In our office (North Carolina) we provide surveying and civil engineering services to our company's heavy civil construction projects (in 20+ states). We have been building construction models since 2004 and we have always done so working collaboratively from a local server or "shared drive". I have always felt that we have benefitted from our ability to work in a fast, consistent networked environment. We have six personnel using cad applications on our network and all our work takes place on the network. The rest of our company has started using SharePoint as a "collaborative workspace solution", but aside from that we are the only office that relies heavily on our server for all our work. Understandably, our IT personnel are attempting to consolidate our company's server infrastructure to reduce the costs associated with hardware upgrades and man hours performing maintenance. Ideally, they would like to migrate our server data to the corporate office server (CT). This would put the internet between us and our data. We are currently adopting PowerInroads and in doing so we have only increased the demand on our server.
My question is does Bentley provide guidelines for using their applications, especially the civil ones, in a local area networked environment? Or, do any experts have time to share an opinion, or advice? I have a meeting with our IT personnel this week to discuss the future of our server and additional insight would be great.
Thanks