It's Friday afternoon, winding down what has been a banner week for the Bentley Structural Team. We had six releases this week, two of which were entirely new products to market. It's true V8i has been a monumental undertaking for the entire company and this week really brought a lot out of our group. I'm very proud to have been a small part of this, and to be here at a company that produces the very tools I used to use as a practicing engineer just a year ago.
And that got me thinking about what it was like when I was on the other side, using this software day in and out to analyze and design structures. So, I wanted to take off my employee hat for this post. As odd as it might sound, I've been a nerd for engineering software long before I got to Bentley (one might say it's why I'm here, actually). So I want to go back to that mindset of envangelist for a short while to discuss just one feature that really struck me this week.
I spent three solid years as a very heavy user of the RAM Structural System. From fairly simply, one-story structures to some more elaborate buildings, I built a fair share of models. And, like many users, I was often trying to model structures that didn't always fit the standard building mold. I was one of the many users out there asking when sloping columns would become available. But it wasn't hard to see that such a feature could really complicate one of RAM's strongest design features: it's ability to rapidly model building structures. There's a good reason that RAM is the number one design tool for steel building structues: it's really fast. And in the design office, every bit of efficiency matters.
Of course, this week saw the release of RAM Structural System V8i and with it the ability to slope columns . What really struck me is the simple elegance of how this very powerful feature was implemented. From the standpoint of the user interface, basically one additional selection tool was added to the Move Column dialog. You now select if you want to move the bottom, top, or both ends of a column; where the first top options will result in a slope. That's it. No great changes in how a building is laid out by floors. No having to draw in columns from floor-to-floor. No new interface changes or additional dialogs in the modeler.
The feature's simplicity belies just how powerful an addition this really is. It opens up using RAM for far more sophisticated structures than previously possible, saving time and money for design firms.
Of course, there are many other aspects to sloped column to help the engineer, not to mention many more important new features in this release which further add to the capabilities of RAM SS. But the elegance in design of this feature has really caught my attention and I couldn't help but congratulate the team responsible for a job well done. This was very well implemented and the details were really well thought out.
So, as this week, this year, and V8i all wind down, let's congratuate jobs well done. But, looking forward, the bar has indeed been raised and next year will no doubt see equally impressive new tools for the structural engineer.