2021 Year In Review
THE INFORMATION YOU NEED, FASTER.
In an infinitely complex world built on complicated design and construction processes, the only sustainable path is for information to come to you rather than you having to go to it. AVAIL’s mission is to connect and deliver the relevant information you need, when you need it, with as little effort as possible.
As each year comes to a close we plan to provide an overview of the progress and challenges we faced, share our customer’s successes, and impart our thoughts on direction for the coming year.
Check out the 2021 infographic we produced to share some of the exciting AVAIL stats from last year! The data in the infographic is a reflection of the incredible work you, our customers, are producing. We’re proudly supporting your operations in over 1650 cities in 86 countries around the world! You added new content to be managed and accessed through AVAIL at a rate of over 14K files per day in 2021. Wow! We built AVAIL to be a massively scalable service and we thank everyone who has put their trust in us as we help them in their digital transformation journey.
The team here at AVAIL worked tirelessly to deliver nearly flawless uptime for the services in 2021 sans the afternoon Amazon AWS had its massive outages which in turn affected our services. We learned from the experience and have initiated improvements to reduce or avoid downtime should AWS suffer similar problems.
We’re excited about the future of AVAIL and aware we couldn’t continue to work on it without your support! Thanks to everyone who helped make 2021 a successful year. We have our plates full regarding new features and extensions to the platform. Watch for continual improvements to the Revit workflow, a new visual browsing feature we call Key Cards, Dynamic Path management to better support cloud-hosted storage solutions like BIM360, OneDrive and Google Drive, and exciting new Project Navigation features we’re working on for our AVAIL 5.0 release!
Special thanks to our new friends at Cricket Press based here in our own hometown of Lexington, Kentucky who helped produce the infographic. We like to be able to share the talents of our friends and neighbors here in Kentucky. Special bonus points if you find the easter egg we included for our friends of Confluence 🙂 Cheers to a prosperous 2022.
Thanks!
Randall Stevens | CEO
By The Numbers
AVAIL is designed to help manage and deliver all the digital information being generated and managed within our customer’s environments. Content and files supporting Revit workflows continue to be the dominant file types being accessed through AVAIL. But you didn’t stop there! Testament to the increasingly broadening use is the fact that we’ve seen over 1,000 different file formats in AVAIL. What we consider “technical 3d/cad” data (rfa, rvt, dwg, dgn, max, 3ds, skp, etc) constitutes around 50% of the files being managed in AVAIL followed by 36% photos and images, 9% documents and hundreds of other miscellaneous files.
Search and analytics are core features of AVAIL. As you can see from the infographic, designers and engineers aren’t always the best spellers 🙂 It’s one reason a good set of Tags, coupled with the Filters Panel, can help you find exactly what you’re looking for. Another piece of information related to search you may find interesting is that the average text-based search within a single Channel of AVAIL returned an average of 64 files matching that search. When you broaden your search using the “Global Search” on the Home screen the average number of returned files is 311. Channels and Files were searched, viewed and used millions of times in 2021. We look forward to millions more in 2022.
Countries Where Our Customers Operate: 86
AWS Servers: US East and Sydney, Australia
EC2 Production Nodes: 17
AVAIL Channels Managed: 12,600
Most Searched Term: Door
Permutations of searches containing “door”: 290
New Feature In 2021
Following the release of AVAIL 4.0 in fall of 2020 the product team spent 2021 focused on radically improving management of non-Family files in Revit, extending access to all content and file locations including cloud-hosted locations, and positioning AVAIL for continued improvement and value creation.
AVAIL Harvest 2.0
Harvest for Revit simplifies Revit by making content libraries searchable and instantly accessible – we help you find information, faster. Once found, putting content to work is as easy as drag-and-drop or one-click placement into a Project. Managing the wide variety of Revit content, not just Families, is extremely difficult. With Harvest for Revit every Revit Element – Drafting Views, Groups, Sheets, Legends, Schedules and System Families, act individual discrete objects ready to be searched and loaded into your current project – all while maintaining those assets in one or more Revit Container Libraries for simple, universal management.
AVAIL Browser for MicroStation, Link Sharing and AVAIL Mobile
To continue making AVAIL accessible and useful in new ways several initiatives were undertaken in 2021. In addition to Revit, AutoCAD, Civil & Plant 3D, 3dsMax, Rhino, and SketchUp, we extended AVAIL Browser support to Bentley MicroStation. As more and more engineering and infrastructure design and management firms adopt AVAIL we will continue to develop capabilities to integrate with their applications and infrastructure.
We added Link Sharing at both the Channel and Content level. Right-click in AVAIL Desktop to access a link and share with your colleagues in an email, Microsoft Teams, Slack or communication channel of your choice.
AVAIL Mobile for both iOS and Android are now available in “Preview Release”. Now you can search, browse and share links to content from your mobile device(s). If you haven’t given it a try, contact our Customer Success team for access.
Tag IO and Lenses
We introduced a cool new feature to help manage Tags in AVAIL called Tag IO. Now you can easily and quickly curate and manage your Tags using a standard Excel or Google spreadsheet. You can easily add or remove Tags related to your content using all the features you command within your spreadsheets.
Tag IO takes advantage of a new plug-in architecture which allows rapid customization and extension of features within the AVAIL Platform. We’re calling the plug-ins to AVAIL “Lenses” and Tag IO is the first of what will be many capabilities developed by our own team and eventually partners who want to take advantage of AVAIL’s core content management capabilities. Lenses are the future of AVAIL!
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