Happy New Year everyone!!
Hope you all had a good time and are feeling fresh? Have you been making New Year's resolutions? Go to the gym more, give up smoking, drink less (or in my case more) tea?
What about your BIM Year's Resolutions? It's fair to say that that 2012 was the year where the industry moved from 'why should we do BIM', to 'how should we do BIM'. 2013 is likely to be the biggest year yet in moving from traditional 'dumb' designs, to data enriched models that can be used throughout the lifecycle of a project and beyond completion. Many governments around the world are now looking at their BIM implementation strategies; it's a great time to act, either as an individual or as a company.
Learn a new product?
If you have one of our Autodesk Design and Creation suites installed, why not learn one of the other products in the suite in your spare time, 30 minutes every lunchtime or at the end of the day soon builds up. For example those on the Autodesk Building Design Suite have access to a huge range of tools, most of you may only use one or two tools, and maybe only part of each one, but there's so much more there to improve your productivity. I'd highly recommend trying out Showcase if you haven't before for presentations or Inventor if you are on the Ultimate Suite for creating manufactured objects for your models like cranes or machinery.
Go mobile
Why not use that Christmas money to invest in a new iPad, taking your 3D models onto site with BIM 360 Glue for design review on the go, and BIM 360 Field to keep track of construction issues and progress and give you access to new ways of working that have never been possible before, or Formit, a new application to help conceptual design (see above).
Move to the cloud?
The mobile apps are a small part of Autodesk's cloud offerings, but you might be wondering, what does the cloud do for me? What does it involve? Clash Detection, model storage, analysis and visualization are all available through Autodesk 360.
Network more?
Do you use Twitter? It's is a great source for information, if you're new to Twitter, have a look here! Just before Christmas I was in London meeting up with a group that use the #ukbimcrew hashtag, a group enthused by further the use of BIM throughout the UK, they've been setting their sights further in recent months, use the hashtag #globalBIMcrew to ask the experts directly. I'm on there as @navisworks and here's a list of more Autodesk Twitter accounts.
There's also a huge range of worldwide BIM User Groups and LinkedIn groups we have listed on this blog, groups of people who have been through the same process as you, eager to share their experience, why wouldn't you want to speak to them? Get in touch with them and go to the next meet up, or set one up yourself!
Learn an API?
People worldwide use Autodesk products because of their usability, however there's always times where you want to automate a task, create new tasks or have access to features in a different way, the API's are a great way to do this, not sure about coding? Use the 'My First Revit Plugin' tutorials and more
Attend more conferences?
With so much interest in BIM worldwide, there's also conferences of likeminded people who want to learn more too. In the UK we have a fantastic resource, BIM Diary which details upcoming events, webcasts and meet-ups, look in your local area for similar tools.
And it may have only just finished, but now is the time to start thinking about Autodesk University 2013, the call for proposals opens in March (sign up to be notified here) and if you want to go to the biggest and best place for learning more about the products you use every day, you'll probably need to be getting budget approval now, here's some help to start convincing your boss.
Whatever your resolutions, good luck throughout the year and look out for more updates!
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