Starting Geopac and/or Openroads with my company - Where do I start?

Instead of "fumbling around on your own" for 3 weeks, you could have received one solid week of training in ORD and then spent the next two weeks productively using it.  It is sad that so many companies have cultures where managers prefer to bury costs by having their employees waste time and budget (and sacrifice quality and employee morale) working unproductively rather than making an upfront investment in training that pays much greater dividends.  I can empathize - I had to learn ORD on my own as well.  I suggest starting with the training available to you free from Bentley at https://learn.bentley.com/app/Public.  Click on the orange "Find Training" link and go from there.  They have training that is organized into logical blocks and sequences.  As others on this thread have said, there is also a lot out there in the Wiki and on Youtube.  However, I think there is value in starting with the basics and then adding to your skills by logically building on it.  Keep at it - it will be worth it.  When you run into trouble, submit Support Requests - that's what you are paying "Maintenance" for.  And keep posting to this forum - there's a huge pool of expertise available to you from folks with a lot of good will.  Good luck!

Karl Dauber, PE
Advance Consulting
Charlotte, NC
www.advconsult.net

Karl, my company has always been kinda opposite. We've always felt that it's better to familiarize first. I'm sure that my one solid day shouldn't have been that hard on the budget. Sometimes when you hop in and get to know where the gears are, how to adjust the seat some and how she steers down the road you take better to learning how to race. Our work loads are sporadic and I just had some time. Any training would have to be planned but never out of the question. I've already classed on the basics of Civil 3D. And acad was a breeze.

I have been instructed on how to download the latest ORD. But my work has ticked up some so maybe this next week. I look forward in seeing what this program does. I'm hoping the newer version is better than the previous in respect to I was not able to create, nor use any of my old personal modified microstation menu's or mdlapps and such that I have created? I have a very fine hefty side bar menu I depend on that so far has been unsupported by ORD. It's been a back and forth with microstation.

I've been pretty good at hopping in and learning how to drive in the past, we will see how it goes. Civil becomes common knowledge over so many years that it helps with freeing up some learn space.

I will keep you all informed.

Thanks again for the encouragement!

Yeah, a lot of your older apps and menus and tools may not work in ORD/Connect. They have redone the interface and there have been some changes to the MDL code. You do have the ability to customize the interface, so you can probably recreate a lot of it. But the change from 32-bit-to 64-bit did change a lot of things under the hood.

That said, the workflow of ORD seems to be more similar to Civil3D, so that learning curve might be easier.

Yeah, a lot of your older apps and menus and tools may not work in ORD/Connect. They have redone the interface and there have been some changes to the MDL code. You do have the ability to customize the interface, so you can probably recreate a lot of it. But the change from 32-bit-to 64-bit did change a lot of things under the hood.

That said, the workflow of ORD seems to be more similar to Civil3D, so that learning curve might be easier.

I think I am discovering that Openroads 2020 R3 (10.09.00.91) does not recognize Microstation V8I SELECTSeries 4? When I browse to any of my drawing files to open, it is giving me an error basically saying:

"This data is not supported"

I can list the entire error if it helps?

It only allows me to open in "Read Only" mode. Is this correct? And how do I go about mingling the two programs I have now? Do I need to downgrade my Microstation?

Still very eager to dive into this program to see what it's about. I just want to make sure I'm making the overall right decisions first before spending much time.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

You can't mingle the two programs. At this point, your projects are in one or the other.

If you need SS4 capability because of projects already in the pipeline, then you will want to upgrade to SS10. You can run SS10 on the same computer as ORD.

But you can't take projects back and forth between them. The data frameowrk is just too different. I believe there is a utility to update your SS4 information up to ORD. Not sure if you could port any of your ORD back out to SS10.

I wouldn't recommend trying to convert data back and forth over the course of a project - too much room for something to get written wrong in translation over time. Pick one for each project, and keep it there.

Thank you MaryB. I will upgrade to SS10 and see where it goes. From what I am reading, it looks like I need to upgrade to SS10 to be ready for the new windows 10 we've been wanting to go to anyways.

I just have way too much invested in Microstation at this point to abandon it without knowing ORD's capabilities.

Thanks again!

MaryB, thinking outside the box here... Can I just create a new ORD "blank" Project and then reference in and file fence an existing V8I DGN base file completed project to work on without issues? I'm not fond of going back and forth between two programs to begin with myself. And as noted, I just merely just want to dip my feet and see what ORD is all about. And so far, unable to even open it up. I don't care for any of my data or resource files and can delete them from the new ORD project directory if needed. I just want to try to run ORD on an existing project that's already been designed.

In the meantime, I've once again sent in another request to my company technician for another upgrade. It usually takes a couple of days with this Covid. We all work from home now and the processes can be compounded with more work shifted towards the tech keeping everybody else happy as well. He has 64 stations to keep going not counting front desk and accounting.

From what I am reading, SS10 will be the path I need to follow anyways given we plan to go to Windows 10 soon.

As said, I can run Microstation blind folded, backwards, up and down and 3 times faster than anybody. And what I get paid to do. Therefore, I am not the one responsible to read up on all the latest Bentley news. I've only been thrown that recently being my tech knows nothing about it. I'm just in a position to make some drastic decisions for the company to get our product out.

Thanks again MaryB. I'm looking forward to a response. You have been outstanding in responding with good answers. I'm just still very anxious to just open ORD in a project.

Sincerely,

Jeremy

If you want to bring one of your existing projects forward just to play around, there is a "Version Checker" in 10.08...

https://communities.bentley.com/products/road___site_design/w/road_and_site_design__wiki/41243/video-upgrading-ss4-ss10-dgn-files-for-use-in-openroads-openrail-designer-obsolete-civil-data-found

or Civil File Manager in 10.09...

https://communities.bentley.com/products/road___site_design/w/road_and_site_design__wiki/51913/civil-file-manager

I haven't played with these at all, but you may be able to find some extra information about these in the forums or Wiki.
I know the feeling of being the MicroStation Guru, but not having the "authority" to do anything about it. It's surprisingly often that IT only knows what the software is, and nothing about how to run it - which is fine, except that somebody needs to know the HOW, too.