Autodesk Docs vs. Bentley ProjectWise

Since my favorite feature is that it brings everyone together, I find it appropriate to interpret it from this perspective. The platform created for all project stakeholders to work together in real time helps increase project efficiency, reduce errors and minimize delays. It creates real-time data, analysis and reporting that will ensure increased and high project performance, which is a quantitative contribution to project management.

Incentivized

ProjectWise is good for really large projects with many team members. I would not recommend it for small projects or those with a small team of people working on them. It is best for technical people and those who plan to use it daily. There are better FTP options out there if you just want to use them for file sharing.

• It helps the design team carry out projects more efficiently by facilitating access to up-to-date documents
• It provides the opportunity to share, edit and collaborate on project documents in the cloud environment.
• It supports remote working and eliminates the need for employees to be together for the project or even be in the same city or country.

Incentivized

• It works for collaboration
• The backend is customisable to do work that other document management systems just cannot do.

• It is a bit expensive for small construction companies or project offices, and it is more difficult to reach, especially for countries with high exchange rates such as Turkey.
• It cannot integrate with other non-Autodesk software we use within the company.
• Being dependent on the internet is a problem. Of course, I know that being cloudy requires internet, but it may be an advantage to at least keep the used files in its own memory for a while.

Incentivized

• many users cannot be in the same file at the same time
• files are not automatically freed upon closure
• copying files to another ProjectWise folder is complicated. There is an option to copy, another to copy to, etc.

Bentley ProjectWise from a user perspective just does not stack up to even something as simple as Dropbox. ProjectWise is powerful, it is capable, it has a ton of features. The best implementation I have seen from Projectwise is where the admins unlocked everything and let the users do as they please defeating everything it stood for and using it as a big Dropbox account, though even then the user interface couldn't be improved still causing significant workflow delays. I would reluctantly leave a good company if they implement ProjectWise, I respect that it's powerful for system admins but it sucks for users. This means 2-10% of what it is used for is well designed while the other 98-90% of its functions are just bogged down by a lack of development in its user interface and I say this as someone who has periodically used it over the last 10 years and seen no effective improvement in usability. Bentley ProjectWise was one of the first I believe to do this type of system, but as is common with being the first is you don't keep up with the times and bring a lot of baggage with you.

• It has saved us time in archiving and versioning documents
• It has saved us effort in backing up files and restoring them when mistakes are made
• It has had an overall positive impact on our bottom line by helping with file sharing and collaboration