Archive for December, 2008

MicroStation’s little-known secret saves massive amounts of time and money.

Monday, 8 December 2008

Greg McKinney shows how to save time and boost productivity in this series of articles on workspaces.

Clearwater, Florida, USA — In this series of articles, I provide power user tips (and some little-known inside data) on using workspaces that will save you time, increase your productivity and help maintain project standards.

Using incorrect resources can cost thousands — even tens of thousands — of dollars in lost production. Using workspaces correctly saves time and also helps ensure that project specifications are maintained.

As the product manager for Axiom’s new Global Workspace Manager, I have talked to many users over the years and am amazed at the number of people who are not aware of the amount of time they could save by correctly setting up workspaces. Some MicroStation users that I’ve spoken with simply use a workspace delivered to them by their client and have no idea why it works or what to do if something goes wrong. So first, let’s go over some basics.

What is a workspace?
A “workspace” is a MicroStation environment or configuration. Customizing workspaces on a per-project or per-user basis goes a long way in helping users comply with standards and increase production speed. It can reduce potential errors caused by using incorrect resources and also saves on mouse clicks. A basic workspace consists of a user configuration file, a project configuration file and a user interface.

Configuration files are text files that are processed by MicroStation when MicroStation is loaded and as it opens each design file. The user configuration file stores information specific to the user such as interface name and file-saving options. Interfaces are one of the workspace components selected from the main MicroStation window. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Selecting pre-defined “User”, “Project” and “Interface” workspace components can save production time and help ensure compliance with project standards.

Once an interface has been selected, MicroStation writes that information to the user configuration file. The interface information will be used for all design files that the user opens, until a different interface is selected from the workspace components. Either an existing interface can be selected or, by selecting “New…” from the Interface drop-down menu, a new interface can be created. If “New…” is selected and a design file opened, the interface can be customized to show specific tool boxes, tool frames, menu items, view borders, view pop-ups, and palettes. (See Figure 2.) The customized interface can then be saved and used in different workspace environments.

Figure 2. From the Workspace menu (“1″ above), the workspace environment can be customized (“2″ above) to display tool boxes, tool frames, menu items and other settings a CAD manager or user wants. The customized interface can then be saved by clicking on the <Save> button so that it can be reused in different workspace environments.

Some companies use customized interfaces for specific disciplines (such as civil, electrical and plumbing), project-specific menus, tool frames or a combination of these. This is done using the Customize dialog box under the Workspace menu as described earlier.

The project configuration file stores information about the location of project-specific resources such as seed files, DGN libraries and reference files. The user interface stores customizations that control the appearance of toolboxes, pull-down menus and other interface settings.

The workspace components are selected from the MicroStation Manager dialog box when opening a MicroStation design file. When configured, these workspace components will make MicroStation dialog boxes open to the proper directory for selecting resources such as cell libraries, DGN libraries and reference files. Other resources like color tables, user preferences and interface settings can be set without requiring user interaction. Resources such as fonts, text styles, line styles, macros, seed files, and dimension styles will be picked from a list of choices that are approved for the project. The three workspace settings shown in Figure 1 are the only workspace interaction that most users will need. Behind the scenes is a whole world of ways to make your interaction with MicroStation a more productive — and pleasant — experience.

Working with configuration variables
Configuration variables contain user-defined information that MicroStation uses to customize your MicroStation working environment. (Examples are given later.) Configuration variables are stored in configuration files. MicroStation recognizes hundreds of configuration variables that affect the behavior of MicroStation. A simple example of a configuration variable is the MS_OPEN variable which controls the behavior of MicroStation V8 when a V7 design file is opened. Setting MS_OPENV7 = 2 will open a V7 design file as “read only” and not display an alert dialog box.

Anything that can be changed with the workspace is defined by a configuration variable. There are four main types of configuration variables:

  • Path variable — This variable specifies the directory or directories that store resources or that are to be searched when MicroStation is looking for specific resources.
  • Filename variable — This variable stores the location of a specific file or list of files.
  • Keyword variable — This variable contains a keyword such as “V7″ or “DGN”.
  • Boolean variable — This variable contains a “0″ (representing “off” or “no”) or a “1″ (for “on” or “yes”). For example, some variables (such as “MS_DESIGN_HISTORY_OWNERSHIP_WARNING” which specifies if the user should be prompted to confirm when opening a file that contains changes made by another user and not yet committed) only have two possible values. Either a user is prompted to confirm (value set to “1″) or not (value set to “0″).

Here’s a look at some real-world examples of using configuration variables. Let’s say that Urban Town Department of Transportation uses a pathname that is generally seven to nine folders deep. The path might look like this:
C:StandardsProjectsCityURBANDOT123456160RoadDesignMappingTopo

Aside from causing an exhausted mouse finger and wasting countless hours looking for project resources, this would drive me insane. If the CAD manager sets a few configuration variables like “MS_DEF” to specify the directory to search for design files and “MS_REF_DEFAULTATTACHDIRECTORY” to specify the directory that contains reference files, it will cut the file opening and referencing tasks down to a couple of clicks. These variables are set in the project configuration file. The project configuration file contains information that MicroStation uses to customize the working environment for a particular project.

Now let’s look at an example of working with multiple project configuration files. Joe’s a CAD manager who works on several different projects at a time. Throughout the course of a week, he switches back and forth between the various projects many times. If these projects have different standards and requirements (different project resources, for example), valuable time is lost changing configuration variables every time he switches from one project to another. The solution is to set up a project configuration file for each project. Each configuration file redefines the configuration variables so they are correct for each project. Each project configuration file has both a file name and a workspace name so that it can be selected from the Workspace drop-down menu later. Each time you open a design file, MicroStation uses the workspace configuration variables in the configuration file for that project to customize your working environment. Figure 3 shows an example of several projects that have been set up that a user could choose from.

Figure 3. Selecting a project from the MicroStation Manager dialog box with previously configured settings can save time when switching between projects with different standards and requirements.

Joe simply selects the correct project from the workspace pull-down menu and all his settings are pre-configured. No time is lost re-configuring color tables, fonts, DGN libraries, reference file paths and a whole “mess” of other settings when switching between projects.

As another example, one company that I worked with had several projects going at the same time that all used different font resource files. Users would tend to forget which font was supposed to be used for which project. The CAD manager would be called several times a week because someone else working on a machine had changed the settings, which changed the font resources needed for a particular project. The font problems would often go unnoticed for days. Sometimes it would go unnoticed until the project was plotted with the wrong fonts! Not only did correcting these mistakes take time, expensive plot media, like vellum or Mylar, had to be thrown away. This is the kind of problem that is easily solved by the CAD manager simply setting up project configuration files.

Setting up a project configuration file
So, how would a CAD or project manager change a project configuration file? Let’s say Bruce is a project manager who has users that keep compressing design files — which purges empty and unused levels and text styles from the files. (It’s fine to compress the design files, but if done before the design is complete, you will often lose things you would have needed later when designing, such as levels and text styles.) To prevent losing some needed levels and text styles, Bruce will need to set the compress options for “textstyles” and “levels” to “disabled”. He will also need to lock down the options so designers working on that project will not inadvertently change them and thereby compress these resources. Bruce can do this by opening the project configuration file and adding two statements to it. The steps to do this are as follows:

  1. Open the project configuration file, such as “nameofproject.pcf”, using your favorite text editor.
  2. Add a statement to disable the compressing of text styles and levels. The statement to do this is: MS_COMPRESS_OPTIONS = -TEXTSTYLES;-LEVELS # disabled due to wild users.
    The variable name is”MS_COMPRESS_OPTIONS.” This is followed by an equal sign (“=”). Next comes a list of items. In this case, the list is “TEXTSTYLES” and “LEVELS”. Each item in this example is preceded by a minus sign (“-”) indicating that this option will be disabled. A semi-colon (“;”) separates the items in the list. Finally, an optional comment can be added to the line by putting a pound sign (“#”) in front of the comment.
  3. Add another statement to lock the “MS_COMPRESS_OPTIONS” variable to prevent users from changing the compress options. The statement to do this is: %lock MS_COMPRESS_OPTIONS
  4. Save the project configuration file using your text-editing program.
  5. Finally, restart MicroStation.

You’re all set! Users working on this project will still be able to compress design files but doing so will no longer purge text styles and levels from the files. Users will also not be able to accidentally modify (or undo) the compress options you just set.
If you’re working with a number of users, I also highly recommend using Global Workspace Manager, which allows you to set and monitor (among other things) workspace components on any number of workstations — all from one location. [Editors Note: see "Manage every MicroStation setting on every MicroStation workstation without leaving your desk!" in this issue of MicroStation Today.] As a word of caution, before you start changing your configuration files, please be careful to follow the first three rules of customizing MicroStation.

  1. Always backup the original configuration files before you make any changes.
  2. Be sure that you have permission from your CAD manager.
  3. If you are the CAD manager, see rule number 1 above.

In the next article in this series, I’ll show you more ways to save time and increase productivity by modifying workspace configuration files.

Tags:
Posted in Articles, CAD Manager Tools, CAD User Tools, IT Tools | 2 Comments »

Fight back!

Sunday, 7 December 2008

How to increase your profits in a slow economy

Clearwater, Florida, USA — In a slow economy, software add-ons that consistently save dozens, hundreds or thousands of man-hours aren’t just “nice” things to have, they’re vital.

How much money are repetitive, time-consuming tasks costing you?

David Evans & Associates saves $19,596 per year by using Microsoft Office Importer. Oregon DOT saves $42,000 per year in man-hours by using FileFixer. Barone-Shultz saved just one of their clients $5,400 on just one project using CellManager, a savings of 90% of the total project cost.
Washington Group saved $16,400 using MicroStation Productivity Toolkit on just one project over one weekend and potentially saved millions of dollars in lost income. Valero Paulsboro Refinery saved an estimated $125,000 on just one project using tools included in MicroStation Acceleration Garage.

Increase profits and reduce expenses.
Axiom creates tools for CAD managers and users that not only make their jobs easier, but also help them get projects done faster. In addition, LearningBay’s e-learning courses make users more effective and efficient when using MicroStation and MicroStation products such as GEOPAK and InRoads. LearningBay’s “on demand” e-learning courses produce better results and yet are less than a quarter the cost of offsite training and less than half the cost of onsite training. What’s more, the training can be done over and over to keep skills fresh. That’s simply not possible with either onsite or offsite training without incurring additional costs.

CAD managers spread too thin
According to Robert Green’s “CAD Manager 2005 Survey”, 26% of CAD managers reported that “their number-one frustration was not having enough time to do their job well.” Surprised? Here are some other numbers from the survey:

  • Only 31% of CAD managers perform their management duties full time (meaning they have other duties as well).
  • 61% are in salaried positions (average base salary: $53,847, or roughly $27 per hour.
  • A CAD manager supports an average of 41 CAD users.
  • 16% have purchasing authority.

Cost justification
No matter how good a product or service is, you still have to explain its value to decision-makers in a language they understand: money. This is why the CAD manager has to be business savvy and where cost justification comes in handy. The below, real-life examples show savings in terms of man-hours. In each case, one or more Axiom products greatly improved the productivity of the user or users involved and saved the company large amounts of money. According to the previously mentioned survey, the average salary for CAD managers was $27 per hour. Typically, taxes, insurance, benefits, training, management, overhead and other employee-related expenses are about 20% of salary costs. Thus, the following examples use $33 per hour as the company’s cost for the employee’s time. The actual cost of each Axiom product mentioned in the following examples was only a fraction of the overall amount saved by the company by using the product. All of the products mentioned below can be purchased separately or as part of MicroStation Acceleration Garage.

Example 1
One customer needed to change 200 drawings from an existing design for re-use in a new project. The task required all existing reference numbers on all drawings be re-mapped to new project numbers. The estimated time to do this manually was approximately 80 hours. At an average of $33 per hour, total cost would have been $2,640. Using Global File Changer, the actual time spent was 3 hours at a cost of only $99. This is a savings of $2,541 or 96% on this one three-hour project.

Example 2
Another customer, who regularly uses FileFixer, comments, “FileFixer ends up saving us approximately 400 man-hours a year. We couldn’t be nearly as productive without it.” Again, applying a $33-per-hour cost to this example, this results in a $13,200 savings in man-hours each year. Keep in mind that the $13,200 is only the figure for the savings. It doesn’t even begin to take into account the extra profit from all the additional work that gets done in those 400 extra man-hours.

Example 3
Another customer states that, “whenever any MicroStation file came back from the client, our drafters would spend an average of about two hours finding and correcting the CAD standards violations. If one figures that we get about 20 files per submission sent back to us by the client, that it takes a drafter about two hours to spot and correct the violations and that there are about two to three submissions in the lifecycle of our design projects, then there are approximately 120 man-hours per project spent in corrections — time spent not earning any new revenue!” Instead of doing it the hard way, the firm now uses SpecChecker and gets the work done in five minutes instead of two hours. In dollars, that saves $3,960 in man-hours on each and every project.

Example 4
Another customer had 400 design files in a project where a non-standard set of cells was used throughout the design process. They had to replace literally thousands of instances of multiple cells throughout all 400 design files. They were looking at 330 man-hours to fix this and a late delivery of the project. However, using Global File Changer, they were able to update all 400 design files with the “Replace Cells” function in a little over three hours — only 20-minutes of which required an operator to be present. The remaining time was simply the processing time. The total time, including the processing time, was only 1% of the time the design team estimated it would have taken to make the changes by hand. They saved $10,879 just by running Global File Changer — once!

Savings plus increased production
The money saved in man-hours is only part of the picture. What these examples don’t take into account the value of the additional work that the users involved can now get done. In other words, for each hour of work that one of Axiom’s products can save a company, that hour can then be used to generate more income on another project. Free advice on increasing profits

Make the vendors vying for your budget dollars work for you. Use their resources to get your projects done faster and more accurately and don’t be afraid to try and implement new technology. Contact Axiom and schedule a no-obligation, one-on-one, online demonstration with one of our product managers to discuss how the products included in MicroStation Acceleration Garage can greatly increase your rate of production and maximize the return on your budget dollars.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles | No Comments »

Manage all your MicroStation workspaces without leaving your desk!

Sunday, 7 December 2008

Axiom’s first enterprise-level MicroStation application brings massive time savings for CAD managers.

Clearwater, Florida, USA —Axiom, the world’s most experienced developer of time-saving MicroStation solutions, announces Global Workspace Manager, the first in a series of ground-breaking, enterprise solutions that save MicroStation CAD managers time.

Using Global Workspace Manager, a CAD manager can set up and manage all the workspaces on all the computers associated with a given project. For example, a CAD manager can view which cell libraries are being used by each workstation. All workspace configuration variables can be monitored and modified from this interface. The CAD manager can monitor and control workstations anywhere in the world without leaving his desk.

Global Workspace Manager allows CAD managers to set up, monitor and change MicroStation workspaces and workspace configuration settings on multiple workstations from a single location. Until now, managing MicroStation configuration variables has been a nightmare. CAD managers have had no easy way to ensure that MicroStation workspace configurations were properly set up and maintained. They either had to rely on each user to correctly set up and maintain his or her own workstation or walk around to each user’s workstation and manually set up and maintain its configuration. Even if CAD managers use a protected, central network workspace, they still don’t know who’s working on which project, when a project was last worked on or even which version of MicroStation is installed on which workstation. With this new add-on, all that is about to change.

With Global Workspace Manager, CAD managers are now able to not only analyze and control MicroStation workspaces, but they can also see who’s working on which project and which version of MicroStation they’re using. CAD managers can analyze, monitor and control a few workstations — or a few thousand workstations — all from a single location.

“A major problem that we hear from CAD managers is that users change their workspace configurations. This has resulted in them not using the fonts, line styles, cell libraries, reference files or other resources that the CAD manager needs used for a given project,” said Greg McKinney, Axiom Project Manager. “Global Workspace Manager gives CAD managers control over system, application, site, project and user workspace configuration files on all MicroStation workstations at their site or in the company, even configuration files that reside on a networked server. CAD Managers can set up, monitor, debug and change these configuration files on a single workstation, a group of workstations or thousands of workstations — without leaving their desks.”

Global Workspace Manager consists of two separate applications: a manager’s console (for the CAD manager to use) and a client (which resides on each MicroStation workstation). The manager’s console receives MicroStation workspace configuration data about each workstation that is running the client. The manager’s console has the ability to view, sort, filter, group, analyze and modify all the workspace configuration variables on the workstations. These capabilities allow CAD managers to view all configuration variables or specific configuration variables by workstation, location, project or any combination of these. The manager’s console has the ability to view configuration variables on one workstation, all workstations or any number of selected workstations. CAD managers can also ensure that all workstations are using the most up-to-date resources such as cells, fonts, dgnlibs, and linestyles. The manager’s console also provides powerful analysis tools to help the CAD manager pinpoint exactly why one workstation or workspace is behaving oddly or different from the others.

In addition to the analysis tools, Global Workspace Manager gives CAD managers many other useful tools. Using the manager’s console, CAD managers have the ability to copy an entire project along with all its resources (such as seed files, dgnlibs, linestyles, fonts, and color tables) to another network server or to an individual workstation, show which MicroStation versions are installed on each workstation, see when projects were last worked on, see who worked on each project (this helps planning for allocating manpower) and compare several machines to easily pinpoint errors on a specific workstation or just verify that workspaces are correct.

Global Workspace Manager can monitor the workspace settings on every MicroStation workstation at your site or even in your whole company. Every change to a MicroStation workstation’s User, Project or Interface setting is tracked in a central database. You will be able to see — and even change — every single MicroStation configuration variable, in every single workspace, on every single MicroStation workstation at your site or even your whole company, without leaving your desk!

The Global Workspace Manager client runs on each workstation that will be monitored by the manager’s console. The client sits quietly in the background, until the user makes a change to a workspace component. For example, when a user selects a different user, project or interface, the client notifies the manager’s console of the change.

The process of the client updating the manager’s console when changes occur ensures that the Global Workspace Manager manager’s console always has the most current workspace information from each workstation. This lets the CAD manager monitor who is working on each specific project, verify that the correct project or company standard CAD resources are being used for each project and make needed changes to the workspaces without ever having to leave his desk.

“CAD managers often spend too much time walking from one floor to another or traveling to remote offices to troubleshoot or modify workspaces. Global Workspace Manager eliminates wasted time by bringing the monitoring and management of workspaces on all workstations into one location,” said Oscar Albornoz, Axiom’s Vice President for Technology.

Tags:
Posted in Articles, CAD Manager Tools, CAD User Tools, IT Tools | No Comments »

How to get a project done that no one else can do

Sunday, 7 December 2008

By Eiren Smith
Clearwater, Florida, USA — It all started with a phone call. A client, we’ll call him “Lazarus”, was talking to his Axiom MicroStation Consultant, we’ll call him “Ruben” (because that’s his name). Although the call was regarding Lazarus’ Axiom products, the conversation eventually turned to Lazarus’ other needs, of which he had plenty. Turns out he had at least five different software development projects and no qualified programmers to execute them. This was software that Lazarus’ company was already selling for V7 but which he badly needed to migrate to V8 — which is no small task — to satisfy clients that had already migrated over and were just keeping V7 around to use Lazarus’ company’s tools. It was really becoming a problem. Lazarus asked Ruben to recommend an MDL (MicroStation Development Language) developer.

Axiom’s programming team has been producing stellar commercial products for over 20 years and maintains an extensive library of features and tools. This allows the rapid building of stable, feature-rich, custom applications that meet your exact specifications.

“Well,” Ruben told him, “I’m glad you mentioned that. Didn’t you know we also provide custom programming?” Without thinking, Lazarus showed his surprise by blurting out, “Why would you share your programmers and tricks with anyone? Well, you know what I mean: why not focus it only on your own products?”
Ruben understood his surprise and went on to explain that a significant part of what Axiom does is custom programming and that there’s no reason not to share Axiom’s tremendous body of MicroStation development experience with others by providing this service.
As it turns out, Lazarus was in a hurry — a big one. He needed the first of his projects completed in about six weeks, which was a tight squeeze due to the scope of the project. Axiom put some of its best talent on the job to ensure that the project got done on time and on budget.

The secret to success is…
The secret to successful custom programming is prediction. Axiom’s custom programming team knows what to expect at every step of the project because they’ve been doing this for over 20 years. As is usually the case, the right guys for the job were already busy working on a number of Axiom’s software utilities (they’re constantly adding new features to Axiom’s existing line of products) and new releases. But in this case, the client really needed help, so they found a way to wrap up or turn over each of the projects they were already working on so they could focus on getting Lazarus what he needed. The next step was easier than usual — the specification. It was easier than usual because in this case, Lazarus actually had someone at his company with experience writing software specifications for them and he did a good job. So the programming team only needed to ensure the specifications didn’t omit any requirements, didn’t contain anything illogical and that it was doable in the time available.
Once everyone agreed on the specifications, Lazarus was given a price quote. Lazarus saw that it was a great price for the scope of work and quickly accepted it. Shortly thereafter, the contract was signed and work began.
The first project was delivered on time and within budget and Lazarus has since contracted with Axiom for more custom programming projects.
Just like Axiom’s commercial software utilities, their custom programming service has a very high level of repeat customers. Customers who need custom programming keep coming back for more because they know they’re getting the best MDL, C++, database and .NET development around. [Editor's note: "C++" is a multi-purpose programming language used for a wide variety of software applications and ".NET" is Microsoft's application development platform that enables developers to create Windows applications, web applications and web services using a number of different programming languages.] They also know that they are getting a professional organization that is the top in their field and, inexplicably, the best price at the same time.
After the second project, Lazarus asked Ruben how Axiom could have such competitive bids when Axiom’s quality is higher than anyone Lazarus had used before. Ruben’s answer was simple: Organization. It’s not just a single player; it’s the whole team, from Axiom’s management to its product managers, programmers, testers and quality staff. Axiom’s team has learned how to make great software every time. Axiom knows what it takes to make a project a winner. If a project doesn’t have all the elements needed for success, they do whatever it takes to turn the project into a winner before accepting it. It doesn’t do the client any good if they get what they asked for but not what they need. Axiom knows how to find out what a customer really needs and they know how to get it done.

Axiom has been producing stellar products for over 20 years and knows where the pitfalls are. They’ve organized to ensure they never make the same mistake twice. And after about twenty years of that, you’ve got a software development juggernaut. Fortunately for MicroStation CAD managers everywhere, this juggernaut is for hire.

Tags:
Posted in CAD Manager Tools, IT Tools | No Comments »

MicroStation Today — December 2008(Volume 15, Issue 12)

Monday, 1 December 2008

Click here for back issues.

MicroStation Today — December 2008 (Volume 15, Issue 12)

Download a PDF version of this issue.

To read the pages above, download Adobe®‘s free Acrobat Reader®, if not already installed in your computer.

Posted in Featured, MST Issues | No Comments »