Opentree’s Cabinet solution helps firms manages BIM work-in-progress, and offers automated file naming and seamless upload to common data environments (CDEs) such as Viewpoint for Projects.
Exhibitors at the Viewpoint 2017 customer summit event (see previous post) included consultants Waterstons and PCSG, Sempre Analytics (helping Viewpoint deliver better dashboards) and Teesside, UK-based Opentree, who told me about their Cabinet enterprise-level document management solution.
Established in 1992 as tsaADVET Ltd and selling network-based CAD solutions from Intergraph, Bentley and Autodesk, the company later resold and supported the Falcon EDMS for CAD management. However, they realised that the EDMS product was not meeting all customers’ needs (c 2000), so they developed their own EDMS, CAB-i-NET (now Cabinet). This product, with a ‘look and feel’ that will be immediately familiar to Windows users, was adopted by key engineering customers including British Steel (now Tata Steel) and Westinghouse Rail Systems (now Siemens) and Cabinet has evolved to manage office documents as well as CAD drawings. In 2014, after a management buy-out led by current CEO Andrew Frank, the company rebranded as Opentree. In addition to Tata and Siemens, customers today include Atkins, Balfour Beatty, Alstom and Sellafield Ltd.
Frank told me that they support the in-house “work-in-progress” phase of BIM authoring, prior to designs being shared with the client’s wider project team. UK BIM expert Mervyn Richards worked with the firm to help ensure it supports the BS1192:2007 processes required at Level 2, with Cabinet helping compliance through automated file naming and seamless upload to the client’s common data environment (CDE), eg: Viewpoint for Projects.
They have been working extensively with Viewpoint to integrate their respective systems via APIs (a recurring theme at the Viewpoint summit). Cabinet can also support automatic upload to other CDEs including Asite, Aconex, Sitedesk, Trimble Connect and Autodesk BIM 360 Docs – though two-way integration is dependent on these other vendors’ active cooperation and having fully documented APIs (some of these relationships were still at an early stage, Frank said).
