Windows 11 Compatibility ?

Hi dominic SEAH,

Thank you for your post.

As stated by other users and colleagues in this thread, MicroStation CONNECT is not currently certified to run on Windows 11 - although there are plans for certification in the future, an exact version/release cannot be guaranteed at this time.

I would advise you withhold your OS upgrade until a certified version of MicroStation CONNECT is commercially available.

Until this time, utilizing MicroStation CONNECT in a Windows 11 environment is at your own risk.

Cheers!
Jayson P.

Hi Jayson,

Jayson Perry said:

although there are plans for certification in the future, an exact version/release cannot be guaranteed at this time.

it is another proof Bentley do not treat MicroStation as main product anymore and do not care about its active development and support. I am disappointed.

Comparing with competitors: ESRI explained in June (!) how compatibility testing will be done and how new Windows can affect ArcGIS Pro users (including dependency on used GIS database). AutoCAD announce already Windows 11 is to be supported by both 2021 and 2022 versions.

Regards,

  Jan

Jan Šlegr said:

it is another proof Bentley do not treat MicroStation as main product anymore and do not care

I concur. So what is their main product?

Jan Šlegr said:

it is another proof Bentley do not treat MicroStation as main product anymore and do not care

I concur. So what is their main product?

Bob Rayner said:

So what is their main product?

My feeling for last few years is all resources have been dedicated to iTwin.js ecosystem (both open-source part and iModel Hub commercial back-end) and related products. The most of people I know from MicroStation development (like Paul Connelly, Jeff Marker, Bill Steinbock and Keith Bentley, of course ;-) now commit their work to iTwin project. Also Sunand Sandurkar, who led platform development team in the past (and did pretty good job there), is now in charge of Digital Tower products (solution developed on top of iTwin / iModel technology).

Everything else (but I am aware I know in detail only a fraction of products) looks like there are no resources, skilled teams, and even no clear visions: MicroStation ... still slow, with plenty of recurring bugs, visualization ... not working well, fragmented between VUE and LumenRT (and Pro), OBD ... nothing exciting I guess, OCM ... I do not see any strong movement, maybe civil products look not so bad.

Regards,

  Jan

Oh, have no fear, the civil products are no better than the platform...Bugs, regressions, version discrepancies, half-baked tools that only kind-of work, convoluted plans production devised by people who (it would seem) have not much experience in a production environment, not to mention a backlog of requests that may never see the light of day.

Amen sister preach it! 

Discontinuing support  for V8i ss10 when  CE still isnt  fit for purpose is just stupid.

 Getting really hard to defend still using  Microstation to our masters and colleagues,   no wonder so many are going  over to Autocad and Civil 3d and embracing  the dark side and just giving  up on Microstation... .. too bad,  really a sad state of affairs .. glad I'll be retiring in a couple more years..

yeap, in the past, management would once in a while ask "why don't we switch over to the A team? why do we stick with team B?". Though arduous, it was a straight forward cost-benefit analysis and team B won most of the time. And the question was only asked once every 3-4yr. 

In the last 4 years, the same question had been brought up yearly. The analysis had been compiled yearly, and the result getting less and less straight forward over the years. I think it'll soon come to a point where a tie will be reached. 

Bob Rayner said:

So what is their main product?

I think that this question has been slowly becoming irrelevant.

Bentley's quarterly earnings calls have been quite interesting to listen to.

On one hand, 'modeling' is stiil the dominant money earner for Bentley. So, if you see Mstn being the underpnning tech for half of Bentley's revenues, then Mstn should have significant funding and ROI...?

On the other hand, I think that the platform group would have to compete with the verticals for funding. I suspect that most users will not be using Mstn alone but in combination with a vertical these days. Dev in the verticals is probably a lot more expensive being reliant on SME domain knowledge integration.

The high growth utilities verticals like OpenUtilities etc will not struggle to get more resources but what about poor old OpenBuildings, with its legacy C libraries and big competition that keeps introducing new shiny features? To keep up, OBD will probably keep absorbing and be forced to bundle in more associated feature suites like Facilities Management and ProsStructures etc. OpenX should be cheap to do, theoretically, but I doubt it. 

Even OpenPlant is apparently struggling due to the drop in the fossil fuels sector, oil prices. Probably temporary but the long term trend is down. OP was a big investment aimed at an established lucrative sector, but it helps not to have all your eggs in one basket. The trend is 'clearly' more OPEX, less CAPEX where Mstn and more modeling would be required. ContextCapture was also a big investment.. not sure how its ROI stands but it does boost Mstn's OPEX credentials?

A new appetite for tech support renaissance, aka User Success and Virtuosity teams sounds very very promising. It would be a good way to dogfood and improve software quality. The guys doing it coming from the SME world in combo with the coders should be a potent breeding ground for superusers and future team leaders in user organisations overun by the usual Autodesk etc punters. The new Bentley Education portal is money well spent. Again, another competing drain on funding. 

An even at platform-to-platform level, it is interesting to see Synchro doing well. But Synchro has its own platform and graphic system which duplicates Mstn's. Even the new Legion 3D seems to be based on another graphic system. LumenRT seems to be on its way to be replaced by Nvidia Omniverse? More platforms, smaller budgets, longer bug lists, slower bug resolution? Deep interop goes way back in the queue. LumenRT is a good example of how not to do things? After years or slow dev, stringing the users on, still a dog and now being replaced by another bigger more expensive dog(?) by others. Why can't Bentley just focus? Not good to hear that Ray Bentley is now retiring. Had to happen, of course, but I fear that as more of the B-level coder-owners go the less nimble Bentley is going to be.

Another big competing drain on funding will be the 'simulation' apps. Bentley has been expanding its offering here, building on its established presence in the structural analysis market. Looking at this layered diagramme, analytics is seen as a core domain and 'general modeling' ie Mstn an enabling ring layer connecting the verticals. All that interop stuff like ISM, EC Framework Schemas and the RFA Interpreter work seems to have petered out, so probably a lot more investment and time is still needed before we see some game changers emerge. iTwins.js is probably the replacement but it is not Mstn-based.