Boston/San Francisco – (May 17, 2001) – With the U.S. debut of Archicad 7.0 today at the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) national convention in Denver, Graphisoft introduces the next generation of Web-based design collaboration with an integrated solution – Project XChange.
As a powerful extension of Archicad’s TeamWork functionality, ProjectXChange is a seamless approach to managing project workflow and manufacturers’ objects via the Web. Using a trio of ProjectXChange tools – Publisher, Reviewer and Markup – Archicad projects make the roundtrip to the Web and back without the use of cumbersome third-party hosting solutions or additional applications.
In CADENCE magazine’s June cover story “AEC Collaboration,” Jerry Laiserin, FAIA, sums up Archicad 7.0’s new capability for 3D redlining of AEC models as unprecedented and having the potential to revolutionize AEC collaboration.
With one click, Project Publisher produces convenient sets of floor plans, 3D views, movie files and quantity take-offs, for printing, saving or uploading to the Web. Published files can be opened, reviewed and redlined in Project Reviewer, a free Java-based viewer embedded in all published documents. Using Reviewer, partners and clients who don’t use Archicad
can monitor progress of a design any time, anywhere from their Internet Explorer
or Netscape Web browser.
Files redlined in Reviewer are merged smoothly back into Archicad with Project Markup developed to handle redlining and ‘red building’ or sketching of conceptual design ideas within Archicad 7.0.
“Unlike the CAD vendors who have approached collaboration with a dot-com mentality, one that says ‘let’s make a portal where AEC professionals will come and spend money,’ we’ve approached collaboration from a different point of view: that of the architect,” says Chris Barron, AIA, vice president of Architecture for Graphisoft US. “We’ve taken the time to understand the architect’s design process – how design information flows within the design team, from the design team to consultants, clients and contractors, and between those who are CAD conversant and those who aren’t but who still need to be able to provide input into the process.”
“We are absolutely floored by it,” says Monte Chapin, principal of 2Dcubed. “It is as if Graphisoft created this approach just for 2Dcubed; it qualifies and extends the way we have been conducting our web-based virtual design collaboration services. The impact Archicad 7.0 will have on our practice and the benefits it will bring to our clients are mind blowing!”
<!–A full description and feature set for Archicad 7.0 can be found online at https://www.graphisoft.com/ac7/new_features/. –>Archicad 7.0 runs on Windows 98/ME and NT/2000; MacOS 8.6 – 9.1 and will support Apple’s latest operating system, OSX.