Asite Autumn 09 release

UK construction collaboration vendor Asite has issued its Autumn 09 Release, says a website notice dated 6 November 2009. Three hightlights I picked out:

• New maps “mash-ups” – using either a Google Maps portlet or a Microsoft Virtual Earth / Bing Maps portlet. The Virtual Earth portlet supports 3D visualisation, meaning users can render their 3D models and make them accessible within Virtual Earth – a useful area for collaboration to support building information modelling too (and potentially useful to teams competing in next month’s BuildLondonLive).
• NEC Manager – Extensions to the Asite NEC Manager mean it now fully supports NEC variants: ECC, PSC, TSC, and ECSC for NEC3, various NEC2 versions, and the Procure21 NEC2 and NEC3 flavours. A graphical dashboard report “shows contract status across project portfolios containing many concurrent NEC contracts with a simple red/amber/green visual approach”. The NEC contract administration field has become quite competitive in recent times. At one point, MPS seemed to have the space to itself, but collaboration firms such as [my former employer] BIW Technologies were soon integrating their document and process collaboration platforms to support NEC workflows.
• Asite Navigator – as part of Asite’s investment in web 2.0, its Asite Community functionality, launched in the Summer 09 release in June 2009 (post) is now accessible via Asite Navigator, giving users access to the Asite forums, blog, Twitter feed, and Asite on LinkedIn directly from their desktop. Maybe this will increase the volume of user interactions – which, when I checked last week, didn’t appear to have maintained the levels achieved in the first 100 days.