Tekla Structures Edmonton User Day
Arvin Eugenio

We had the pleasure of meeting several users, especially from the Edmonton area, during our Tekla Structures Alberta user event. The number of attendees exceeded our expectations and we received much valued feedback from them.

We started the day providing an overview of the new DowcoTech.com website and extranet, where users on maintenance can access the most recent downloads, participate in discussion forum or read technical articles or the latest Dowco, Tekla, Archicad or Fabtrol news. There is also information about Tekla Structures in the Tekla North American site as well as Tekla Extranet...specifically we recommend bookmarking Tekla US Support Center in Tekla Extranet to easily follow product news issued by Tekla Inc. - not forgetting the highly useful Tekla webinars!

There followed a presentation of Tekla Structures – Fabtrol – Tekla Structures roundtrip. First a phase in Tekla Structures model was released for fabrication using Tekla Structures Fabtrol Submittal tool. Then the phase was imported into Fabtrol, where steel was estimated, nested and pushed through the production. After that, we showed how the status of each assembly was imported back to Tekla Structures.

The result is a normal Tekla model but now with more information about the status of each part. Tekla Structures makes it easy to visualize the status of the project, run reports from any of that information and also communicate the model project progress using Tekla Structures model reviewer, where you can customize the part tooltips to show detailed information about each part and use comment and redlining tools to ask or answer questions.

We also highlighted the huge amount of work Tekla has put into the North American environments. Each new version comes with new US environment, with lots of goodies not found elsewhere. Make sure you read the US localization nodes in every version, as we are confident there will be something useful there for you. Not necessarily everything may suit your current workflow, but surely some will, and take the rest as ideas about how you could further customize your Tekla Structures to perfectly support your needs.

Another thing is specific for Canadian users. We have already made CISC compatible profile catalogs for both Metric and Imperial environments. We would like to continue this work with you, and are open to receive any ideas which we can implement for Canadian users to help your work.

Another way to help users are the Tekla Structures Extensions. We showed only small part of these highly useful tools, which do not always come with the installation but are often developed and uploaded to Extranet after an official release. There is now also a complete "Tekla Structures 16.0 US Extensions" installation package with helpful videos available in Tekla Extranet. All the tools are based on customer requests and feedback, so keep the requests and feedback coming and we hope the extensions will become an even more significant part of your Tekla toolset.

The day ended with a presentation on improvements recently added to Tekla Structures and how to use these in daily work. During the session we covered not only 16.0 but also some of the 15.0 and 16.1 improvements in order to give a more complete picture of what has happened recently. In the end we showed the near future main directions for Tekla Structures, which generally follow the same fundamentals as so many previous versions:

• Strengthen the presence in fabrication
• Easy management and revision control of models
• Sharing of models between different offices and organizations
• Tekla models to become the new center of optimized building production and erection

During the day we also gave out a survey of training needs that local users have. Wherever you are, if you think there is something we can do to take Tekla Structures usage further, don't hesitate to contact us! We will do our best to accommodate your needs, whether it is simple technical help, some online consultation, online training of specific modules or even classroom training held in our or your office.

Thanks to all attendees and our guest presenter Tom Carpenter from Fabtrol. We hope everyone found the session useful and will come back to the next one!