microstation and staad

huangyhg

microstation and staad?
just heard this from one of our jr engineers (
i attended reis staad convention in las vegas july 22-23.  one of the presentations was by jim barr of bentley about combining bentley structures (microstation) with staad.  they have been working to use the open staad interface to seamlessly import and export structures between microstation and staad.  they are doing the same thing with autocad, larsa, adapt, mathcad, tekla structures and a wide variety of other programs.
staad as a popular program is not unknown to bnetley. i fail to see why they could not "seamlessly" import and export from their major programs with quite an open architecture of staad in all these years. the most you can do is to export/ import dxf files and that too only the line geometry, not the complete model with all the attributes of material and section properties. no doubt, they have a lot of ground to cover before these software can talk to each other.
as a user, i don't see any immediate outcome of the takeover. microstation was a big success for bentley but they appear to be sitting on their past laurels.
ciao.
and netguru's stock soars from $1 to $1.04.
smells like an anti-trust suit/crackdown on cadd vs. fea and such programs is long overdue.
i've played with the staad export to .dxf. it works. that's about it.
rockengineer, thanks for the tip. i asked rei to give me a copy of their presentation at the conference you were referring to. the slides did not have that much data - i guess the live presentation had more. we do a lot of dot work and we have to use microstation for that. we are looking for a good integrated modeling, analysis, design and drafting package where if the results change the drawings chane as well. we have looked at revit + risa (very flimsy) and tekla (very costly and not standard) so we are eager to see the staad + microstation. i think it has the best shot since they are now one company.
vooter - anti-trust? don't you think it is the exact opposite?! there are like 1000 structural engineering/fem packages out there. i think consolidation from microstation is exactly what we need.