BlueCielo 2010 Update

It’s been a bit since I’ve written an update on the latest news from BlueCielo ECM Solutions (the developers of the Meridian and TeamWork products we implement). With new releases of Meridian and TeamWork out, and an exciting new BlueCielo product coming late this year, now is probably a good time.

Probably the biggest news going forward is that BlueCielo will be releasing a new, totally Microsoft SharePoint-based document management solution called ProjectForce. For those who are not familiar with it, Sharepoint Server is a software platform developed by Microsoft that can be used to create solutions for document management, project management, collaboration, web publishing and a variety of other business functions. As a platform product, Sharepoint is not designed necessarily as an out-of-the-box software solution such as Microsoft Office. It can be customized and configured to serve a variety of business purposes such as those listed above. The limitation of SharePoint for most of our customers at Hagerman & Company is that it has little or no capability to manage, share and otherwise work with CAD files. That is where BlueCielo ProjectForce will come in.

ProjectForce adds the following functionality to Microsoft SharePoint:

CAD title block integration
External reference/assembly relationship management
CAD integration for AutoCAD, Microstation, Revit, Autodesk Inventor, SolidWorks and all MS Office applications
Embedded viewer with view, redline and markup capabilities
Manage document changes, revisions and references

Additionally, ProjectForce will offer advanced capabilities in the areas of project management/collaboration, transmittals and automatic document publishing such as from CAD to PDF. While not as advanced in configurability or functionality as BlueCielo’s flagship Meridian and TeamWork products, many companies may find ProjectForce to be extremely suitable for their needs. Please stay tuned for more information on ProjectForce!

As mentioned earlier, BlueCielo is also releasing BlueCielo Meridian and TeamWork 2010. Some of the new features of the 2010 releases include;

Major user interface improvements including independent windows for shortcuts, viewing pane, property page, etc. that can be dragged, docked, automatically hidden, pinned, etc., along with different user selectable visual UI styles, more modern icons and a configurable toolbar.
The concept of client application scopes has been added. A scope is a configurable, named set of vault objects and functions that limit what a user may see and do in a vault. For example, a vault used for managing facilities might define scopes for as-built documents, design projects, archived documents, or maintenance management. Also, a vault used for manufacturing documents might define different scopes for standard parts, active projects, and inactive projects. A configurable toolbar is available for each scope.
Many improvements in search functionality have been made.
Support for MS Office 2010 along with the following additions to support for popular CAD applications have been made: AutoCAD 2011, AutoCAD Electrical 2011, Autodesk Inventor 2011, SolidWorks 2009 SP 5.1 and 2010 SP 1-2.1, Autodesk Revit 2010 64-bit versions (Architecture, Structural, and MEP) and MicroStation V8i SELECTseries 1
The property values of two documents may now be compared in addition to graphical comparison.
The URL of documents is now shown at the bottom of the General page in Web Access. The URL can be copied to the Windows Clipboard and pasted into other applications (for example, email) in order to provide a hyperlink to the latest released revision of the document.
The BlueCielo viewer now supports the AutoVue Web Version (Java applet), which can be deployed for zero footprint web clients and 64-bit users.

Configuration improvements include:

Multi-value string properties are now supported. A configurable separator character may be defined, which causes the property to display a drop-down combo box control on property pages from which users can select multiple values read from a lookup list, table, or other source.
The layout of property page panel elements may now be in a dynamic array with the visibility and behavior of each element controlled by the value of a specified property. This makes defining one property page useful for multiple different document types. The controlling property can be used to distinguish between document types, workflow states, user security roles, and other conditions that you require. Convenient controls are also provided to set a fixed field width and VBScript expressions to control the visibility and read-only behavior of multiple panel elements at one time.
A new VBScript event DocGenericEvent_PrepareCommand, property Batch.ProcessAsBatch, and method Batch.AddDocuments were added to support programmatic building of batches of documents and processing batches by custom commands.
A new VBScript function FindDocuments has been added for searching for documents from within VBScript.

In all, the Meridian and TeamWork release notes list over 75 product enhancements.

Other Meridian-only enhancements include:

The Meridian Enterprise Data Library which provides a read-only, synchronized replica of the Meridian document metadata. The metadata can be stored in an SQL Server or Oracle database. You can use the Data Library as a data source for your favorite reporting application or for more complex reports than can be configured in Meridian Enterprise. You can configure reports against the Data Library using any application that supports SQL Server or Oracle as a data source.
Many improvements to the advanced Meridian modules including Global Collaboration FrameWork, Transmittal, Publisher, E-Mail Manager, Explorer, Asset Management

This page last edited on Monday, February 14, 2011