How Horner & Shifrin Found the Collaboration Platform Their Teams Needed

Horner & Shifrin is a multidisciplinary engineering firm that has delivered civil, transportation, structural, environmental, GIS, and construction administration services since 1933. With eight offices, more than 200 employees, and roughly 500 projects per year,  the firm’s data environment is as varied as its work.

For years, managing that data meant operating three separate systems simultaneously: ProjectWise for Bentley-native design files, on-premise network drives for everything else, and Autodesk Construction Cloud for Revit and BIM work. The stated goal was a single source of truth. The lived reality was something else entirely.

By moving to Egnyte, Horner & Shifrin replaced that fragmented environment with one platform that works natively for every discipline, every application, and every team — without requiring anyone to change how they work.

A Platform That Created the Problem It Was Supposed to Solve

When Horner & Shifrin adopted ProjectWise, the goal was straightforward: one place for all project data. For work that ran natively on Bentley software, it delivered. But as the firm’s software stack grew and the industry evolved, the gap between what ProjectWise promised and what it could actually support became a structural problem.

Any tool outside the Bentley ecosystem — AutoCAD, GIS platforms, HECRAS, XP Swim, and InDesign, — could not connect natively. Teams working in those applications had to store files locally or on network drives, work until something was “done enough,” and then manually upload into ProjectWise. The platform that was supposed to centralize data was structurally requiring data to live in multiple places at once.

The check-in/check-out model that governed ProjectWise made collaboration inherently fragile. A failed file transfer could erase a full day’s work. Rolling back to a previous file version required significant effort and IT involvement — a process described as “like pulling teeth.” Data restoration from corrupted or accidentally deleted files meant submitting a support ticket, coordinating across teams, and identifying the right directory and timestamp — meaningful downtime for something that should be routine self-service.

Staff responded the way people do when a system makes their work harder than it needs to be: they found ways around it. Files accumulated on personal OneDrives, local C drives, and shared folders that existed outside any governed environment. In more than a few cases, entire project files lived on a single person’s machine. When that person went on vacation, so did the data.

Version Lock Was Slowing the Firm Down

One of the less visible but consistently frustrating constraints of ProjectWise was its integration lag. Certified integrations for new software releases ran a full year behind what the industry was actually using. Horner & Shifrin could not run AutoCAD 2025 or 2026 in their ProjectWise environment — the integration simply did not exist.

In practice, this meant that whenever a project partner wanted to collaborate using a current software version, the answer was always a workaround. The firm’s ability to adopt new tools wasn’t a technology limitation — it was a platform limitation. 

When M&A Exposed Every Weakness

About a year to eighteen months before the switch, Horner & Shifrin completed a significant acquisition — bringing in a firm that ran entirely on AutoCAD and network drives. What should have been a growth moment became a preview of everything ProjectWise couldn’t do.

There was no path to gradual integration. The entire acquired team — experienced professionals who had worked the same way for decades — had to be fully retrained on ProjectWise before they could function within the company. The goal had been to give the incoming team the full horsepower of the company and let both sides grow together. Instead, the platform’s inflexibility turned a strategic opportunity into a retraining campaign.

Nine Months Looking for Something Better

Horner & Shifrin evaluated more than half a dozen platforms. The criteria were shaped directly by what ProjectWise had failed to provide:

• A true single source of truth — for every file type, every team, every application
• A native Windows drive experience — no check-in/check-out, no web console, no behavior change required from users
• Enterprise governance without friction — security and auditability that didn’t come at the cost of usability
• Software agnostic — compatibility with whatever tools a project required, not the other way around
• Flexibility to scale — able to absorb new hires, new teams, and future acquisitions without retraining campaigns

Every other platform evaluated failed within two meetings. There was always something that didn’t meet the core requirements. Egnyte was the first to clear every one of them — and then go further.

The Aha Moment — and Waiting for It to Fail

The moment that sealed the decision was the native Windows drive experience. No new interface to learn. No workflow to relearn. Files appeared and behaved the way teams already expected them to.

What followed was telling. Months into the implementation, the team kept waiting for something to break — for the failure that had disqualified every other platform. It never came.

How Collaboration Works Now

The change in how teams collaborate at Horner & Shifrin is most visible in what no longer happens.

Every application, one system

Autodesk, MicroStation, GIS platforms, Adobe, Bluebeam, Word, Excel — all working natively in Egnyte. Version control that previously required IT involvement is now self-service. The software version lock that kept the firm a year behind the industry is gone. Teams use the tools they need, on their own timeline. Integration-related support tickets have dropped by 75% — at peak, the firm was logging 10 to 20 per week. Since moving to Egnyte, that number has reached zero.

Internal co-editing and external sharing

Co-editing sessions are now a regular part of how teams work together — something that wasn’t possible in a check-in/check-out environment. For external collaboration, teams have moved away from third-party file sharing tools, sending direct links to live Egnyte folders instead. Partners are always looking at current files, not a transferred copy that may already be out of date.

M&A onboarding — a different experience entirely

Shortly after moving to Egnyte, one of Horner & Shifrin’s business units grew from nine to nearly thirty people — staff arriving from different companies, different backgrounds, and different ways of working. None of them went through a retraining program. They worked natively from day one.

Field-to-office coordination

Field teams now use the Egnyte mobile app to geotag and upload photos directly to project folders from the field. What previously required manual transfers and IT troubleshooting now happens in real time — closing the loop between the field and the office without an additional step.

Knowledge that stays with the firm

The OneDrives, C drives, and personal folders that had become quiet workarounds throughout the ProjectWise era disappeared — not through mandate, but because there was no longer any reason for them.

When files live in one governed place, the project knowledge that accompanies them stays accessible regardless of who has joined, left, or moved to a different team. 

Looking Forward

Horner & Shifrin is now using Egnyte’s AI tools as a governed, secure on-ramp for broader AI adoption across the firm — a way to bring staff into AI workflows without concerns about data governance or model training. The platform’s forward momentum matters as much as what it fixed.

For the firm’s leadership, the story of what changed is less about any single metric and more about a cumulative shift that revealed itself over time.