Newforma’s newest release of Project Center, version 2022.2, continues to strengthen security with multi-factor authentication (MFA) and includes several productivity enhancements. In addition, our newest Connector for Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) enables users to access and share ACC project files directly from Newforma Project Center.

Project Center users will also benefit from efficiency improvements to the Microsoft SharePoint Connector and Project Center file transfers.

Strengthening Security

Newforma recently announced that it has achieved SOC 2 certification providing advanced security controls to protect customer data. Newforma continues to lead the industry in security by adding a second layer of security with multi-factor authentication (MFA). This new authentication is now available for Project Center Info Exchange and the Microsoft SharePoint Online Connector.

MFA, also known as Two-Factor Authentication (2FA), prevents access to information by unauthorized individuals or groups. According to the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), “multi-factor authentication is a layered approach to securing data and applications where a system requires a user to present a combination of two or more credentials to verify a user’s identity for login”. MFA has also proven to be an effective tool to prevent data theft. Given that cybercriminals have found multiple ways to get around the traditional security of username and password, MFA adds an advanced security layer to deter criminals.

This is particularly important for the construction industry. Data theft or leakage of sensitive information such as intellectual property, critical infrastructure plans, and operations information could be devasting.

Although it may seem a bit annoying to have another login step to deal with, Project Center administrators will have flexibility around authentication frequency for their organization. Administrators can set Info Exchange authentication frequency to “always”, “once”, or after a set number of days. SharePoint Online users are only authenticated by Microsoft’s MFA the first time they login.

Expanding Your Reach to Project Information

Newforma’s latest Connector for Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC), enables users to access, view, and share ACC documents directly from Newforma Project Center. Users have a unified view of ACC documents alongside all other related information such as RFIs, submittals, and action items.

Another major benefit of this new ACC Connector is that all ACC documents can now be searched. Because all files in Project Center are scanned, indexed, and OCR’d, any text embedded in the document can be found by Newforma’s powerful search capability.

In addition, by sharing ACC files through Information Exchange project teams have a complete audit trail of the file transfer. Users can also download record copies of ACC documents anytime, providing teams with incremental archive capability.

Simplifying Project Life

Productivity improvements have also been made to the Project Center Connector for SharePoint. SharePoint Online Projects can now be linked through one backend connection, eliminating the need to create a separate connection for each project. This is particularly helpful for teams with lots of projects stored in SharePoint. With this new enhancement, adding new projects in SharePoint is a breeze!

The SharePoint Online Connector also includes a significant new feature we call the “round trip” editing. Users can now open documents, edit them, and then save them back to SharePoint directly from Project Center. This saves multiple logins, upload, and download steps!

This release also simplifies file transfers by removing pop-up boxes and clicks. There’s no need to click through multiple pop-up screens. File transfer options are available directly in the transfer window.

In this new release, Newforma has also included support for Autodesk 2023 and Microsoft Windows 11.

Newforma customers will also notice a change in our release numbering system. We have simplified our release naming convention by using the release year, followed by the number of the release for that year. This release is numbered 2022.2 since there was an earlier release of Project Center this year (12.5.3).

To learn more about the Project Center 2022.2 release, check out our video release notes on the Newforma Customer Community and Youtube!