Bentley Systems has announced that MicroStation V8 is now commercially available. MicroStation is the first release of Bentley's V8 generation, a new era of integrated engineering content creation, management and publishing across the boundaries of file formats, project teams and time zones.

"Bentley is following a deliberate strategy to advance computer-aided design from drawing and document production into engineering content modelling," says Tex van Deventer, Managing Director of Bentley Systems South Africa. "MicroStation V8 focuses on improvements in three important areas: data exchange and interoperability; workflow efficiencies; and the enrichment of MicroStation as an application development platform."

MicroStation V8 provides a unified design environment for any project without the need to divide project teams or to re-train them based on file formats. No longer explicitly tied to the DGN file format, MicroStation V8 will natively reference and edit AutoCAD DWG files directly, making it the universal engineering design platform for the world's two most popular computer-aided design formats. MicroStation V8 fully and transparently accommodates AutoCAD DWG data including graphics, layers, view ports and layouts. The information in DWG files and DGN files can be interchanged, even in the same session, via references. This makes back and forth or round trip translations unnecessary even within projects where both AutoCAD and MicroStation are used.

MicroStation V8's new design history feature automatically maintains a complete change history in every DGN file, regardless of engineering discipline or application. Design history adds the dimension of time to design data through a comprehensive log mechanism called a history journal. The journal is the accountability trail that tracks all changes made on a design, including what changes, the date and time the changes were made, who made them and comments about why the changes were made. Empowered with this knowledge, project managers can more accurately monitor progress, predict project success and track project metrics.

MicroStation V8 includes hundreds of other user and application level enhancements including automatic referencing and unit conversion, project standards libraries, AccuSnap, Auto-Locate, embedded XML (extensible mark-up language) and support for the industry-standard Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

About Bentley

Founded in 1984, Bentley Systems is a premier technology supplier dedicated to improving the process of designing, building and operating permanent assets such as buildings, roadways, manufacturing facilities and utility and telecommunications networks. The professionals who use Bentley technology include architects, engineers, constructors and owner/operators. Bentley's MicroStation, ProjectBank and Viecon technology and services make Bentley the leader in the engineering, construction and operations (E/C/O) market.

Bentley Systems South Africa

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