Bentley Systems offers ProjectWise, a construction management software for keeping construction project personnel and engineers up-to-date with most recent progress information, with daily logs and punchlists, risk item lifecycle management through identification, creation, tracking and resolution, RFI management, and document storage with automated sharing.
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OpenRoads Designer
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Bentley Systems offers OpenRoads Designer, their civil engineering and design platform which replaces the former GEOPAK Civil Engineering Suite, InRoads, MX, and PowerCivil.
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.
ORD is really focused on modeling of roads infrastructure projects, but includes a few design workflows that are in other disciplines such as stormwater and drainage design and site modeling tools for developments. This is really handy because you don't need a third-party application that you have to transfer your design files over to to carry on with the project. Including LumenRT for free with ORD is by far the most helpful feature because of the visualisation capabilities which most software does not include. ORD is well-suited for what the name of the product says - designing roads. I wouldn't say there are any scenarios in road design that it is less appropriate for.
Creating linear models, since the app is based on alignment models and templates to extrude along the alignment.
Precise long section/profile along horizontal alignment. The app practically flatten the horizontal alignment for profile generation.
Template control. Though the template creation takes a bit of effort to create due to the point rulings. However when done right allows the model to be specifically modified with use of functions like super-elevation, point control, widening, parametric 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.
ORD is a lot faster and a lot more modern than Civil 3D even though they're essentially the same product under different names (in terms of workflows). I find that the DGN file format used by ORD is far better than the DWG file format used by C3D because DGNs can contain much more information and multiple models per file. C3D is very heavy on memorizing keyboard inputs while ORD is a much more modern interface that relies mostly on using the mouse for inputs.
