Open Roads - Are you using it? Tell us more...

We are a County Engineering Dept. We mainly do short road sections, bridges, parks and site designs. I sometimes wonder if I saddled the wrong horse 20 + years ago when I chose the Microstation/Fieldworks/Inroads solution for our office. Mainly chose it because our DOT used it and Intergraph was a local company. Have never had any real training on the products. I did joint the learn training program several years ago and I feeling pretty good with InRoads. Then came SS3. I had spent many hours learning site modeler and roadway designer and bang they are gone. OpenRoads is staring me in the face with DGNLIBs, workspaces etc... Things I never really had to worry about before (we only work for ourselves). Also read where a few DOT's and the Army Corp is switching. Adds more fuel to the second guessing.

All this new stuff is almost like starting over. Again I wonder about the horse. I only keep up with the latest so those that follow me won't be too far behind. That and I really like the new stuff that comes out. Looking at what OpenRoads is supposed to be able to do seems fantastic. I've been trying to learn it but I admit it's been slow. I can see where it will be better in the long run if the bugs can be straighten out (I crash more now). But I'm unsure if I'm following the best path.

Sorry for the ramble but I don't know anyone else working with this stuff. Local private firms seem to use Autocad/Civil3d. Don't guess I know anyone doing what we do, using what we use.

We are a County Engineering Dept. We mainly do short road sections, bridges, parks and site designs. I sometimes wonder if I saddled the wrong horse 20 + years ago when I chose the Microstation/Fieldworks/Inroads solution for our office. Mainly chose it because our DOT used it and Intergraph was a local company. Have never had any real training on the products. I did joint the learn training program several years ago and I feeling pretty good with InRoads. Then came SS3. I had spent many hours learning site modeler and roadway designer and bang they are gone. OpenRoads is staring me in the face with DGNLIBs, workspaces etc... Things I never really had to worry about before (we only work for ourselves). Also read where a few DOT's and the Army Corp is switching. Adds more fuel to the second guessing.

All this new stuff is almost like starting over. Again I wonder about the horse. I only keep up with the latest so those that follow me won't be too far behind. That and I really like the new stuff that comes out. Looking at what OpenRoads is supposed to be able to do seems fantastic. I've been trying to learn it but I admit it's been slow. I can see where it will be better in the long run if the bugs can be straighten out (I crash more now). But I'm unsure if I'm following the best path.

Sorry for the ramble but I don't know anyone else working with this stuff. Local private firms seem to use Autocad/Civil3d. Don't guess I know anyone doing what we do, using what we use.

Aucivil,

I'm guessing you're from Huntsville?

As the one who started this particular thread, let me answer a few things. I started with InRoads at MD DOT - and we have a single main office that does design. This also did not include the toll facilities, airport, mass transit or rail. Of those, only tolls was also a MicroStation shop. Although when we migrated from IGRDS to InRoads, tolls went to GEOPAK. In fact, within our highway department, the traffic department started with Autodesk and DCA before eventually migrating to Bentley.

As DOT's go, we are pretty small potatoes. From what I understood, PA and Texas (and probably others) had district based design offices that were as big as our HQ office.
So now, I work for a minority owned firm. We have approximately 12 seats each of Bentley PowerInRoads products and 11 seats of Civil 3D. Most of my users (I'm the CADD Manager as well as a designer) have to be able to work in either. We also do a fair amount of Survey work, probably equally split too.

My plan, is to stay in Ss2 until the DOT clients develop DGNLIB's capable of being used with Ss3/4. I have seen some US COE workspaces that look promising. For my world, I even have to deal with probably 5 or 6 different level naming conventions. At least where you are, you hopefully have one.

At the DOT, the mass transit department has migrated to Bentley, but decided the V8 level names that the highway and tolls departments were using was not good enough, so they opted for a modified NCS approach xx-xxxx-xxxx. Unfortunately, their system is different than the Army Corps NCS system.

So, between Civil 3D and Open Roads, I still prefer Open Roads. The initial setup for Civil 3D is as daunting as Open Roads. Survey alone is far more complicated and their is no XIN file. Eveything must be done in a Civil 3D seat and all settings are stored in DWT (templates) so managing them is much more complicated. Are there some Civil 3D things I like? Yes. But other areas are annoyingly over complicated.

CADDCOP,

Thanks for the reply.

Yes - Huntsville is just across the river. We have 3 seats of Microstation, InRoads Suite and several of the Bentley/Haestad hydraulic products. We generally work on separate projects which are housed on our individual workstations. I feel like Microstation/InRoads Suite is geared toward multiple power users working on different phases of a project. So we are kinda using a Pile Driver to drive in a nail. But I do like the power.

Not trying to derail your thread but have have you looked into SITEOPS.

I have always been reluctant to introduce yet another tool when we already pay annual fees to keep our Bentley and Autodesk seats up to date. When InRoads ran in both MicroStation and AutoCAD, we used that capability for Survey and considered extending that to design when Autodesk began phasing out Land Desktop over Civil 3D. I figured if my Land Desktop users had to learn a new software, why not make it InRoads. But then, as Autodesk was pushing 64 bit AutoCAD, InRoads was no longer an option for AutoCAD.
And since we no longer get admission to the BE conventions as part of our select fees, it is much harder to get approval to attend. So when you do get approval, you concentrate on what you have vs what you might want to get. At this point, I am lucky if I can attend once every four or five years - which in today's world, is an eternity.