Kevin Breslin | ISD/RCS Services Manager
Here we are in the middle of 2020 and I’m writing a blog post about “Migration to Autodesk”. Seems kind of odd when you think about it, considering AutoCAD has been around since the 80’s and our flagship infrastructure program Autodesk Civil 3D has been around since 2004. The reality is, despite Autodesk technology being mature in the CAD/engineering world, it’s still *NEW* for what appears to be a growing number of users.
Unless you happen to be with an organization that is working on this move to an Autodesk platform, you might wonder “Who is just now going to Autodesk?”.
The Top Two Answers Are:
- The expected new engineers, designers, etc., fresh out of school and/or just beginning their careers in the industry.
- But the growing part of this segment of our customers are those migrating FROM a Bentley platform to an Autodesk platform.
For over 25 years, we have been in the consulting services business and have been providing education, support, implementation services to customers, and over these years, we have encountered customers that were also making this Bentley/MicroStation to Autodesk/AutoCAD/Civil 3D migration, but in the last year or so, the numbers have gone up . . . . a lot.
While I could spend time opining on the “why” this is happening, I’ll leave it at, there are changes within the industry that are driving people to consider an Autodesk-based alternative for design, drafting, engineering, survey processing, visualization and data management needs.
The ISD Services team over the years have collectively assisted many organizations, large and small, commercial and government with the move to Autodesk from Bentley and have done so as part of our TakeAIM services. While the TakeAIM platform has given us the ability to meet the needs of customers making the migration, it often required additional steps which we have found necessary to effectively get an organization migrated to a new platform, with a customized optimized environment, standards, workflows, education and support to ensure the challenges associated to making the change is as minimal as possible.
By leveraging our collective years of experiences, we have developed best practices and methodologies to address the unique aspects of migrating platforms and have used these lessons learned to develop a new service. This new service is simply branded “Migration to Autodesk”.
Yes, it’s kind of on the nose. . . . but hopefully it’s self-explanatory.
In addition to the typical aspects of implementation (discovery, education, optimization, piloting, support), the challenges of migrating from another platform also adds the potential of needing to address migrating legacy standards (line types, cells, levels,) and in some cases, the actual conversion of legacy design data from Bentley/MicroStation-based files to Autodesk/AutoCAD/Civil 3D equivalent. There are also aspects that deal with data management (ProjectWise to Vault Professional), automation, and more.
This new service takes all of these aspects into account.
While there may be many similar needs from one organization to another, we know that once you dig into the specifics, each migration requires a unique plan to be defined.
If you are with an organization that is currently considering making the move to Autodesk from Bentley, please review the details of this new service here, and as always, feel free to contact us with questions.
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