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ProjectWise

Score9 out of 10

18 Reviews and Ratings

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What is ProjectWise?

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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Who Buys & Uses Bentley ProjectWise

ProjectWise Reviews

What users are saying about ProjectWise.
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ProjectWise Review.

Incentivized
Richard HindsView profile
Hitachi Rail CAD Manager/ProjectWise Administrator in Engineering at Hitachi Rail (10001 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ProjectWise is used as intended by the developer as a complete document management application within the engineering department for all document types, with workflows enabling version & access controls, preventing unauthorized access while maintaining an audit trail of all documents placed within the application. Being able to transmit documents from the same application where they were produced is an added benefit. Documents are stored in a single location & not spread across multiple server shares, which would otherwise make them hard to locate if not familiar with a particular project or file storage location. The scope of the use case is to make finding documents easier regardless of project or location where documents are created.

Pros

  • Maintain an audit trail of all documentation.
  • Integrate title blocks with the ProjectWise database.
  • Keep documentation for all projects in a single application that anyone with the appropriate authority can access.

Cons

  • Cannot think of anything presently.

Return on Investment

  • Centralized document location giving great control on projects.
  • Not as widely used as it could be so potential loss of control on some projects.
  • Can eliminate unnecessary rework by using a common data source shared by everyone on the project, regardless of geographic location.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Asite, LiveLink by Comsol and Clindex CDMS/CTMS/EDC

Other Software Used

MicroStation, AutoCAD, DraftSight

ProjectWise Review

Johnathon PageView profile
Senior Drafter - Structures in Engineering at BGE (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

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

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

Autodesk Vault, 12d Synergy, MS SharePoint, Dropbox and OneDrive

Other Software Used

Autodesk Vault, 12d Synergy, MS SharePoint

Love it for large projects

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

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

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • 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

Alternatives Considered

OneDrive, Dropbox and SharePoint

Other Software Used

OneDrive, Dropbox, SharePoint

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