The Age of Collaboration

Over the past few months the Applied Software development team has been working hard to improve and expand the capabilities of 360 Sync. You may have seen the numerous Applied Software webinars, blog posts, videos, and even the “Bridging the Gap” discussion regarding what’s new. On average, we have four or five 360 Sync calls per day to either set up 360 Sync for a new customer, provide a demonstration for a potential customer, set up a 360 Sync trial, or discuss future plans. I’ve been on calls with people from all over the world – companies large and small, east and west coast U.S., Australia and New Zealand, Singapore, the Middle East, eastern and western Europe, England, Canada. It’s been a blast!

Following are 360 Sync features we’ve been working on and things in store for the future. Hopefully, you can provide a few requests for 360 Sync that we can add to the development wish-list.

NEW IN 360 SYNC: We have added a bunch of functionality to 360 Sync over the past six months:

Integrations with Bluebeam Studio Projects, Procore, Viewpoint – Because our customers requested it, we have added the ability to upload and download files to these widely used point solutions.

Log and reporting improvements –360 Sync has always logged everything that it uploads or downloads, as well as documenting any errors or warnings. Now we’ve added a third log that tells you more about the files that were just uploaded – the name of the file, the time and date it was last modified and by whom, and where the file came from on the server.

Glue upload and download – We’ve added the ability to upload and download files and folders from BIM 360 Glue. Whereas previously you could only upload files from BIM 360 Glue, our recent update makes it possible to upload files and entire folders of files. It also gives users the ability to download and/or archive an entire project with 360 Sync.

French character normalization – In late June, we noticed an issue popping up with some newly restricted characters in BIM 360. It spread from commas, semicolons and quotation marks to include numerous other characters, which greatly affected French Canadian users. We worked diligently to resolve this so these characters could be normalized with BIM 360.

Bug fixes and support – We’ve been working hard to support 360 Sync users across the globe, and we’ve resolved a few tickets here and there for bugs that were found along the way. We appreciate our clients notifying us about them and their patience as we quickly resolved them. Most bug fixes have been turned around in a matter of days.

UPCOMING FOR 360 SYNC: During the coming year, we have a ton of exciting things planned for 360 Sync:

Doubling down on integration – There are nearly ten new integration points in the development queue for the remainder of the year. Not a week passes when we don’t discuss the possibility of integrating another point solution with 360 Sync. Look for 360 Sync to have double the integration points well before this time next year.

Improving user interface for better user experience (UIUX) – 360 Sync users have been clamoring for a faster and simpler interface for a while now, and we’ll be providing that soon. Look for a friendlier interface that will quickly, logically and painlessly walk you through the entire sync setup process. We plan to develop wizards that will walk you through the setup as well.

BIM 360 Insight Cards – There are plans to further integrate 360 Sync with the Insight Cards on BIM 360. This ability, along with the new File Info Log already created (noted above), will help users determine the file updates – the last time, how many, when – without having to check the logs.  Simply go to the Insights tab in BIM 360, link up the 360 Sync Partner Card, and you’ll be good to go.

Consolidating the application – We’re working on consolidating a few things on the back end of our software to make the user experience faster and also to improve response time on bugs or support cases. The goal is to improve response time even further. This may seem like the most boring thing on the 360 Sync roadmap. However, trust me, it will improve performance, allow you to more quickly create integrations, and will help the 360 Sync development team be quicker and more agile when responding to and resolving issues.

What do you want to see?

Now that you know what we’ve done and what we plan to do, it’s your turn. Let us know how we can better serve you. In the comments section of the Applied Software contact form, let us know what you’re looking for in 360 Sync. Maybe you’re looking for a specific integration point or a specific functionality, or maybe you have an idea for how we could simplify the setup process.

If you’re not using 360 Sync yet, don’t waste another hour on double data entry to manually update your BIM 360 libraries. Contact Applied and find out how easy it is to set up and automate your file transfer process.