How Many Contractors Does It Take to Scale a Wall? (Cadalyst Daily Archives)

Associated General Contractors of America releases guidebook offering insight and advice for building industry's adoption of BIM

Les Snyder, executive vice-president of the general contracting and design/build firm Barton Malow, coauthored a guide to help contractors climb over a wall. It's a wall stacked with blocks of fears: fear of legal risk, fear of change and fear of the unknown, to name but a few. To be more specific, they're fears associated with BIM (building information modeling) adoption.p>

There's no shortage of BIM advocacy literature in the architectural arena, but it's quite a different matter for the contractor crowd. So "The Contractors' Guide to BIM: Edition 1," a 48-page treatise from the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC), may well be one of the earliest efforts by this community to formally advance BIM. As such, this guide is a commendable accomplishment—even if it's anything but exhaustive, by the AGC's own admission.  Read more >>

Ricoh Aligns with Contex
Wide-format scanners and printers from the two companies now integrated. 
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Pictometry Unveils ArcGIS Extension
Users can view, navigate and measure digital oblique imagery inside various ESRI products.  Read more >>

Microdesk Opens L.A. Office
Los Angeles facility is the company's second West Coast location.  Read more >>

Granta and ASM International Collaborate
Five-year strategic agreement to advance materials information resources for such sectors as aerospace and medical devices.  Read more >>

General Software: Adobe Reader 8
Latest version of free downloadable PDF file exchange tool features new 'Smart Meeting' real-time online collaboration button.  Read more >>

General Software: PeerSync for CAD Collaboration
New version of Peer Software's backup and synchronization tool was developed to promote collaboration among CAD project teams.  Read more >>

General Software: Net-It Central 7.0
Informative Graphics' update automatically indexes and publishes documents, and provides a Web-based interface for users to find and view content.  Read more >>

Visualization: Foreground Plants -- Zones 2-7 Foliage
Realworld's collection of high-resolution deciduous plant partials is intended for framing and composing architectural visualizations.  Read more >>

CAE: Optimization Lab Codes
COMSOL adds codes geared at computationally intensive finite-element analysis and multiphysics problems.  Read more >>