Bentley ProjectWise vs. Nextcloud

Well suited to large projects & organizations where there may be 2 or 3 applications used in parallel to do what ProjectWise can do on its own.

Incentivized

While searching for tools to satisfy a quickly scaling online startup, we found Nextcloud is well suited for today's remote collaborative team. Nextcloud has just the right toolset for a collaborative workspace including video, chat, many file formats accepted, and intuitive user interface. Comparatively other popular tools like Trello were distracting with more features than functionality. Working with Nextcloud is much like having a workspace with all your content and tools available anywhere on any device, without the ads, distractions, and irrelevant functionality. We will continue to utilize Nextcloud as a remote workspace for evolving and scaling teams.

Incentivized

• organize projects
• create restore points/audit trail
• locking files and not providing access to certain users
• collaborative files

• File sharing (internal, public or federated).
• One software, many activities (files, address book, calendar, chat, edit, email) ...
• Groupware, sharing between users or groups is really easy and finely controlled.
• Integrations and many apps.

• It's worse than a virus, it WILL get into every part of your system, with the only way to get rid of it is to do a full system format.
• Integration is dependent on if Bentley wishes to support your software.
• DMS system, it just makes it incompatible with native programs unless you have integration, which is at Bentley's discretion for support, exporting to your system is a work around, though this takes significant time to export and to re-teach PW linked file locations when you reimport it.
• Clunky user interface, if you want to work on more than 1 file at a time expect to be at least 50-80% slower.
• a Labyrinth of forms that are prone to user error.
• Interface straight out of Windows 2000, and that's generous.
• Inability to delete or even "Recycle bin" files, this is more an admin issue but most PW instance lock out deleting files, which makes it impractical for general use.
• Encourages unnecessary and convoluted workflows, This comes down to the Pro of "The backend is customisable," it may be customisable but this encourages system admins to write convoluted and time consuming workflows just because they can.
• Seems to require an IT team to manage it - this probably relates to the highly customisable component.

• Slow in comparison to other solutions
• May be complex for the start since there are lots of apps and features
• May be not focusing on core topics

Incentivized

It is simple to use once users become familiar with it & it has a familiar Windows-like interface.

Incentivized

It's easy to use and easy to maintain. It also provides many useful programs and plugins to make work even more productive; just check what's available and how you could use them to your advantage. Also, check the Nextcloud Files app on your phone, which makes everything available at the touch of your fingers.

Incentivized

I never needed support as everything always worked fine. The documentation on Nextcloud website is extensive and clear. The community is very active on the forum and should support you if you don't already find what you are looking for.

I think ProjectWise is better for technical users than Dropbox, one drive, or SharePoint. It is less intuitive than any of the others though. It is better for restoring files and creating an audit trail than any of the other programs. It is better for sharing large files in a short period of time than SharePoint or one drive. It is also better for larger teams and larger projects than SharePoint or Dropbox.

PIM and file sharing are the same as you get in Google's Drive/Calendar. With extensions, you can also implement web meetings (e.g., by using Jitsi), but this comes with more administrative effort. In the end, this comes down to how big of a user/customer base you are supporting. For small enterprises, Nextcloud stacks up very well against its big competitors. At a large scale, you will have increased maintenance and resource costs which you need to check against licensing fees for the cloud providers.

• Provides a central place for people to store files.
• Incredibly long time to fill out forms to initialise a file. 4 hours to update files instead of about 10mins.
• Significantly longer to open drawings. up to 1.5mins to open vs about 10seconds.
• Can't easily batch script over files, thus making this workflow either ineffective or redundant. Scripts can take 10mins to do an hours worth of repetitive tasks.
• Restricts you to 1 file at a time, so rather than in the morning opening 10-15 files at once and doing other work while they open you have to site their and open via dialogue boxes each and every file. This can take 10-15mins of your morning run.
• People seem to email more documents unofficially now, which kind of defeats the first point.

• It allowed us access to our files from any device over the internet.
• It helped manage and organize our file sharing with third parties.
• It provided a secure wrapper for accessing files.