Blog / Newforma Konekt
Transitioning to a new platform can feel like a risk you can’t afford. CESO’s Lindell Brooks and Terry Jones spent years testing that assumption before finally completing their Newforma Konekt migration off Project Center. — This is the unscripted version of how it actually went: what convinced them, what they’d do differently, and what changed once VPN was no longer part of anyone’s day.
Participants: Lindell Brooks — Senior Director of Technology, CESO. Terry Jones — BIM Manager, CESO. Jason Herbst — moderator, Newforma.
CESO has used Newforma Project Center since 2017, not long after Terry Jones joined and pushed early adoption. For years the team ran on it, in Lindell Brooks’s words, “religiously.” Then COVID hit, and it changed how people connected, how they worked, and where they worked. Traditional filing systems stopped delivering what the team needed.
The initial assumption was that bandwidth could fix it — a big enough VPN pipe could make anything work. It couldn’t. The problem wasn’t just the pipe into the office; it was every home network, every coffee shop, every location someone happened to be working from that day. Reliable access to Project Center became a real, recurring friction point.
CESO first saw Newforma Konekt introduced at Newforma World 2023. They were interested — but not convinced. Terry Jones explained the hesitation directly: the core functionality they needed wasn’t fully there yet. “We do like being early adopters,” he said, “but we’re not early riskers.”
Internal policy mattered here too. CESO staff took laptops home every night, which meant VPN dependence was already built into daily work. Konekt’s cloud-based model was appealing precisely because it removed that dependency — but in 2023, the timing wasn’t right yet.
A year later, the calculus changed. CESO had decided to move away from on-premise file servers entirely and wanted a platform that connected cleanly to the cloud tools it was already using. At Newforma World 2024, the team created their Konekt hub on the spot and started testing it that same week and the week after.
Jason Herbst, who’d joined Newforma around that time, noted that most Project Center users he talked with weren’t running a hybrid setup — they wanted a straight answer to one question: what does it actually take to migrate to the cloud?
CESO made the call to drop its internal filing system completely and stop VPN access for the whole company — not just as part of the migration, but as a security decision. The upside was immediate: staff could work from the office, from home, or on the road, and still reach both their file systems and Newforma Konekt without a VPN connection in the way.
Because Konekt connects directly to the cloud platforms CESO had already adopted, project data mapped over the same way it always had in Project Center — just through a VPN-free path.
CESO ran pilot teams first to surface what worked and what didn’t before rolling out company-wide. A handful of workflow customizations — in the QC team, for example — needed adjusting, but nothing that changed the plan.
The team set a go-live date and worked backward several months to leave room for training, testing, and planning. Lindell Brooks’s advice on this point was blunt: over-communicate. “Overload people with information about upcoming dates, about times when things have to be submitted.” Champions were identified early — people who could both test the product and help build anticipation for it across their teams.
One thing Lindell said the team got wrong: assuming IT could absorb the migration workload on top of its existing job. “That in no way really points poorly on Newforma,” he said — the migration process itself is quick and easy. The volume of work is what needs a dedicated team, not just IT.
CESO built a small dedicated group to run the actual migration, and separately, a larger team to handle new project creation going forward — setting up the Konekt project, the corresponding Autodesk Forma project, and financial setup together for every new job.
CESO also decided every new project, without exception, would be created in Konekt from that point on — making it the default rather than an opt-in choice. As Terry Jones put it: “That is the key to adoption. You have to get people excited about it, and they have to know what’s in it for them.”
Both Lindell Brooks and Terry Jones returned to the same theme repeatedly: adoption lives or dies on champions — usually people in roles like project coordinators, whose habits ripple out to everyone who works with them.
Lindell described resistance in long-tenured staff as something close to the stages of grief — denial, then frustration — before, eventually, “if you can get them to drink the Kool-Aid,” a real moment of enlightenment. Newer hires had no old habits to unlearn; a solid onboarding program was usually enough on its own.
Terry’s read on what makes a good internal champion: some comfort with technology, genuine willingness to try something new, and real enthusiasm — paired with enough standing in the office that their adoption pulls other people along with it. One example from CESO: someone managing project coordinators on the construction admin team, who wasn’t even a previous Newforma user, spent thirty minutes walking a resistant colleague through the tool. “The lights came on,” Terry said, and that person became a convert.
Adoption came faster with Konekt than it ever did with Project Center, according to Lindell Brooks — partly because newer hires simply learn it as the default, and partly because the SaaS interface reads as simpler than Project Center’s desktop, multi-module layout. Terry Jones was direct about the comparison: Project Center is “a lot of software to learn”; Konekt “does feel a bit more intuitive.”
The other tangible shift, in both their words: no more managing software upgrades. With Project Center, a new release meant preparing and installing it across servers. With Konekt, updates simply appear. “I sign into my browser and fire up Konekt,” Terry said, “and boy, it just got better.” Dropping VPN and local servers also meant CESO’s work-from-home days stopped colliding with connectivity problems — both speakers named this as one of the biggest gains in day-to-day speed and access.
Asked directly whether CESO stores all project data in Konekt or keeps a separate cloud environment, Lindell Brooks was clear: Konekt holds the project information management layer — RFIs, submittals, action items, and connected teams — while the underlying working files (AutoCAD, Revit, Adobe, and daily production files) live in Autodesk Forma (the platform Autodesk renamed from Autodesk Construction Cloud in March 2026), with internal company information on a separate platform. Konekt maps to both, so CESO can see and navigate file structures through Konekt without those files being stored there.
A follow-up question asked specifically whether staff open and edit production files directly inside Konekt. The answer is no — that work happens through Autodesk’s desktop connector, against files that live in Autodesk Forma. Konekt provides the map and the connection point, not the file storage.
CESO’s transition was a hybrid cutover, not an overnight switch. The team set a drop-dead date to fully retire internal filing and VPN access, then worked backward with several months of runway. Projects with a month or less of work remaining stayed in Project Center and were simply left there — always retrievable, never migrated. Projects still in earlier stages (preliminary, design, construction documents) were scheduled for a specific migration day, coordinated directly with each project’s manager.
Project Center and Newforma Konekt run under the same license, not separate ones, so CESO could operate both in parallel during the transition. Migrating a project shuts down its access in Project Center — it remains visible there as an archived project, but isn’t editable — though a reversion process exists if it’s ever needed.
Asked which modules aren’t available in Konekt: RFIs, submittals, change orders, proposals, and proposal requests are all there. Site visits and field notes are not — a dedicated field notes app was in beta at the time of this session — and CESO worked around the gap in the meantime by repurposing Konekt’s Issues module. Email filing and search — described as the core of what Newforma does — carries over fully.
Walking through a real example — a submittal — Lindell Brooks described the flow: base files live in Autodesk Forma; markups happen in Bluebeam Studio, with the marked-up PDF staying there; that file gets attached directly to the submittal inside Konekt through the desktop connector, with no separate download step. Because each project is mapped between its Konekt and Forma counterparts, staff can browse straight through to the file they need.
Asked what to start doing now if you’re still on Project Center and considering the move, Lindell’s answer was infrastructure-first: define your own break point — which active projects move, which stay, which get archived — and build a realistic timeline from there. Terry’s answer was user-first: inventory which Project Center modules your staff actually rely on day to day, and confirm each one has a home in Konekt, or a workaround, before committing to a date.
Migrating an individual project, per Lindell, is mechanically simple: an admin clicks migrate on a given project in Project Center, it processes in the background, and an email confirms success or flags a failure. CESO had very few failures against roughly 625 projects migrated, and most were traced to broken links rather than platform issues. Migration time ranged from about twelve minutes to three hours depending on how much content — email volume especially — a project carried, with most landing in the 13–20 minute range.
CESO’s migration itself was handled by IT and a handful of others. A separate, larger team was built specifically to handle new project setup going forward — spinning up the Konekt project, the corresponding Autodesk Forma project, and financial setup together, for what Lindell estimated at dozens of new projects on some days. CESO now runs more than 3,000 projects in Konekt.
Asked what this migration makes possible a year out that wasn’t the point going in, Lindell Brooks pointed to API access — the ability to pull data out of Konekt to build dashboards for program directors and business unit leaders overseeing dozens of projects at once, visibility that used to mean going project by project inside the tool. Terry Jones tied it back to Newforma’s broader ecosystem approach — Autodesk, Procore, and conversations at Newforma World about deeper Bluebeam integration — plus AI on the near-term roadmap.
Terry Jones’s parting line: get past the hesitation and just try it — setting up a Konekt hub is simple enough that testing it costs little, even if you keep one foot in Project Center for a while. Lindell Brooks’s version: “Drink the Kool-Aid and share the joy” — and a nod to Newforma’s self-paced training academy for teams that don’t have time for a live walkthrough.
