topic Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2 in Modeling

Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:56:09 GMT

Provides some insight on what might be coming up next.

Next-Gen BIM:
Graphisoft Teamwork 2.0 will revolutionize
BIM/IPD workflow and collaboration
http://www.laiserin.com/features/issue25/feature01.pdf
www.laiserin.com/

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Chazz — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:12:13 GMT

I don't understand this. It's an industry newsletter (one I've never heard of) that reads like an ad or endorsement rather than an objective evaluation.

Also, as has been pointed out elsewhere why would GS let an obscure newsletter be the mechanism of their announcement? And does this free the beta testers from there NDA's?

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Karl Ottenstein — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:54:15 GMT

Chazz wrote:
why would GS let an obscure newsletter be the mechanism of their announcement? And does this free the beta testers from there NDA's?

The LaiserinLetter is not that obscure. Fairly well-known in certain circles. But, yeah, obscure to most I imagine.

Nothing frees beta testers from their NDA until Graphisoft themselves do so as part of an official product announcement. Graphisoft may release any information they want prior to that time, but that does not free the beta testers to talk about anything.

Cheers,
Karl

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Bricklyne Clarence — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:24:37 GMT

I have to say, it's beginning to seem like GS have once again missed the boat with regards to dissonance between AC13 and their clients' core needs and expectations of the program.

I may be (and truly hope I am) wrong, but from all the buzz and articles it would seem that AC13 is going to be all about Teamwork (or TW 2.0, as they put it) in much the same way AC12 was largely about the new CW tool and it's system-based interface. Which is all well, and good except for the fact and indication that GS seem to be catering to their big-ticket clients (read: Larger firms) rather than to the meat-and-potatoes issues of their bulk of their clientbase, which are small to mid-sized firms. Issues like a working Stair Tool (for once) that produces parametric stairs which are easy to create, document and modify and don't constrain one to a ludicrous fixed template of outdated stair-types, SEO issues, and the huge raft of other issues that require multiple work-arounds just to feign a pseudo-parametric process.

In ArchiCAD 12 the Curtain Wall tool was a great addition, but was it really that high up on the user wish lists. I mean outside of firms that focus on Commercial, healthcare and large-scale projects, it just isn't a useful (or even complete, or well-implemented) tool for architects and designers whose day-to-day projects range from residential to small-size civic projects. I'm not even including the multi-core support that was added to AC12 because that was well over-due (as is 64-Bit support), nor am I including 3D-documentation (because it's based on AC's outdated and clunky internal 3D engine, rather than an improved and more responsive OpenGL or DirectX platform) as legitimate major improvements to AC12.

And now we seem to be approaching AC13 where once again, the major upgrade seems to be in an area, that while beneficial to some, will not really be significant to a whole host of others who have got accustomed to working around Teamwork 1.0's perceived shortcomings or flaws (it's still far superior to Revit's team-based approach, so once again, was this really an area that direly needed urgent improvement?).
Meanwhile the nuts-and-bolts issues of the program (GDL alternative to parametric object creation, Improved versatile window/door library, Terrain/Massing/Site tool(s) 64-bit capability, etc etc etc) remain unaddressed. Perhaps they will prove me wrong and render this rant moot. But given their recent history, inability (or is it reluctance) to communicate with their own clients on their own moderated Talkforum, and their apparent objectives ( large-sized potential or future clients with null-BIM experience) I highly doubt it.

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Laszlo Nagy — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:42:56 GMT

Bricklyne,
That article itself is only about TW2 as a BIM model-based collaboration solution and not ArchiCAD 13 as a whole.
So let us not make any early assumptions as to the whole of the release when only partial information is available about it.

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Christiaan — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:40:26 GMT

Sounds fucking great anyway. I wish Nemetschek NA were working on something like this for Vectorworks. It might just be the final straw that breaks the back in our (Vectorworks-based) office.

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Erika Epstein — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:50:03 GMT

Bricklyne,
If you read Jerry Laiserin's article he repeatedly stresses the benefits to firms of ALL sizes.
As to the other features and improvements in AC13,as Laszlo notes, we don't know yet. That part of 13 hasn't been released.

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Chazz — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:48:22 GMT

laszlonagy wrote:
So let us not make any early assumptions as to the whole of the release when only partial information is available about it.

Erika wrote:
Bricklyne,....we don't know yet. That part of 13 hasn't been released.

Bricklyne wrote:
I may be (and truly hope I am) wrong,....

Seems to me that the sig-less canadian pretty will indemnified himself at the top of his second paragraph.

Look, if this is the way GS chooses to launch the product, I think they have to expect users to speculate about the features that were not announced (if that's what you call this). Speculation is part of the game. If they don't want people to second guess then stand up, anouce the feature set and end the speculation before it can begin.

Also, I think it is pretty fair to say that this is a big feature development-wise (though of apparently little utility in my practice) and if past releases are any guide, it will repesent the bulk of the upgrade effort.

As our Canadian friend says, I may be (and truly hope I am) wrong... but.....

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:49:37 GMT

Christiaan wrote:
Sounds <b>[censored]</b> great anyway. I wish Nemetschek NA were working on something like this for Vectorworks. It might just be the final straw that breaks the back in our (Vectorworks-based) office.

Our Vectorworks back is already broken but we are still in the middle of a transition. I've ranted elsewhere about this but I hope we see better integration with VW to ease the transition. At the moment it is vectorwors > dwg > archicad!??

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Christiaan — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 07:29:13 GMT

tropicalismo360 wrote:
Our Vectorworks back is already broken but we are still in the middle of a transition. I've ranted elsewhere about this but I hope we see better integration with VW to ease the transition. At the moment it is vectorwors > dwg > archicad!??

Really, your transitioning from Vectorworks to ArchiCAD? I'd love to pick your brains on this. I'm hoping GS has tidied up the Mac interface with the release of v13 as I want to bring somebody in to demonstrate ArchiCAD to my directors but at least one of them has a long experience with Vectorworks on Mac (which complies well with Mac interface conventions, and Windows conventions on Windows for that matter) and I know his first impression is not going to be good.

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

owen — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:05:57 GMT

Bricklyne wrote:
I have to say, it's beginning to seem like GS have once again missed the boat with regards to dissonance between AC13 and their clients' core needs and expectations of the program.

I agree with what you have to say about other features (included or not) but TW2 sounds like it will be a Very Big F...... Deal indeed.

Prior to moving here I was working in a fairly large practice doing a mix of large commercial, residential and public projects - nearly all of which were Teamworked, and nearly all of which were suffering substantial productivity losses due to the whole TW process with large files. Sign-In/Out's could take upwards of 20 mins some of the worst affected projects .. multiply that through a team of 10 and people start to get unhappy .. very unhappy.

So if what this article indicates re: TW2 file handling is true then this really will be THE killer feature for AC13. I have said many times before I thought the Multi-Processor support for AC12 was alone worth the upgrade, and I will say the same about TW2. I won't dispute that these things took far too long to see the light of day (and we are still waiting on 64-Bit AC) but at least they are finally here. Better late than never i guess.

Being the optimist (a rare case) perhaps now that GS is removing most of the major performance bottlenecks in AC they can start rolling out some of the really great new features they have been developing in the background for AC14+

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Chazz — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:14:52 GMT

The LaiserinLetter article/ad/fanboy-love-letter talks in depth about the increased efficiency of the data sent between client and server in TW2. Only the changes are transmitted instead of the whole file. This seems less like a breakthrough than an obvious objective from the getgo but what do I know, it was probably hard to do:

LaiserinLetter wrote:
...[the] active server database management system...maintains and updates the central project by passing to and from clients (users’ machines) only the “delta” or change-data of user actions and edits

Anyway, it is my hope that some of the this increased smarts in the database will trickle down from TW2 to more pedestrian aspects of the program. In AC12 any change to the model (including 2d work) will require ALL of the live drawings in the layouts --sections, perspectives, 3D documents, plan views -- to be regenerated. This is the #1 massive time waster in the software. Hopefully AC13 will address this situation.

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Aaron Bourgoin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:55:45 GMT

I don't understand this. It's an industry newsletter (one I've never heard of) that reads like an ad or endorsement rather than an objective evaluation.

Jerry Laiserin is the guy who can take a fair amount of credit for the coining of the term BIM.

BIM: have ya hearda that yet?

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Karl Ottenstein — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:47:19 GMT

Chazz wrote:
The ... fanboy-love-letter talks in depth about the increased efficiency of the data sent between client and server in TW2. Only the changes are transmitted instead of the whole file. This seems less like a breakthrough than an obvious objective from the getgo but what do I know, it was probably hard to do...

I would say, "pompously verbose fanboy-love-letter".

Yes, it seems pretty obvious now. We expect relational databases to let us reserve just the record or field we are editing and then process the update, whether it is on a local network, or the airline-seat reservation process over the internet, for example.

I would imagine that revising the internal structure of ArchiCAD project data in a way to support such transactional operations and yet still provide all of the performance of prior versions (I hope the same, and not less - maybe more?) - would be quite a technical challenge.

It certainly sounds like a huge leap forward for team projects.

Cheers,
Karl

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Jere — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:54:57 GMT

I work in a small firm with two senior and two junior technologists. While we only do small and medium-sized projects (less than $10M,) this improvement in Teamwork is very welcome. At one point or another, we almost always have two people working on the same project. We've gotten to the point where we may set every project as a teamwork file right from the get-go so that it's already set up.

While a send/receive is fairly quick in our office, I know another firm with whom we work where the send/receive takes 10 to 15 minutes at times.

I'm looking forward to seeing it in action.

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:15:23 GMT

I hope that changing the database structure will bring improvements for future versions. Sounds encouraging.

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:42:30 GMT

outpostarc wrote:
I hope that changing the database structure will bring improvements for future versions. Sounds encouraging.

My impression is that it will.

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Achille Pavlidis — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 14:28:05 GMT

LaiserinLetter wrote:
One or two privileged individuals among the hundreds of thousands of folks employed in AECO in the USA claim to have encountered the “perfect” solution some dozen years ago in an unreleased version of a now defunct product.

What is he refering to?

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 06:22:04 GMT

Achille wrote:
LaiserinLetter wrote:
One or two privileged individuals among the hundreds of thousands of folks employed in AECO in the USA claim to have encountered the “perfect” solution some dozen years ago in an unreleased version of a now defunct product.
What is he refering to?

You know I had to read the article over and over again just to figure out what the heck he was saying. I mean, he makes a living writing? Deliver me.

Re: Interesting Article about Archicad 13 and Teamwork 2

Christiaan — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:23:09 GMT

Achille wrote:
LaiserinLetter wrote:
One or two privileged individuals among the hundreds of thousands of folks employed in AECO in the USA claim to have encountered the “perfect” solution some dozen years ago in an unreleased version of a now defunct product.
What is he refering to?

I assumed he was talking about vapourware of some description.