a highly secure environment used by millions of companies.
Software usage reports are available via the SELECTserver web page at https://selectserver.bentley.com. Note that your organization must be using the hosted version of SELECTserver to take advantage of this capability.
No. The usage tracked by SELECTserver and available to you in SELECTserver reports is only for Bentley applications.
You do not need a desktop software license to use cloud services however all services require a Bentley Profile, some services require a Bentley Passport and other services also require a specific Visa be added to that Passport. A Bentley Passport is a general access, named user license for using file servers like ProjectWise as well as cloud services. Usually, your organization will purchase a pool of Passports for many users to use.