[CONNECT] Release of Update 12?

f.mandoki said:

We're almost always about  the last language group to receive their version.

I am not sure about Czech versions, but I think we are after you ... which makes sense when German speaking and Czech speaking markets are compared ;-)

f.mandoki said:

I hope that at some stage Bentley releases all languages on the same day! That's not rocket science, it just needs some patience until all translations have rolled in.

Well, maybe the problem is that Bentley has no localization group. I know there are some people with "localization" on their business cards, but they know nothing about localization, there is zero enthusiasm or practical experience with localization and how it works in real life when software is implemented in particula industry with defined terminology and processes. But they like a lot their Excel tables and SAP forms and their primary goals are whether localization is done by always the same company (which makes life simpler), but definitely not quality. Nobody in Bentley is listening, there is no official way (and simple, with feedback) how to report localization issue and I do not remember any activity from Bentley "we would like to collect translations / localizations inputs from you" ... so we are back at lack of communication.

I am aware I am harsh and probably breaking community rules, but they are my real experiences from last about 10 years trying to solve terrible quality of localization. In the past I maintained personal list of localization issues in MicroStation (I did a lot of trainings that are perfect opportunity to find typos and wrong translations), but when I discussed an option to provide localization services, the answer was I am not certified and approved for the localization and when I am interested in localization, I should cooperate with selected translation company. I had a list of few hundreds of issues (in one product!) as evidence of poor job, but the priority was used the same company, not to make the product better and users happier. So after some time, I gave up.

Because of delays with translated versions availability and also because of so many mistakes in translations, I know many users prefer to use English version, but it's not solution for everybody. Moreover some users told me they refused to use Bentley Map, because it's so wrongly localized, that they do not understand the functionality (which is a result of fact the translator knew nothing about GIS terminology and uses 1:1 translations from some normal vocabularly).

Localization is the topic for another (and very long and depressing) discussion, I have incredible (from localization perspective) findings in new Bentley webs, CONNECTION Client, CONNECT Advisor etc...

Anyway, MicroStation Update 12 was released, so it's time to test it and report bugs... ;-)

With regards,

  Jan

Hi Dan,

Dan Eng said:

We are still continuing to address performance and optimization issues in various areas of the product.

it seems you have started work for marketing team. This is unsubstantial marketing phrase. Every software company address performance and balance this effort with investment into new features. What is Bentley's differentiation in such case?

From top product MicroStation has become just average. I agree with Mark Shamoun the competitive products have also own bugs and troubles and MicroStation still can shine in some areas, but as more users (including me) noted, how the development and the migration is communicated is just disaster and my feeling is that it creates much worse feeling and worse acceptance than the reality is.

Dan Eng said:

I'll relay this back to the team and I'll check to see if we have any statistics from a baseline comparison for the Properties dialog.

I hope such statistics exists, otherwise I will be in great doubt about how development in Bentley works. It's one from gold software development rules: Don't assume, measure, always!

Even for some simple tools I developed for my customers, I created simple scripts (VBA for rough measurement or C# where higher precision was required) to measure tool performance, especially when it was about to process many elemens. Nothing complicated, just simple stopwatch, but it ensures there will be not slow done because of a new feature is added. It's not about to measure everything (as well as it makes no sense to target 100% test coverage), but to focus on reported problem(s) and evaluate progress using facts and numbers.

Critical problem with Properties dialog is known from early MicroStation releases, I also talked about it with Sunand Sandurkar some time ago, so I would expect it will be adressed at least as information in release notes (even when the performance improvement is small).

Dan Eng said:

I look forward to your feedback

In my opinion it's primarily Bentley's responsibility to demonstrate enhancements and changes in their products and it's where you are defeated pretty when compared with competitors.

Why companies like Autodesk or ESRI are able to share more detailed and better formulated information (like "in this release, the performance improvements were implemented to this tool, this tool and this workflow, there is an example..."), sometimes supported by numbers ("when loading data above tens of MB, the process is about 50% faster")? Bentley? Nothing.

I remember also (I guess it was from team behind Visual Studio) videos demonstrating progress in development and final state when problem with loading huge projects was addressed in several consequent releases.

... so it's, again, not about features themselves and whether it works this way or that way, but about efficient communication.

Dan Eng said:

once Update 13 is released in regard to the Properties.

Because I am not in optimistic mood, I guess in that time I will mark off some more customers moving MicroStation to (maybe) maintained-only installation and standardiing on another platform. As was mentioned already in this discussion, you are delayed by few years and honestly, recent e-mail about V8i support discontinuation in situation, when CE is not able to handle some basic user operations, made customers pretty angry. It was really <irony starts> perfect timing <irony ends> to spread such information when promised product release is delayed by more than 2 months and (edited) first reactions demonstrate some serious bugs have not been still resolved, despite of reported long time ago.

With regards,

  Jan

Hi Jan,

We are still continuing to address performance and optimization issues in various areas of the product.  I'll relay this back to the team and I'll check to see if we have any statistics from a baseline comparison for the Properties dialog. We are focused solely on defects for Update 13 and we have targeted improvements for optimizing the Properties dialog in Update 13.

I look forward to your feedback, once Update 13 is released in regard to the Properties.

Thanks,

Dan

At the moment, this is one of the main disruptions to our workflow. The Properties dialogue is really slowing us down when selecting multiple items or groups/cells containing many elements.

We don't yet have many users on CE. However those that are using it, find it better to simply close the properties dialogue entirely when working. Which is a shame.

Also I had hoped that the bug where priorities are being ignored when printing would have been fast-tracked for this release. It is so fundamental to our ability to use this software (I'm guessing same for most users'). Some drawings simply cannot be printed until this is fixed. I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind would think waiting another 4 months for U13 is acceptable.

Hi Dan,

thanks for the announcement, it's great Update 12 is finally available. And the list of fixed issues seems to be what I think the most of users expects for every version: Fixing bugs and optimizing performance is much more important than introducing new features (and potentially new bugs).

Unfortunately one issue that has been total migration blocker for substantial part of my users (and was discussed several times, so it's not unknown to Bentley), is still not addressed: Performance issue / MicroStation slow-down / halt when more elements are selected with Properties (Element information) dialog opened.

I am not able to compare whether Update 12 is faster than Update 11 in this scenario (do you have any statistics if and in what scenarios Update 12 is faster?), but it's still unaccaptably slow and many times slower than V8i with the same design file. To remember to close Properties dialog every time it's nod needed is not a solution.

With regards,

  Jan