Eighteen months on from its acquisition by Autodesk, Unifi’s cloud-based software solution for managing and accessing design content has been reworked and integrated into Autodesk’s cloud stack
For mature BIM customers, having content at the tips of their fingers can lend productivity a major boost. It might be content – created for previous projects that they need, or new content created for ongoing projects that needs to be shared among teams. Managing this kind of content can be complicated, however, and there have been numerous technologically-based attempts to tackle the issue.
The big issue here is that the Internet was, and still is, a Wild West when it comes to downloadable content. Customers looking for BIM component data that doesn’t already exist in their own internal, managed repositories are forced to deal with issues around file size and quality and then incorporate these ‘foreign objects’ into well-managed BIM processes.
It’s been a challenge for the software industry. Take, for example, Autodesk Seek, a content website from the software giant that demonstrated exactly how disparate the quality of downloadable content can be. In early 2017, Autodesk ended up handing over the operations and customer support obligations relating to Autodesk Seek to BIMobject , a Sweden-based company that has taken on the gnarly task of encouraging AEC manufacturers to provide managed content and developed a high-end database to store it, at first for its own use and then later, for fee-paying BIM customers. In the UK, meanwhile, we have BIMstore, among many others.
In my view, getting companies in the AEC industry to provide up-to-date, high-quality, modern digital deliverables that represent their entire product ranges is probably never going to happen. The task is too huge, and I think we may have to wait for AI to take it on.
Welcome news
That said, the recent announcement that Autodesk has reworked the technology acquired in its March 2023 acquisition of Unifi and integrated it into its own cloud stack is welcome news.
Unifi was founded in Last Vegas in 2010 by engineers Dwayne Miller and Ken Gardener, in response to the huge expansion of building programmes in that city over the past two decades, as well as in the Middle East and Asia. The goal was to give back to BIM users all the time they wasted searching for and downloading content.
In essence, Unifi was built as a library for collaging and managing company and project content, providing control of virtual assets for firms looking to deploy consistent standards across project teams. Offering cloud accessibility, in-Revit access, intelligent search and browse and a stack of other management tools, Unifi gained real momentum quickly and inevitably popped up early on Autodesk’s radar. Getting into buying mode and negotiating a deal took time, but it was clear that Unifi was a product from which all Autodesk customers could benefit and which could easily be included in their subscription fees.
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Since the deal was signed, Unifi has been reworked to fit into Autodesk’s cloud stack and rebranded as Content Catalog, a part of the Autodesk Docs subscription at no extra cost and manageable via the Autodesk Construction Cloud Admin. This means that users of numerous Autodesk products have free access to Content Catalog (including ACC, AEC Collection, BIM Collaborate, Collaborate Pro, Autodesk Build, Autodesk Takeoff), as well as those with an Autodesk Docs stand-alone subscription.
Meanwhile, customers using the most recent release of Unifi Pro are secure and Autodesk has no plans to retire this product. In fact, Content Catalog doesn’t offer the full functionality of Unifi Pro, with a number of key features omitted. These include content ratings, content requests, personal saved searches and support for Revit legends, Revit Material and Fill Pattern. Also missing are the preview image generator, automatic users management for group syncing with SSO or Active Directory, the ability to create new shared libraries, manufacturer-provided content (channels), shared parameter management, APIs and Project Analytics.
It’s expected that many of these capabilities will be added over time. Project Analytics, for example, appears to be something that Autodesk is working on in a more general capacity within its cloud stack and the company plans a release of new management tools, with a separate licensing framework.
In conclusion, Unifi has the potential to be a big crowd-pleaser, especially with customers that have not yet implemented a content management system of their own. And in many ways, content management within Autodesk’s BIM products is long overdue, as are industrial strength management-level tools. The inclusion of Content Catalog in the Autodesk stack and the possibility that the company is working on additional management reporting tools is likely to be well-received.
