"We are excited to offer Meridian 2017 with a host of great new capabilities. Having worked closely with our users and partners through the development and testing of this release, we know that Meridian 2017 provides advantages well aligned with their needs and objectives. This edition is all about helping organizations simplify IT implementations, improving the user experience for all roles, significantly enhancing web-based workflows, and empowering trusted members of the supply chain with secure self-service access to information – all to lower costs and improve operational efficiency," says Pat Jenakanandhini, Director of Product Management at BlueCielo.
The new Meridian 2017 edition now streamlines centralized operational control for enterprise implementations. Organizations can reduce the number of servers and administrators needed by co-locating servers in a centralized deployment, lowering their implementation and administration costs, and ensuring consistent enterprise-wide processes and standards. Local caching servers at sites provide fast access to information for users worldwide.
Users can now perform concurrent engineering for BIM in managed workflows. Shared Workspaces enable users to share models, distribute design work in a controlled manner, and edit collaboratively in BIM. Meridian 2017 fully supports Revit models, including Revit Worksheet management with property validation, approval workflows, 2D sheet management, and auto publishing of PDFs. Users can now manage Revit models and the data and drawings from BIM with the same rigor as other critical documents, ensuring increased operational efficiency.
New enhancements to the Power Web and Explorer clients provide fast predictable interaction from virtually anywhere. Project management and document control can now be performed via the browser interface, including managing user and security assignments, undeletes and purges, mass property edits, and more. By not requiring specialized hardware or software implementations for most users, organizations can easily expand project teams, reduce training time, and lower costs, while providing fast managed access to the most up-to-date information.
Streaming PDF workflows in Meridian 2017 power consistent standardized publishing, review, and markup in the industry standard format for documents of record. No plug-ins or software installation are required for viewers, reviewers, or approvers, and no documents are downloaded. Users can now instantly view and annotate from anywhere, with a consistent experience across Meridian Enterprise, Meridian Explorer, and Meridian360 Portal.
The new Contractor Self Service capabilities securely empower the supply chain, proving contractors with the ability to find and access information without submitting requests, and without breaching internal networks. Contractors and other trusted third parties can now directly search and retrieve documents without having to send requests – significantly improving their efficiency. This lowers the barriers to external collaboration, reduces the document control effort, and simplifies operations, while ensuring accountability with full audit capabilities.
"Kinsmen Group is looking forward to rolling out Meridian 2017 for our customers. The new and enhanced web client and site cache capabilities will enable organizations to more effectively centralize their servers, helping to simplify IT administration and reduce associated costs. We are seeing more interest in managing BIM data recently, and the ability to incorporate that into managed workflows, including Revit worksets, will help ensure complete and consistent data is available to everyone who needs it. I’m also excited about the new Contractor Self Service capabilities in Meridian360 Portal, which will facilitate improved document collaboration between owners and contractors in a private and secure portal. As participants in the Meridian 2017 beta program, we’ve seen it all in action already and are eager to roll it out," said Brian Sallade, CEO of Kinsmen Group.
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