ProjectWise and 64 Bit Operating Systems
With the release of ProjectWise SELECTseries 1 last year, Bentley made a significant change in the server requirements by announcing that 32 bit versions of Windows 2008 server will not be supported. If you want to use a 32 bit server with ProjectWise, you will need to use Windows Server 2003 which is still supported in the SELECTseries 2 release of ProjectWise. The ProjectWise Explorer and Administrator clients support both 32 bit and 64 bit operating systems.
Why the move to 64 bit? It makes sense since Microsoft has no plans to offer a 32 bit server operating system beyond Windows 2008 so the migration to 64 bit is going to happen sooner or later. Also, the latest release of Microsoft’s own collaboration system, SharePoint 2010, only supports 64 bit operating systems, so it stands to reason that Bentley would consolidate its collaboration platform to align with Microsoft’s since there is some degree of integration between the two products. Additionally, 64 bit Operating Systems also can utilize more system memory when compared to 32 bit systems which becomes more important as our collaboration systems are managing larger datasources.
ProjectWise does remain a 32 bit application, so it will be installed to the \Program Files (x86)\ folder on a 64 bit operating system. Also, you will need to use the 32 bit ODBC Data Source Administrator to create your ODBC datasource. You can launch the 32 bit ODBC Data Source Administrator by going to the C:\Windows\SysWOW64 folder and running odbcad32.exe.
As always, we recommend carefully reviewing the system requirements in the readme file (located at program files\Bentley\ProjectWise\read_projectwise.chm) that comes with ProjectWise whenever you install or upgrade ProjectWise.