Introducing New Features and Integrations for the AEC Industry

June 23, 2015

Construction firms around the globe are adopting cloud applications to help boost productivity, shorten project timelines, enhance their collaboration workflows, and reduce costs. To help keep these firms competitive and eliminate delays, Egnyte’s open, hybrid architecture is ideal for AEC customers looking to effectively manage and enhance all aspects of projects from bidding to completion.I’m happy to share that we’ve expanded our footprint in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) market with an enhanced solution that includes new feature sets and third-party partner integrations to extend the value for project managers and IT decision makers. Check out our video about what Egnyte can provide for construction teams:

The newest features added to Egnyte’s solution for AEC teams include:

Role-Based Administration Rights: For global construction firms, it’s not scalable for IT to administrate each project. With role-based admin rights, the project manager can gain some admin rights to delegate projects, add/remove employees and contractors, etc. for the duration of the project.
Advanced Folder Templating: When AEC teams start a new project for building a new corporate campus, for example, instead of recreating the entire folder hierarchy of files used for each project (i.e., folders for contracts, blueprints, photos), there is now an advanced templating feature to automate this process. IT can then set folder permissions or delegate a role-based admin to add contractors and subcontracts to this project and remove them once the project is completed.
Third-Party Integrations: The integrations provide optimized workflows with blueprint markups, annotations, image management and other project management requirements in this industry. Some of the popular integrations include solutions with Bluebeam, FotoIn, SmartUse and PlanGrid.

To address the growing use of construction-focused solutions and mobile apps, Egnyte has joined forces with an ecosystem of best-in-class construction partners, such as Bluebeam, FotoIN, PlanGrid and SmartUse. These partners provide apps that reduce paper and enable instant sharing of project photos, blueprints, and PDF files through Egnyte.Here’s what some of our partners and joint customers have to say:“We selected Egnyte in the beginning because of its high level of security and granularity of permissioning,” said Jeff Pistor, director at Balfour Beatty. “We stayed with Egnyte because of the efficiency and performance the solution provides in our geographically diverse business where collaboration is a critical requirement for our day-to-day operations.”"PlanGrid is all about enabling construction workers in the field to be as efficient as possible," said Kenny Tucker, VP of Marketing at PlanGrid. "Working with Egnyte helps us enable project teams to collaborate on project plans and documents in real time via any mobile device, creating a seamless workflow for customers, like Balfour Beatty and PowerDesign, all while maintaining a secure environment with strict access permissions.""As one of the leading electrical contracting companies in the country, PowerDesign focuses on exceeding expectations for our customers and delivering high-quality projects on time and within budget,” said Raghu Kutty, director of IT at PowerDesign. “By empowering our employees with Egnyte’s open platform and rich ecosystem of integrations for their favorite apps, we have been able to enhance our workflows, centralize our project files, and unify our teams out on the job site to make sure we stay true to the commitments we make to our customers.”“Our partnership with Egnyte has helped create an open and secure environment for customers to deploy FotoIN throughout their entire organization, including construction, engineering, restoration, property management and real estate firms,” said Sly Barisic, founder and CEO of FotoIN. “Within the FotoIN-Egnyte integrated environment, users are able to automate field to office workflows by capturing, accessing and collaborating on photo files on the go or in-house, helping to increase productivity, customer satisfaction and cost-savings.”“At Bluebeam, our goal is to provide customers with flexible solutions to enhance the way they work,” said Sasha Reed, VP of strategic alliances at Bluebeam. “Together, Bluebeam Revu and Egnyte enable our customers to seamlessly access, manage, annotate, and store project documents in a secure environment, which allows them to easily share the latest versions of their work with project teams when and how they prefer.”"SmartUse currently provides an app for real-time sharing and markup of PDFs across devices, whether at the desk, in the site office, or in the field," said Dan Conery, vice president of business development at Newforma (provider of SmartUse). ”By partnering with Egnyte, we are able to ensure that teams are always working from the latest versions (with strict, enterprise-level controls) of plans, specs, submittals, RFIs and more, to avoid costly mistakes and delays.”Stay tuned for more updates in this industry, and for more information on the Egnyte construction solution, visit here.