r13 Early Impressions

My general impression is that it feels a bit more responsive and I like the new V8i mode implementation. However I see Bentley have just posted a blog with opening times. It seems (If I read it correctly) that unless you have a massive data set then V8i is still faster. IMO Connect should be faster in all situations. 

Duncan Macdonald said:

unless you have a massive data set then V8i is still faster

This Bentley blog discusses the DGN file opening times.  I've reproduced their table and added a column that shows the performance of CONNECT compared with V8i...

Apparently, their conclusion is that we should all work with files greater than 800MB, because then we'll have a faster experience using CONNECT than with V8i!  Most of us, most of the time, are working with files well below 800MB, so we're stuck with a slower experience.

https://communities.bentley.com/products/microstation/b/microstation_blog/posts/time-for-change-help-your-colleagues-switch-to-microstation-connect-edition-1885868783

which reads to me as somewhat desperate. The 'advantages' of Connect are listed. My comments on them below

• Sheet tracking and ordering - This is to slow and lacks basic features that would make it useful.
• Tables - Finally but to be honest we don't use them enough for this to be a must have.
• Item types and property- driven reporting and annotation - Potentially useful but for most things I need tags work just fine
• Explorer Slow. Keep it closed 
• Parametric modeling, parametric cells Could be good but not robust enough yet and Revit does it much better
• Reality modeling support for ContextCapture reality meshes We haven't needed any of this on a project as yet
• CONNECT services like Issue Resolution Service, Standards Sharing, ProjectWise Share, and CONNECT Advisor . Don't use
• Online help This is not advantage as it's slow and not updated much more often than the delivered help file.
• Bing Maps can be used as background images We could do this already and anyway would use Google
• Expanded interoperability with support for multiple file formats and versions This is about the only advantage and the one thing I sell Connect on.

My strategy at the moment is to put new users onto Connect as they don't know what they are missing. i'm trying to move new projects to Connect but until I physically remove V8i from users, the experienced users will go back to V8i as it's faster and more stable and they know the interface. CE13 seems to be an improvement but there is still away to go IMO to persuade users that CE is a better option..