The Ideate Software team was thrilled to be invited to show off a prototype web project we’ve been working on at the Forge DevCon Village Expo and Autodesk University 2019 in Las Vegas.
Overview of our Project
The web project is our internal Beta Forge Integration solution, which allows BIM 360 subscribers to easily assess the warnings in their models by adding model health Key Performance Indicator (KPI) cards to their Project Home or Insight dashboard from the BIM 360 platform’s Card Library.
We started with the count of Revit warnings as a key metric for assessing a model’s risk and paired it with the ranking organization from Ideate Software’s Warnings Manager to present “Stoplight” KPI cards and “Top 5 Worst Offenders” bar charts. Warnings Manager is a component of Ideate Explorer, our application for fast Revit data discovery.
On the Top 5 cards, users can get additional data about the BIM 360 projects and files upon hover and drill-down, and on the Stoplight card they can easily send emails pre-populated with project-identifying information to alert co-workers that a file needs fixing.
Feedback from Potential Users
In showing off our work-in-progress at the Forge DevCon Village Expo and Autodesk University, we aimed to get conversations started about the potential value of this tool and the direction users would like to see it go. We were not disappointed.
We were gratified to hear interest in areas that align with our current plans for this project, including:
- Exporting data and visualizations to Power BI
- Closing the loop by connecting cards on the BIM 360 platform back to the desktop version of those Revit files
- Providing notifications to make insights from these data visualizations more immediately actionable
Most of all, people expressed interest in seeing this prototype expand to become a full Ideate Software product or add-on to one of our existing products with a complete catalog of cards that can make up a model health dashboard. One visitor told us that something like this would have saved him considerable time and effort on a recently finished project by helping him locate files with problems and notify the “fixers” easily.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to provide feedback and suggestions on this prototype work! We are encouraged by the responses and will continue our investigation into how it can best serve our customers’ needs.
Your Thoughts?
If you weren’t able to make it to Forge DevCon or Autodesk University 2019 and have an idea you would like to share, as always, we would be delighted to hear it.
About the Author
Stephanie Fitzgerald – Software Developer
Stephanie earned her Ed.M. in Technology, Innovation, and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from University of Oregon. She also gained a certificate in Advanced Full-Stack JavaScript from Alchemy Code Lab in Portland, OR. In past roles, Stephanie wrote C# and web design curriculum for Zaniac, where she was also the project manager for development, managed a research study of student motivation to learn math for Harvard University, and redesigned the website for a Tufts University library. As a student, she built a social network site for athletes, a back-end security package, and a tablet game app for the California Science Center.
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