"All the News That's Fit to Plot"
Bentley Newsgroups on Viecon.com

Bentley hosts and monitors Internet newsgroups for all of their products via their Viecon website. Users of Bentley software will find that these newsgroups are a great starting point for asking questions and sharing information with Bentley Systems programmers and support staff as well as with other users. The current list of newsgroups include:

bentley.microstation
bentley.microstation.programming
bentley.general
bentley.geographics
bentley.geopak
bentley.inroads
bentley.interplot
bentley.microstation.imaging
bentley.microstation.visualization
bentley.projectwise
bentley.triforma
bentley.viecon
bentley.announcements

Check http://selectservices.bentley.com/newsgroups/ for late-breaking updates to this list.

To subscribe to any newsgroup, follow these steps:

Use the link news://news.viecon.com/
If you are using Outlook Express as your newsgroup reader, right click on the news.viecon.com folder (in Outlook Express), select Properties, click on the Server tab, enable 'This server requires me to log on', enter viecon for Account name and viecon for Password, then click OK.

If you are using Netscape Messenger as a newsgroup reader, you will be prompted for a username and password (viecon and viecon respectively) after you subscribe to newsgroups for the news.viecon.com newsgroup server.

You can then subscribe to any of the Bentley newsgroups. Note that if you have previously subscribed to any newsgroups on news://news.viecon.com/, you may need to re-subscribe to the server to see new newsgroups.

If you are running Windows 2000 and are not able to successfully connect to the newsgroup server, make sure you have the proxy client installed.

If you do not have access to a newsgroup reader or are restricted from accessing NNTP-based services, you may still be able to view postings in the newsgroups. One option is www.easyusenet.com, which allows you to look at any NNTP-server via web pages. Use the free service, go to settings and enter news.viecon.com for the server, viecon for the user and viecon for the password. Since this is HTTP-based, you should be able to access the newsgroups and see the postings.

For more details, see Bentley's technote devoted to this service.