12d Synergy 4 Highlights

Richard Stoliar – Technical Lead for 12d Synergy – recently spoke to our excited 12d Technical Forum 2018 delegates about the upcoming release of 12d Synergy 4.

Since the release of Version 1.0 in February 2011, a lot has changed in 12d Synergy…we’ve learnt a lot, and responded to feedback, and this new release is going to be a big one. We’ve included over 600 changes, based on user feedback through the Support Portal!

Since 2016, the 12d Synergy user base has grown over 300%…leading to several new staff members required at 12d in various offices.

The main foci for 12d Synergy 4 are:

Speed

As new customers have come on board, we’ve learned a great deal about the different ways in which they structure and access their data – everybody does it just that little bit differently, and we’ve spent a long time analysing that. We’ve worked on making things generally faster as users navigate through the job tree. We’ve looked at faster retrieval of job information and significant optimisation of how we store and analyse files – both these areas have shown marked improvement in Beta Testing. This all leads to less load on infrastructure.

Usability

We had a lot of feedback suggesting that 12d Synergy 3 does a lot of what people need it to do with their files in a managed data environment…but with more mouse clicks than is desirable. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to streamline the interface to give a better experience. This ranges across admin, general day-to-day workflows, adding files, checking items in/out, issuing/transmitting, and 12d Model projects.

Better panel layouts in 12d Synergy 4 help achieve these aims. There’s now a Transfer Progress Bar so you can see how long whole operation will take, not just view timing for individual files. My Recent Items is a handy new shortcut to allow you to quickly access anything you’ve been working on recently.

Column layouts for searches (emails, PDFs, etc.) will also assist users. Workspace Number has been hidden to alleviate the confusion this previously caused in some businesses. It’s easier to on-board users now – administrators can set 12d Synergy up to send out an invitation email to welcome new users and show them how to use the software, add training materials, etc. Users can be grouped, too.

For Issuing and Transmittals there are now more administrative tasks for issued data, like deletion. You’ll be able to issue data to contact lists to avoid repetitive selection of users – you won’t have to pick each user one at a time anymore. Less panels will pop up while you’re doing a transmittal, and with the Transmittal Cover Sheet you can easily display lists of drawings that are in the drawing set, etc.

Naming rules – we’ve always had this option but it’s been improved…for instance, we’ve added capabilities for reduced data entry duplication, zero padding on counters, and multiple counters based on document type.

12d Synergy is a permissions-rich environment. Permissions control who can read/write data, or even who can see that it exists. This can be quite comprehensive – merged across groups, etc. – and in 12d Synergy 3 it could be quite time-consuming to figure out who has access to what. The Permissions Explainer in 12d Synergy 4 helps with this – it’s a simple tool to investigate who has access to what.

Connected Products

We already connected with a number of third-party products in 12d Synergy 3 and earlier; 12d Synergy 4 welcomes Total Synergy and Quick Map.

And of course, the vast majority of our users need to connect 12d Synergy with 12d Model, so we’re constantly looking for ways to improve those processes.

Cached Customisation – you could already put your 12d Model customisations into 12d Synergy 3…but this could make things quite slow. So we reimagined this a bit for v4…and Cached Customisation was born. This means that when you open 12d Model, if it needs to, it will download your User and User Lib in advance, meaning all the subsequent file searching is done locally – it doesn’t need to go back to the server. This works really well with 12d Model because if you change your symbols, toolbars, customisation files, etc., you have to restart the system anyway. There was a lot of work going on before that wasn’t really necessary, and this is significantly faster. It also helps solve the problem with your #Includes within those customisation environments.

We also now have Auto Check Out – previously you were asked the question every time; now you can set it to Auto, as is often the best option for 12d Model projects. Check in and Check out Many, as well as Offline Many (with its options to compress/zip data ahead of transfers), will also speed things up significantly – often users are working on more than one 12d Model project at a time, and it was previously quite slow waiting for each to open individually.

12d Model Project Templates – sometimes you might want to have certain files in your working folder or even in the project directory when you get started on a new 12d Model project and you want to make sure that’s controlled, you want to do it automatically. Now you can have it pop up and ask certain questions – what type of 12d Model project it is, which custom attributes you want, etc.…and based on the answers to those questions, it can pre-create that 12d Model project with everything set up and ready to go.

Administrator definable ignore lists – 12d Model has a tendency to write temporary files in certain instances, and we don’t want those to go back into your source of truth environment. With 12d Synergy 4, you can define which of these gets stored.

We’ve also added functionality for you to roll back or extract versions of single files. History is a big part of what 12d Synergy does, but if you want to, say, roll back five versions of a MTF, you previously had to roll back an entire project (which is often huge)…now you can look for the individual file and just do what you need to.

CAD

CAD is a big feature for 12d Synergy 4. In 12d Synergy 3, we supported AutoCAD and BricsCAD, but it was a little limited. In 12d Synergy 4, we’ve added support for Map 3D, Mechanical, Plant 3D, Civil 3D, etc. 12d Synergy 4 includes support for more reference types – not just DWG. We’ve added support for Sheet Set Manager and for Civil 3D, which includes Data shortcuts, as well as better reference management overall, and support for drawing and title block registers either using Excel or directly using 12d Synergy attributes.

Workflows

The all new Workflow Engine is already causing quite a stir with beta testers. Users have always been able to define attributes in 12d Synergy, much like you can in 12d Model, and attach them to anything in the system. These are really great for decorating items with more information, and they can tell you what stage you’re at in a project, what revision a drawing is on, if a drawing has had a review…but they can’t organise and drive your processes. They can’t tell you if it’s okay to go from one stage to another.

Workflow in 12d Synergy 4 allows you to model your business and day-to-day processes, and perform automatic operations. Its easy point-and-click interface lets you decide what stage you can go to next, and what should happen, e.g. sending an email, locking files, assigning new team members to the workflow.

Spatial and Mapping Capabilities

12d Synergy 3 allowed users to capture addresses and co-ordinates, but it didn’t allow much context for that information. In 12d Synergy 4, you can display maps within the product, using ArcGIS Online. You can then search for jobs using a bounding box, show surrounding jobs within a particular search radius (which is useful for knowing whether there’s historic info in the region you need to look for, or perhaps conflicts of interest, etc.). You can pull in layers from external sources and search for files near your current job (e.g. Dial Before You Dig).

Reports and Gadgets

12d Synergy 4 deploys with lots of reports out of the box, e.g.

• Licence usage
• User activity
• Job details
• Changes in files over time
• Changes in 12dM projects

You can now also schedule reports – e.g. “For all my active jobs, at the end of every week, I’d like all project managers to get a report.”

Dashboard gadgets provide at-a-glance view of information about your job. These range from basic information to task progress, task status, and who’s done what work lately. They even work through to system administrator issues like the amount of space on disks.

 

Well now…if all that information doesn’t leave you ‘champing at the bit’ for a peek at 12d Synergy 4, we don’t know what will!

Watch the full video here!

OR watch an excerpt from Richard’s presentation here: