Blog Archives

Help us improve by filling in a short survey

May 4 2011  |   Léon van Berlo  |  Blog  |  Comments Off

Give us 5 minutes of your time, and we will give you an improved BIMserver.

To get an overview of the applications, expectations, perceptions, opinions, shortcomings and your own developments of the open source BIMserver.org we created a short survey.
It consists of some 22 questions and should not take longer than 5 min. to fill in. All questions are optional, fill in only as much as you want.
We would very much appreciate your feedback on this project and we are certain that this will help us with regard to future improvements, features and the general direction of this effort.

Link to the survey: http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=fd868919-cf74-4f2d-a28c-2373c767cbe7

Any other (informal) feedback is also welcome.
Thank you very much for your time,

The BIMserver.org team

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Release Candidate 3: WebGL

November 2 2010  |   Léon van Berlo  |  Blog  |  Comments Off

People keep asking how many release candidates will come before the stable release is there. To be honest… we don’t know. For now we have everything in there we want in a 1.0 release. Final part of the featurelist was the implementation of  WebGL as an online viewer (and forget O3D). Of course not everything we want in a BIMserver is in there, but there will be next releases… If nog bugs will be found in the RC3 it will be the stable release somewhere next week. Feel free to test it via http://download.bimserver.org/

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BIMserver pilot info

June 7 2010  |   Léon van Berlo  |  Blog  |  Comments Off

Returning readers of this blog have noticed the start of a BIMserver Pilot 2010 in the Netherlands. This bimserver pilot is not limited to just the open source BIMserver, but it will probably have a strong focus.

The kickoff meeting of the pilot has taking place at TNO. During this meeting quite a large number of participants elaborated on what they expect and want to contribute in the pilot. TNO is now working on a projectplan to set off with this pilot.

For those of you who want to keep up with things going on in the pilot, or even want to participate: join the special mailinglist at http://bimserver.nl/mailman/listinfo/pilot2010_bimserver.nl
This is the only form of communication about this pilot. The projectplan will be send to participants using this mailinglist. Most of the conversations will be in Dutch, but most Dutch people speak pretty good English, so feel free to join in.

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Factsheets

June 1 2010  |   Léon van Berlo  |  Blog  |  Comments Off

We get a lot of questions about the BIMserver software. Most of them are really good questions. Most of the answers can be found on the website (or by simply using the software itself). Because the audience is growing and more and more people would like to have a factsheet about the BIMserver, we decided to create just that.

BIMserver.org introduces the BIMserver factsheet on http://www.bimserver.org/factsheet/

For now we only have a Dutch language (our native speech). English will follow soon. We like to invite you to help us translate to any language you prefer.

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Masterclasses

January 15 2010  |   Léon van Berlo  |  Featured  |  Comments Off

Getting to know the BIMserver: introductions and details….

BIMserver.org is an open source software server written in Java that allows users to share and edit Building Information Models. Designed for interoperability, it publishes BIM data using open standards.

When you are a professional in the AEC industry and you want just a bit of extra attention beside the standard documentation, we are glad to help you. A full day masterclass will introduce you to BIMserver.  Attendees will learn how to upload, publish, and share BIM data in different formats.  Discussion will include the BIMserver user interfaces, IFC, merging, clash detection, and much more….

Get a full day of personal attention of the BIMserver experts, addressing your issues, helping on your specific questions. Make sure to invite your partners as well!

Who should want this:
Anyone interested in BIM and working together with partners is encouraged to attend, but familiarity with basic BIM concepts and 3D modelling is suggested.

Directions:
The masterclass will take place at your office. We will come to your place and help you with your issues. Make sure to invite your partners as well!

Please contact us at masterclass@bimserver.org for more information or to book our experts.

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Expanding user group

January 13 2010  |   Léon van Berlo  |  Blog  |  Comments Off

Since the release of the 0.8 version of our software, we manage to get a wider user-group. More and more people download and use the software. The demoserver also gets more users every day. To give you an idea about where our users come from we plotted this map from the statistics engine.

bimserver users from 0.8 release until today....

As you can see, many of the users are in Europe. We have to say that the US is gaining fast. This week was the first week that there were more US visitors on our site, than all other countries together. Seems like you guys don’t mind my typos once in a while….

Let’s hope that this map will look completely red in a few months. We will try to please more new users with our upcoming 0.8.1 release.

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New release: v0.8

December 22 2009  |   Léon van Berlo  |  Blog, News  |  Comments Off

BIMserver.org: new release, new site, new features!

The open source BIMserver just released a new stable version of their software. The new release is the 0.8 version. A lot has changed since the 0.1 version in March this year. Just some of the new features:

  • 25% speed increase
  • concept of sub-projects
  • improved automatic merging
  • RSS change notification
  • geolocate projects
  • improved multi user support
  • improved web-user-interface
  • google earth network link
  • smart revision management
  • extended query and filter options
  • more details on your revision
  • checkout/update warnings (while concurrent engineering)
  • enhanced read only access
  • enhanced user rights management
  • change finder on revisions
  • export of CityGML, Collada, KML, IFC properties, O3D
  • reference implementation of the CityGML ADE for IFC and BIM
  • get a summary of your model
  • and a lot more….

Some of these features are a direct result of the successful BIMserver Breakfast in November at TNO; some come from the intense contact with some of our users. 
This release of the open source bimserver software is, without a doubt, the ‘best bimserver ever’. The team doesn’t stop developing and new plans are already being deployed.
The latest release is now available for download at download.bimserver.org. The demoserver (which was offline during the final stage of development) is back online as well. Check it out on demo.bimserver.org.

Together with the new software, the team also launches their new website. Because our software is stable and professional, our site also needed a more professional layout.
With this new software-release and the new website the bimserver.org-team and it’s users are ready for the future.

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New feature, new release date

December 17 2009  |   Léon van Berlo  |  Blog  |  Comments Off

This week the development team of bimserver.org found out that we are all passionate about our jobs. That’s not really a surprise (or we wouldn’t make this software open source) and it gives a lot of valuable opportunities like having fun at what you do.
But as all good things in life it also has a downside. In this case the downside is that things we are not as passionate about will fall behind on the cool stuff.
For the open source bimserver software this means that we are looking at implementing O3D visualization in the new release, but because we are passionate about this, the given release date of December 18th will not be made.
Our families decided that it would be good for us to stay home for Christmas and not work with anything that has the word ‘java’ in it (except for the coffee of course). This means that we will (for sure) release a new version of the bimserver.org software before Christmas (central European time) and hope to have all the new features like O3D in it.
So to be short: we won’t make December 18th, but the waiting won’t be long and we will give you extra stuff in return.

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Getting ready for the breakfast

November 16 2009  |   Léon van Berlo  |  Blog  |  Comments Off

The BIMserver.org development-team is working night-shifts to get ready in time for the 2009 BIMserver-breakfast. The sourcecode is rapidly changing every day. The BIMserver software is transforming to a completely new architecture. The merging capabilities will become more in the core of the architecture (in stead of ‘just’ a feature) and the ‘difference finder’ is getting better and better every day. Some of our first users call this new version ‘the best BIMserver ever’. The development team just hopes it will be ready in time for the breakfast….

If you plan to look at the new features at the BIMserver-breakfast, don’t forget to send us an e-mail that you are coming over (so we can make sure there will be enough of the brown stuff).

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BIMserver.org on FOSS4G2009

October 23 2009  |   Léon van Berlo  |  Blog  |  Comments Off

citygml-export

These days all the open source GIS nerds are attending the FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial information) congress in Sydney Australia. Because the BIM world and the GIS world are starting to overlap each other, BIMserver.org was also present at this conference. We made a contribution by presenting the CityGML extension for BIM and it’s implementation in BIMserver.org. For those of you who missed it you can find the sheets, the extension and some example files on foss4g.bimserver.org.


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