Web marketing: What the CE News story is missing

Client service. That’s the more powerful way a website builds your business. A good marketing-oriented website is important, but the real potential of a website is to lower the costs and raise the quality of service to existing clients.

“Web marketing: What firms are missing,” in the July edition of CE News, does a good job of describing requirements for a marketing website, but it misses this idea that client service is what the web was made to provide.

A client-service-oriented AEC website improves service and lowers costs as clients gain the ability to share files, track action items, view transmittal logs, manage submittals and more without tying up your personnel.

Take good care of clients and partners, and they’ll not only come back to you, but they’ll also refer new business your way. Now there’s a marketing website!

Client service is the more powerful way a website builds your business. And that’s just what your Newforma Info Exchange website does for your company.

P.S. Put that client service website on a smartphone, as Newforma Touch does, and prospective customers will really be impressed.

What Are Your Top 3 Goals?

JM Coull reminds its people of their top three goals in signs the Boston-based construction manager and design builder displays in its offices and job trailers.

The JM Coull team has told us the strategic goals on their “Our Focus” sign, shown here, are the reasons they use Newforma software for project information management:

1. Our PIM software makes it easy to get safety checklists and forms from the field into the office.
2. Our products enable the responsiveness, transparency and accountability that make up exceptional client service and invite repeat business.
3. Overall project quality rises as key project information is acted upon quickly, without items slipping through the cracks.

To help us improve our products further, JM Coull project managers, superintendents and an executive vice president recently sat with a team of Newforma product designers to validate the direction we’re taking with field apps now under development.

JM Coull blogged about the meeting and posted a picture of the participants. To read the post and see a picture of Newformants Justin Velgos, Michael DeSouza and Marge Hart with the JM Coull team, see the JM Coull blog post here.

App Happy

Because you love smartphones and tablets, we're strengthening our ability to deliver great mobile and web apps.

As detailed in this news release, Newforma recently hired a whole team of app and web developers. They had already been working together, so the ramp-up time is zero.

Good thing, too. The demand for new smartphone and tablet apps is urgent, based in part on the success of our tablet app for punch list management, shown here. (The people we hired developed this app, which is how we know they’re awesome.)

To show you how dedicated these guys are, check out these pictures. They're from a recent Newforma Engineering Team wiffleball game.

At bat, team leader Michael DeSouza prepares to crush his pitch. But look in the shadows and you’ll see web developer Jordan Sage doing homework. That’s dedication!

This week it’s phones, tablets and websites. Last week we announced new capabilities in the cloud. For a fuller discussion of why we accommodate so many technology platforms, see this blog post and the white paper it describes, “What’s the best technology platform for project management?”

VEO + Newforma Project Center = BIM + PIM

There has been some very positive feedback following the announcement last week of our licensing of the VEO^TM 3D building model collaboration platform from M-SIX. Of course, lots of folks have lots of questions, so here is an attempt to answer at least a few of the most basic questions:

What did Newforma license?
Newforma licensed key elements of M-SIX’s VEO platform for 3D building model collaboration. This will allow Newforma to offer VEO’s model viewing and navigation capabilities, as well as the ability to associate items in Newforma Project Center, including project files and PIM objects, such as RFIs, Action Items and Submittals, with elements of the building information model, as an integrated part of our industry leading PIM solutions.

How does this fit with Newforma’s focus on Project Information Management (PIM)?
We believe that these capabilities open up a broad new range of possibilities for our customers in design and construction. For all of the promise and capabilities of Building Information Modeling (BIM), BIM itself has exponentially increased the challenges that PIM addresses. 

The flood of deliverables that are typically generated from the building information model, the explosion in the number of models developed for specific disciplines/trades, each in multiple versions as the design and construction process progresses, and providing access to information that was previously locked away inside the building model, are all challenges that PIM is capable of addressing. Integrating BIM with PIM has been a key objective of Newforma since its early days. This licensing arrangement moves us several steps ahead in fulfilling that objective.

Why VEO?

Simply put, we really liked the product, the people and the company, and saw a great win-win-win opportunity.  Based on the picture of Max, they seem to like us as well. :) 
By partnering with M-SIX, we saw an opportunity to accelerate our road map, and bring new capabilities to market sooner, benefitting Newforma, M-SIX and the AEC/O industry. 

Our Cloud, Your Cloud or Your Premise – Which is it?
VEO is designed to be a cloud-based, 3D building collaboration platform, but can be deployed in any of those three environments. Incorporating the VEO platform into our PIM solutions is just another step in the continuing evolution of our PIM solutions, driven by the needs of the AEC/O industry to deliver the right information to the right project team members, anytime, anywhere, on any device.

As detailed in the recent “PIM in the Cloud” whitepaper, our approach is to select the right platforms to meet customer business needs. There is no one platform that suits all; incorporating the VEO platform as a cloud-based service, fully integrated with our PIM solutions, is just one of a number of exciting announcements that we will be making over the next few months.

When can I get it?
We expect to incorporate elements of the VEO technology in the next major release of our flagship PIM solutions, expected to be released early next year.

How do I learn more?
Come to Nugget 2012, September 17 through 19, 2012, in Fort Worth, TX. For more information,visit the Nugget 2012 web site. I look forward to seeing you there!