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Newforma Project Center Fourth Edition (Cadalyst Labs Review)
1 Nov, 2007 By: Jerry LaiserinEfficient e-mail management can save time and offset costs.
When computing pioneer J.C.R. Licklider first juxtaposed the words personal and computing in 1962, what he had in mind was a human–machine symbiosis in which computers would take on the repetitive drudge work of information management and liberate people to do the creative, judgment-based sorts of things that computers can't.
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Today, after half a century of digital revolution, we humans often find ourselves burdened by the very PCs that were supposed to liberate us. Particularly in project-centric industries such as AEC, we — not our computers — labor at such soulless tasks as moving and copying digital files in myriad formats across imaginary trees of invisible folders governed by arcane protocols. However, we can recapture much of the original vision that involves using PC software to make our lives easier with Newforma Project Center.
Newforma's founders are AEC technology veterans whose careers include stints on both the practice side and the software-business side. The team's breadth and depth of experience is reflected in the product and in the way it came to exist.
Newforma applies a radical but all-too-rare approach to developing its Newforma Project Center software. Everyone in the company believes that the way a piece of software works should match users' behaviors, not force users to change their behaviors to conform to the software. Most end users and practice managers in AEC have come to dread new software; they fear taking two steps forward and one step back. When Newforma Project Center is added to an AEC firm's workflow, however, the experience is more like the same, only better.
Not Just the Same Old, Same Old
The path to AEC software nirvana is strewn with technologic road kill — everything from document-management systems to knowledge management, intranets, extranets, and myriad forms of electronic collaboration. Each enjoyed its moment in the sun, and some still are used effectively, but most have not survived their initial buzz of enthusiasm. Why and how is Newforma Project Center different?
 Newforma Project Center Fourth Edition |
Unlike document-management systems, knowledge management, and most intranets, Newforma Project Center relies on a bottom-up (rather than top-down) approach to managing information. What I mean by this is that it does not impose a preordained way of organizing information — a taxonomy, to use a fancy word. Instead, Newforma Project Center provides a painless and seamless way to find and retrieve any and all information that bubbles up in any design firm during the ordinary course of practice. No special dialog boxes interrupt the normal flow of opening and saving everyday files. No one has to use arbitrary and hard-to-remember file-classification schemata; they just use the same files in the same places they've always been. No tricky and annoying metadata need be applied if one hopes ever to see a particular bit of information again.
In a similar way, Newforma Project Center relies on an inside-out rather than outside-in approach to sharing information within a project team. Most so-called extranets, project-specific Web site services, and similar project-collaboration networks shift the management of shared information outside any individual firm. Those services centralize a document repository, messaging clearinghouse, and transactional database. This approach would be ideal if only one such system existed or if firms only worked on one project at a time. However, hundreds of these services operated prior to the dot-com implosion in mid-2000, and dozens of contenders — from online plan rooms to full-blown electronic collaboration systems — are still out there. This diversity means that project managers dealing with multiple projects on behalf of any firm likely will face multiple interfaces, each with its own login and file structure and each demanding its own cycle of file uploads and synchronization.
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About the Author: Jerry Laiserin
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