The research firm Harris Interactive, Rochester, N.Y., conducted the Document Exchange Study for the AEC Industry for Adobe Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif. Adobe was not identified as the sponsor to the 965 architecture, engineering and construction professionals, project owners, operators or facilities managers in the study. The 15-minute Internet surveys were conducted last November and results released recently.

One eye-opener for Adobe, maker of Acrobat software, Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker and other applications, was so many users doing nothing to secure their files despite concern over document security. "Does that mean it’s too hard to secure them?" asks Patrick Aragon, product marketing manager for Adobe.

Some professionals suggest that it is not a matter of difficulty so much as one of priorities. Frank Merino, director of technology for Vollmer Associates LLP, New York City, says, "Yes, we’re concerned about security, but it’s somewhere on the list, not necessarily at the top. You don’t know how secure you are or aren’t until you get hacked."

Another unexpected finding was that just 17% of respondents named Web-based collaboration systems as their means of exchanging documents and other information with project team members outside their own firm. "We expected that to be higher," says Aragon. The most common means of exchanging files were e-mail at 90%, fax at 52%, courier at 40%, mail at 35% and personal delivery at 27%. Click here to view chart

Adobe was somewhat taken aback at the relatively low percentage of 2D and 3D CAD drawings industry professionals exchanged, especially to people outside their own firms. "The surprise…is that CAD drawings represent less than one third of the total document set," says Aragon. Just 28% of survey respondents cited 2D CAD and 7% named 3D files as most commonly shared with people outside their firms. Microsoft Word files are the most commonly exchanged files, followed by Acrobat and Microsoft Excel. But that percentage rises when exchange is restricted to project team members; 42% said they share 2D CAD files and 20% 3D files.

Exchange of images, including pictures, also is on the rise. Over three- fourths of current survey respondents cited exchanging JPEGs, compared to 55% in a similar but not parallel study Adobe commissioned two years ago.

The proliferation of large, complex files, including several versions of many of them, has made data exchange, storage and retrieval more challenging. The study found that 18% of CAD files are reviewed primarily on paper, 33% electronically and 49% both ways. "We’re using more paper now than ever before," says Merino.

Stockley

"Management of archived data is a big issue for us and not one that’s easily resolvable," says Mike Williams, chief information officer of Parsons Brinckerhoff, New York City. One common database for all documents just isn’t practical due to the plethora of people involved and their different requirements, say some CIOs. "We’re trying to resolve it on a piecewise basis and we haven’t found a silver bullet," says Williams.

"The cost of holding on to those documents was overwhelming," says Chris Stockley, CIO of Skanska USA Building Inc., Parsippany, N.J. "That drove us to deal with the issue." Skanska now has simplified its data storage system, reducing the number of disparate databases by a factor of 10. "Now there are four places, not 40," says Stockley. "The fewer places you store this data, the more secure that information is in those databases."