Are Microsoft SharePoint and Teams ISO19650 Compliant?
It is a devastating moment for Europe and the wider world as military action in Ukraine escalates. Let’s hope that this conflict ends soon so we can see an end to this senseless loss of life.
ISO 19650, the international standard for managing information over the whole life cycle of a built asset using BIM, has also become viral in the past few years. Common Data Environment (CDE) is another buzzword when it comes to BIM implementation. I want to give you a quick update on how bimU.io Agile is approaching them with Microsoft SharePoint and Teams.
Short answer to the title of this post is no. So we’re working on making them ISO19650 compliant!
Jargon buster for you…
You can probably find more explanatory guides on the internet. To help you cut through complexity and get straight to the definitions, I’ve got some useful links below.
- BSI Group has listed out a series of ISO 19650 standards here.
- Designing Buildings’ BIM Wiki has summarised the history of Common Data Environment (CDE) here.
- Microsoft provides a high-level summary on Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive here.
Why Microsoft SharePoint and Teams?
Another short answer: because we’ve been heavily using k̶i̶d̶n̶a̶p̶p̶e̶d̶ ̶b̶y̶ Microsoft’s Office suite and its Cloud-based version—Microsoft 365 (previously known as Office 365). To be honest, they are fantastic collaboration and communication tools to get rid of local network drives. Everything, including project files, can be stored in a Document Library in the Cloud. This gives real-time co-editing capability for you and your colleagues to make changes simultaneously to Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slides.
Every Microsoft Teams workspace is backed by an underlying Microsoft SharePoint site. Document libraries in SharePoint are essentially network drives in the Cloud.
Almost every company in our industry uses Office products and many of them have migrated to the subscription-based Microsoft 365, which often comes with SharePoint and Teams. Hence, if your company is already using them, you’ve actually got a fully functional Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) with almost unlimited cloud storage space.
Can we use Microsoft SharePoint and Teams as CDE?
If you ask BIMers what CDEs they’ve used, you might hear answers like Bentley ProjectWise, Autodesk BIM 360, etc. Normally they have higher barriers to entry due to their complexity to set up and maintain. There are also additional costs of staff onboarding and internal service support. You might feel them cumbersome to adopt if you’re not working on a large scale project. Sometimes, it is also inevitable to use a different file storage in parallel. For example, when you need the live co-editing functionality in Microsoft 365.
It would be more cost efficient if we can tweak Microsoft SharePoint and Teams a little bit and use them as CDE for BIM projects. Technically, SharePoint can already accommodate user-defined file metadata and bimU.io Agile has a full-fledged online BIM model viewer. We just need to link the both “platforms” together and configure appropriate “information container” and “workflow” to comply with the ISO 19650 standard.
If you haven’t heard about bimU.io Agile, it is a Cloud-based VDC platform where project teams can navigate BIM models online, track down issues on Kanban board, review markups across BIM tools.
How are we approaching this?
If you’re an existing bimU.io Agile user, you might have already noticed a new “Files” tab on the left menu. Yes, we’ve made an experimental SharePoint integration publicly available a few weeks ago and received very positive feedback from our clients and early adopters.
This is one of the reasons why we also call it “Channel” on bimU.io Agile. You can connect a Document Library (either in SharePoint or Teams) to a Channel on bimU.io Agile. It is likely to have multiple document libraries in a SharePoint site (or Teams workspace). Once you log in with your Microsoft organisational account, you’ll be prompted to select an existing team from Microsoft Teams or enter your SharePoint site address.
Give it a go now! Start integrating your Microsoft Teams and SharePoint with bimU.io Agile.
If the connection is successfully created, you’ll see a synchronised document library like below. Now you can upload files, preview content, view document properties, check version history, etc. without leaving bimU.io Agile.
If you upload a BIM model while staying on the “Files” page, there will be a tick box option for you to also save it in the current SharePoint folder. Once a BIM model is uploaded, the same entry will be created as a hyperlink in that folder that allows to open a bimU.io Agile model directly from SharePoint (or Teams) — the so-called bi-directional link.
What to expect on bimU.io Agile?
We’re currently adding more ISO 19650 compatible functionality, including naming convention, revision number, status code, etc. Since every project uses a different client standard, it must be made fully configurable to suit everyone’s needs. For example, you’ll be able to define a list of project specific “Originator”, “Spatial Breakdown”, “Discipline” options. Then the system can do automatic compliance check for you while uploading files. Another example is automatic revision sequencing. If you want to bulk increment revision numbers for multiple documents, bimU.io Agile will detect and pick up preliminary/contractual states and primary/WIP versions automatically.
We’re always here to help you!
The ISO 19650 functionality will be generally available (GA) in Q2 2022. Please stay tuned! We can prioritise development for your urgent need if there’s a business case. Email support@bimu.io and let us know!
