Design review tools

The past week has seen some blogging about design review tools from two of the AEC CAD heavyweights: Bentley and Autodesk.

Bentley has announced (29 January) the release of ProjectWise Navigator – “the first visual collaboration client for design review and analysis plus work packaging that fully supports iterative workflows and reuse of all content throughout the process.” The website has an 11-minute PowerPoint presentation by Joe Croser which gives a good overview of the product’s capabilities.

Meanwhile (and possibly not entirely coincidentally), Autodesk Design Review is now (as of 1 February) a free download – giving some of the Autodesk bloggers something to shout about (see Between the Lines, Beyond the Paper, and Connected, for example). The product has also just been independently reviewed by David Harrison at Stress-Free: Reviewing Autodesk Design Review. His conclusion:

Autodesk Design Review is a very promising tool for Windows based design teams seeking a simple way of exchanging design information, questions and opinion. The tool is free, powerful and relatively easy to use by those somewhat literate in CAD. The markup tool set makes it easy to hold fairly complicated design discussions but it does incur a heavy cost in terms of the data sizes communicated between team members. There are a number of areas where Design Review could be improved and I hope in the forthcoming releases we see some, if not all, of these issues seriously addressed.