CONNECT Advisor is a software component/desktop application which provides a unified interface for you to interact with various Bentley content in one location, thereby eliminating the need to browse to various sources individually. CONNECT Advisor boosts productivity as it reduces the time required to access and get information. You get the ability to browse-search-view-interact without having to leave the application that you are working on.
CONNECT Advisor performs the following functions:
When CONNECT Advisor starts up for the first time, it shows an onboarding screen to help you familiarize with the application; it also contains an onboarding video which explains the features and capabilities available in the CONNECT Advisor. This onboarding screen is also accessible via the About Box.
You can turn on/off the display of the onboarding screen on startup via the checkbox “Show on startup”, near the bottom left of the dialog.
To disable showing of this screen on startup you can uncheck the option “Show on startup”.
The CONNECT Advisor main dialog is made of the following sections or controls:
You can enter the “search phrase” that you want to find through CONNECT Advisor. As you key in the “search phrase” CONNECT Advisor performs a search in the existing displayed list and highlights the items that match your search phrase.
The search box also auto-suggests strings that might have been previously searched by other users:
When you press the ENTER/RETURN key or click the search icon (as described in step 5 below), a global search is executed, and results are returned from various available content sources.
The search functionality shows all available sources/channels it is searching in
CONNECT Advisor search works in two ways:
As you type in the search box, matching results are highlighted in yellow. E.g. If you have many items in the current display, and you type in the search box, the matching entries will be highlighted.
If you press the ENTER/RETURN key or click the search icon, CONNECT Advisor finds all content that matches the search literal, irrespective of the product and displays them. The results are sorted based on a relevance algorithm.
One of the new features that have been added in this version is the support for search using Boolean expressions. CONNECT Advisor now supports AND, OR and NOT operations in a Boolean search. You can search using various combinations of the Boolean expressions, some of the examples are given below:
Supported Operations
Result
· String1 AND String2
· String1 & String2
· String1 + String2
The result set will have posts contains both terms/keywords i.e. String1 and String2. e.g. MicroStation & Accudraw
· String1 OR String2
· String1 | String2
The result set will have posts contains either terms/keywords from either String1 or String2.
e.g. MicroStation OR ProjectWise
· String1 NOT String2
· String1 -String2
The result set will have posts relevant to term/keyword String1 but not to String2.
e.g. Isometric -design
· “String1 String2”
An exact match for “String1 String2” is looked and the result set will contain posts that explicitly includes “String1 String2”
e.g. “Cable Manager”
· String1 String2
If there is no boolean operation given, the result set will have the same effect of searching for String1 OR String2
This control has the following options.
This control allows you to filter the items per your selected criteria.
There are four-tab controls
This tab contains a drop-down that allows selecting content from various sources.
Most Recent Content: shows all the recent content for Bentley Communities, Bentley Learn, and YouTube.
Search Results: shows your search results.
QuickStarts: shows all quickstart learning courses that are available for your currently active product.
Upcoming Events: shows all upcoming events for the next 60 days. Events such as webinars, seminars, Live virtual conferences, industry events, virtual and physical classroom events etc. are shown here with a calendar.
News and Announcements: shows the latest Bentley corporate news.
The Recommendations tab contains personalized Learn videos and suggestions, along with items marked as your favorites and content that are recommended by others.
If you have new recommended items, they will be marked with a “red dot” ● and the count of new items will be shown in the Tab header.
After you view the item by clicking on its link, the red dot will disappear and the count will be decremented.
Ongoing Trainings: Any Learn courses/training that you take via the Learn Portal or CONNECT Advisor, will be shown over here. You can review your ongoing in-progress training in this view.
Suggested Trainings: Based on your in-progress trainings, CONNECT Advisor suggests some Learn courses. These Learn courses are suggested using an algorithm that looks at your current in-progress courses and learning paths. Self-assigned and Organization assigned Learning paths are taken into consideration when suggesting new courses for you.
Recommended by Others: If any content (Learn, YouTube videos, Community posts, Events, News and Announcements etc.) is shared/recommended to you by anyone, you can see that content in this section. In the displayed items you can see the name of the user who has recommended the item to you.
Once you have viewed the item and you no longer require it, the content item can be removed from your personalized list by selecting the item, right-clicking it to display the context menu and clicking remove from the context menu.
Recommend to Others: If you see any content (Learn, YouTube videos, Community posts, Events, News and Announcements etc.) and you feel is important, you can recommend the content to others using “Recommended to Others” feature.
You can go to the content, right click on that item and select Recommend to Others, after this a window will open.
You can enter Name or Email of the person you wish to share this content in recommend to others window.
After clicking the Recommend button, if the content was successfully shared, the recommendation status window will get displayed against entered userName or Email.
Favorites: The Favorites feature allows you to bookmark the content (Learn, YouTube videos, Community posts, Events, News and Announcements, Product Help etc.) of your interest as a favorite item. Whenever you are viewing any content, you can right click on that item and add that item to the Favorites List.
Clicking on the Favorites section displays the favorites that you have added. You can view your favorite items and remove items from the list as required.
As you work in your product, content that is applicable to your current action (current command in progress) is shown here, this functionality is currently only available for all PowerPlatform based applications.
For V8i PowerPlatform based applications: When using CONNECT Advisor with V8i PowerPlatform based applications, you can see live recommendations for the current command in progress in the contextual tab. By default, this feature is turned OFF.
If you want to turn on this feature you can enter the following keyin in the keyin prompt of your PowerPlatform application
connectadvisor contextual start
To disable contextual live recommendations, you can enter the keyin in the keyin prompt of your PowerPlatform application
connectadvisor contextual stop
This section contains the list of items per filter criteria, clicking on the item of interest will perform the action associated with it.
You can download and save the Hands-on files on local disk by clicking on it.
There is a notification window popup shown in the windows taskbar when a file download begins and when a file download is completed.
Similarly, self-assessments would open in the default browser, and you can view and take the assessment course.
Clicking on this icon would perform a global search and results matching the search terms would be returned from various available sources.
This drop down has two options
Clicking the first option which is help or pressing F1 would launch this help document.
Clicking on the second option would open the ‘About’ dialog for the CONNECT Advisor, and you can view the program information over here. The Onboarding screen which gives a brief information on CONNECT Advisor can be launched from here by clicking the “Learn more about CONNECT Advisor” link.
CONNECT Advisor now has the feature to expand/collapse the size of the display dialog. When in the expanded state, the dialog will occupy the entire length available on the screen. When in a collapsed state the dialog will only show the header area and will hide the displayed items.
General Settings: These settings drive how CONNECT Advisor behaves.
CONNECT Advisor can be customized as per your personal preferences. The user settings feature allows you to achieve this. CONNECT Advisor has various views available such as Most Recent, Search Results, QuickStarts, Upcoming Events etc. Each of these views has its own Sort and Filter criteria. You can set up these preferences to use your own saved settings or use the last settings that you were using.
The User Settings dialog box, allows you to select what settings you want to use. There are two options:
Changes made to the sort/filter settings by you will be used the next time when you open CONNECT Advisor. Changes from the last session are preserved and used on next launch.
You can set up your view sort/filter settings and then do a “Save Current Settings”. These saved settings will always be used the next time when you open CONNECT Advisor, irrespective of what view you last used. You can reset all settings back to the CONNECT Advisor default settings by doing a “Restore Default Settings”.
Show Titles only
To reduce the amount of space used by each item to display, you can now show the titles available in each item. Selecting this option hides the description thereby consuming less screen space and displaying more items. Hovering over the displayed item would show its description in the tooltip.
Auto-Refresh content
Available content in CONNECT Advisor window will be refreshed if CONNECT Advisor is idle for a particular time interval.
You can select the checkbox and time interval to refresh the content.
Keep window always on top
If this setting is checked, CONNECT Advisor window will be the topmost window on your desktop. This setting is particularly useful when you are viewing videos and content and want to work side by side with your other applications.
Launch CONNECT Advisor on startup
Use this setting if you want to launch CONNECT Advisor as soon as your product starts. When this is checked CONNECT Advisor will automatically launch itself, whenever a new session of your product is started.
Content Settings: These settings control the display and availability of the channels that are available in CONNECT Advisor. Via this setting, you can turn ON/OFF the display of particular channel/feature in CONNECT Advisor. If a particular channel is not enabled via your system/organization admin then that channel will not be avaialble for selection.
If some features are dependent on other channels/features, they will be greyed out if the parent channel/feature is not available.
You can refresh the available content in CONNECT Advisor window anytime by clicking on Refresh icon while the active tab is Most Recent, Search Results, QuickStart, News and Announcements and Upcoming Events.
Knowledgemaps are a way that shows your progress and your expertise for the product in use. It shows the status of the trainings that you have started/completed. Knowledgemap is the best way to see how you are doing in a particular area of your product in a graphical format.
Knowledgemap is a personalized feature that looks at your Learn Server transcript and trainings taken to date and shows the map in a tree format. If there are no knowledgemaps associated with your product, this functionality is not available.
Learning Paths
Learning Paths is a feature that allows you to view your assigned learning paths (Self Assigned and Organizational assigned learning paths) in a tree format. It also shows the status of the trainings that you have started/completed in a particular learning path.
If there are no learning paths assigned to the user, this functionality is not available.
The message bar provides information and error messages occurred during the lifetime of the CONNECT Advisor. It also displays the current number of items visible in the items list
Your feedback is important to us. You can provide valuable feedback using this functionality. Clicking on the feedback link will display a feedback dialog, wherein you can enter in your comments and feedback (up to 500 characters) in the area provided. You will need to accept the “Terms of Use” and “Privacy Policy” before you can send us any feedback.
In case you want us or a Bentley representative to contact you, please enter your email address in the space provided after clicking on the “Get in Touch” link.
You can select the zoom level to zoom in/zoom out the items on the list so that more/ fewer items are visible on the available items list.
For any issues and questions related to this document, please drop an email with your questions to
Product Manager Molly Brown molly.brown@bentley.com