Bentley ProjectWise vs. Cisco Business Edition 7000 (discontinued)

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.

Cisco business edition are well suited for the environment where we need regular communication as they are easy to dial and has got great features. The product is well suited for both small business and large enterprises. Speed dial, good voice quality are key features of Cisco phones. They are not well suited in scenarios where we do not have LAN connectivity or internet. Sometimes we may face latency and jitteriness which is not good.

Incentivized

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

• The platform supports up to 5,000 users connected at the same time in voice and video calls.
• Everything is virtually deployed on Cisco servers with reliability.
• Intuitive configuration and user-friendly web interface.
• It has several types of IP phones and is compatible with legacy and multi-brand hardware with SIP protocol.

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.

• More cloud based services need to be added to the default service package.
• Companies frequently require a small contact center within the UC environment. It would be nice to see a build it contact center in the box.
• It would be nice to see some advanced AI based services (IVR voice recognition service) in the BE7K application list.
• Call recording should be also built in.

Incentivized

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.

Looking at the feature sets and customer experience overall it's a good investment to make. It provides insights and also gives needed reports and statistics.

• 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

• It has allowed for mostly smooth communication from department to department/office to office.
• It allows for saved phone # / last contact to appear quickly.
• It has allowed for safety warnings/announcements to emerge all across every office so that everyone within the organization is on the same page about events when they occur.

Incentivized