Newforma Project Center’s New Release Adds Multi-factor Authentication and New Autodesk Construction Cloud Connector

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.

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

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 Newforma Project Center’s Info Exchange and the Newforma Project Center 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 devastating.

Although it may seem a bit annoying to have another login step to deal with, Newforma Project Center administrators will have flexibility around authentication frequency for their organization. Administrators can set Newforma Project Center 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 log in.

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 Newforma 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 Newforma Project Center 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.

Productivity improvements have also been made to the Newforma 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 Newforma Project Center 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 Newforma 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 Project Center release, Newforma has also included support for Autodesk 2023 and Microsoft Windows 11.

Newforma Project Center 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 Newforma 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!