Construction Software- what do you use in your company? whats best?

On the Project planning side...while I am sure that MS Project will suit your needs...many companies also opt for Primavera as a Project planning tool. I would say this is more prevalent if your company deals with larger scale construction projects.

Not necessarilly reccommending Primavera as I think it is less user friendly and there is somewhat of learning curve going from Project to Primavera but it does have a bit more robust functionality as a planning tool in my opinion.

I work for a Design Build mechanical contractor and have work for manufacturers of building products in the past. There's a lot out there.

For CAD, AutoCAD, AutoCAD MEP, AutoCAD Building Systems, AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD Architectural Desktop, Revit Architecture, Revit MEP, Reveit Structure, etc. The exact "flavor" really depends on the specialty.

For Estimating, the mechanical industry uses some specialty programs on top of CAD that often also have estimating programs associated with them as well. CAD-Duct/CAD-Mech have Est-Duct and Est-Mech counterparts for estimating sheetmetal ductwork and piping/plumbing systems. There's other software that caters to the fire supression insustry. QuicPen is another CAD and estimating option in the mechanical contracting world along with offerings from East Coast CAD/CAM.

There's other companies oike Quote Soft, etc that do just estimating,.

Timberline is also used by a lot of firms.

We also use (as well as other larger firms) JD Edwards.

There's a lot of project collaboration software's out there as well like BuzzSaw, that host construction projects, documents, enable collaboration.

A lot fo contractors if they do any design are also using Navis for coordination and collision detection, even 4D construction simulation.

There's really a lot of specialty application for structural, others for mechanical, etc. It's a pretty open quesiton and I or anyone else here could litteraly go on for a long time and still only scratvh the surface.

Can you provide more detail and help narrow down the particular area or trade you're interested in if any?

I use to work in a similar line of work...I think...I use to work for, one of the top 3 stone quarrier and fabricators in the world. They fabricated about 1.5 million custom pices annualy for the building industry. They'd didn't have a CRM to manage Email, everyone just packratted their own stuff.

I know a few companies are using things like SharePoint. It's a nice product. peopleare starting to build applicationsd on top of it, it does a lot (can run blogs, email collaboration and project hosting, custom search queries, document sharing and rights management, etc. And it integrates well with office and outlook.

There are companies that will host the site for you as well if you don't want to run in internally. Should be plenty of consulting firms willing to give you a demo/tour hoping you'll use their services.  I can give you the name of one in the midwest US if you like (although I"m not on the west coast).