This next series of blogs have been more than a few years in the coming. Any of you who have been around Bentley products since the days of version 4 and 5 know just some of the frustration many of us have with Connect. Right or wrong, these are just my opinions and my journey to get me to where I am today. I hope that there are at least some lessons in here that can't be learnt by all parties. So, I hope you get at least something out of this blog series. Thanks.
As a CAD Admin there is no such thing as consistency. Client standards, users, project styles, discipline requirements all go together to keep us on our toes and have us trying not to step on too many. Yet, with all this there is one constant and that’s the chaos that can be created by software vendors.
Version updates. File format changes. Interface changes. Just when you think you have it all under control, the software vendor can make a change that brings it all crashing down. It sounds like an exaggeration, but that’s the reality when a change can bring down 10 years or more of development.
This is the journey I’ve faced since Bentley Connect first came out in beta. For anyone who has followed my blogs, I developed an interface and configuration methodology that allowed me to run builds for any Bentley package at any level needed:
Company
Site (office location)
Client
Project
User
Configurations in V8i gave us the flexibility to set things up to suit us. Add to this the hta interface and we’re left with an easy way to deliver builds that allowed us to lock down those little user annoyances like being able to break the reference file paths or play with vba they shouldn’t.
We could have all user files in a single location, making it easy to back up to the network.
Want to know more? Then check out:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-bear-forward-53471a11/recent-activity/posts/
So what is it about Connect that has created problems for those of us running custom builds?
Over the next few articles, I want to go through the issues, how it’s meant change to CADmanage and how these changes can mean issues to any of us customising Bentley products.
More soon, stay tuned.