Overview

During the month of August 2009 MSG conducted a survey to get feedback from their different user groups on both the IFC standard and MSG related activities. The survey was sent out to all registered members of iai-tech.org. In addition the survey was circulated in some of the other mailing lists hosted by different local chapters.

In general the response to this first survey was good. The results presented on the following pages are based upon more than 200 responses and many participants provided additional feedback to MSG by using the comment fields. This feedback used used to prioritize future activities and to improve the overall quality of MSGs work.

The survey was split into three different sections:

• The first section intended to help MSG understand the participants roles and interrest in IFC. Most of the participants reported to be either software developers (36%) or software users (32%). Of the software used more than 50% of the participants reports to be using CAD/BIM applications. Almost half of the software developers also want to support IFC for import and export. For a more detailed view of the results, please follow this link.
• The second section allowed users to give feedback to MSG around the IFC specification, its documentation and this web site. This feedback will be used by MSG to understand how to better help users take advantage of the IFC specification. In general participants are most happy with the IFC specification and its documentation as well as the web site. There seems to be more issues related to the Model View specifications and how the user the IFC model to meet specific requirements. For a more detailed analysis of section two, please follow this link.
• In the last section we asked if users where interested contributing to IFC related work and if so in what way they could be willing to participate. Many of the users responded in a positive way (that they are willing to contribute in one or more ways to the IFC specification) and as a direct result one new group is created for people willing to be part of the IFC review process. A mailing list has been set up as well as a dedicated workspace at this site. 

All results are presented in the following pages. If you have indicated you want more information from MSG you are now added to a mailing list "info" from which you will receive information.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond the the IFC Questionare 2009. We promise to do our best to use the valuable feedback to improve the quality (also of the survey itself) of all MSG deliverables.

• The MSG Team