Where is the Bentley View announcements page?

Hello Stuart,

Here is the link to the MicroStation Announcements forum, which includes Bentley View:

communities.bentley.com/.../343468

Thanks. Specifically I'm looking for the View CONNECT edition announcement. I couldn't see it in the list.

Hi Daniel,

Unknown said:

We have discontinued Bentley View CONNECT Edition

It's pretty big surprise and I agree with Stuart it's hard to understand why.

Unknown said:

You can find the announcement for this version below.

I have not found any information that Bentley View has been discontinued and there will be no CONNECT Edition released in the announcement you linked. But in the discussion in the mentioned post, Bentley View CE is mentioned as product to be released.

I have to say it's long term Bentley tradition to don't provide any clear, simple and consistent information about product and development plans, but it seems it was enhanced to own job specialization to be able to guess what will be (not) migrated to CE platform and how. Maybe Bentley think the users are Nazguls controled by King of Angmar and Sauron and information has to be protected, so Gandalfs is walking around Bentley offices telling "Keep it secret, keep it safe" ... but for me still more acceptable picture than an assumption that agile methodology degenerated into a mess of ad-hoc decisions.

With regards,

  Jan

Hi Jan,

Let me clarify a bit. We did initially have a Bentley View CONNECT Edition but we have since removed it and you can still use the Bentley View V8i SELECTSeries 4 version to view files as a free viewer.

Please let me know if this helps.

Thanks,
Daniel Eng

Unknown said:

Hi Jan,

Let me clarify a bit. We did initially have a Bentley View CONNECT Edition but we have since removed it and you can still use the Bentley View V8i SELECTSeries 4 version to view files as a free viewer.

Why did you remove? As I noted above I thought that CONNECT was the way forward for Bentley.

Hi Daniel,

Unknown said:

Please let me know if this helps.

No in the least, because it seems I did not express good enough were I see the main problem.

All companies (Bentley are probably the only exception) maintain "announcement blog" , typically more of them, split per product, solution or whatever style can be applied. Usually announcement about new features are published, but often also information what is planned, investigated or even what project was canceled or postponed. So it's easy to keep overall knowledge about the current status and expected further development (which change quickly, but it's natural feature of software world).

Bentley's tradition is to hide and don't share as much information as possible and if anything is made public, to make it hard to find it. No consistent channel to share latest news exist (Announcement forum is very basic try, still better than nothing, but as demonstrated in this discussion, not used properly). My experience, especially in relation to migration to CONNECT Edition platform, is, that if Bentley want to make their users confused and dissapointed, you do it extremely well.

To plan migration is always complex and to schedule it if different products are used, especially if it has to be synchornized with projects life-cycles and also budget has to be allocated on-time, is a long term effort. But it can be done if you have enough information. But what to do if Bentley aim is to don't provide any information? Many my customers are confused they are not able to even roughly estimate when evaluation and testing of e.g. power products can be started. They don't expect exact dates and they are aware any schedule can change, but to don't know at epxected quarter and if product will or will be not migrated or will be replaced by some other is really nightmare ... and it's also great opportunity for Bentley competitors and arguments are missing a lot in such discussions.

With regards,

  Jan

Hi Jan,

I appreciate your concern and can empathize with you in regard to providing plans, etc. Rest assured though with MicroStation CONNECT Edition, our plans are to do quarterly updates to help organizations plan and schedule updates.

Thanks,
Daniel Eng

Hi Jan,

I appreciate your concern and can empathize with you in regard to providing plans, etc. Rest assured though with MicroStation CONNECT Edition, our plans are to do quarterly updates to help organizations plan and schedule updates.

Thanks,
Daniel Eng

Hi Daniel,

Unknown said:

our plans are to do quarterly updates to help organizations plan and schedule updates.

Yes, who reads MicroStation Community forum is probably aware of it, but I don't thing anybody else is.

More serious problem is that I don't know any customer that use MicroStation only but always some other products are implemented also. So the information about MicroStation as alone is not very usefull, because rarely MicroStation can be upgraded / migrated independently from the rest of project workspace.

I know your focus is MicroStation, but information about MicroStation only are not enough. Lack of consistent and clear information about other product plans (PowerDraft, Navigator, View, geo, building, civil...) is nearly total.

With regards,

  Jan

So what do I do with the Bentley View CONNECT that I have installed? Is there a future for it or do I just uninstall on the basis that this version isn't going to be upgraded any time soon?

stuartw said:

So what do I do with the Bentley View CONNECT that I have installed? Is there a future for it or do I just uninstall on the basis that this version isn't going to be upgraded any time soon?

bump!

We require some clear and concise instruction.
Just because software is removed from sidtribution, this action differs greatly from actively stating the recommendation is to removed from client side.