Realizing that software interoperability only represents the potential to pass data between differing software products and is not an end in itself, Bentley Systems Inc., Exton, Pa., has developed and is offering for free a set of workflow tools to help designers actually make good use of it.
The company announced on Jan. 27 that it is releasing free plug-ins that not only pass back and forth and back again models and tracked revisions within Bentley’s 3-D structural modeling program and two of Bentley’s analysis programs, but it also is giving away a plug-in for San Rafael, Calif.-based Autodesk’s Revit program that lets users put Revit in the workflow the same way. Additionally, the company is offering for free the application programming interface tool used to create the plug-ins to any software vendor who wants to enable the same capability for their programs as well.