When Autodesk retired its software-as-a-service construction project management platform Constructware in 2021, MIS Project Leader Dennis DiPalma of Pittsburgh-based contractor PJ Dick found himself in the same awkward position as many construction IT directors—trying to get years of project data out of a vendor’s SaaS platform that was designed to ingest customer data, not release it back.

“They gave you your data as PDFs in a folder structure, and then they gave you files with the raw data from the database. That’s what they wanted to do,” said DiPalma, who would have been in charge of reviewing 20 years of RFIs, photos and other project data that were saved as unsearchable PDFs. “So, I negotiated very nicely with them to give me the SQL database of all the data. That’s what we ended up doing.”