by: Troy Gates
Revit Architecture
product focus
2012
Revit Collaboration: Then and Now
➲W
hen Autodesk® Revit® was first released, it had a very different collaboration workflow than the traditional CAD file-based systems. Revit uses one file for multiple consecutive users while the traditional CAD systems used multiple files with a single user in each file at a time. This challenged companies early on to figure out how to share their Revit projects with other people outside their network or office. Over the past few years, several technologies have surfaced to help Revit projects be more collaborative.
mapped to a drive letter via the SUBST command in Windows. This tricks Revit into thinking the DFS share is a local drive instead of on a server. All Revit users of the DFS share are required to have the substituted drive letter in order to work on the project. While this solved working on a project within a common network, it still didn’t allow for external parties to collaborate on the project.
Early on, many companies found that the way to share a Revit project was to divide the project into either multiple files and link them together or to split the project up into many worksets that could be checked out. The files were usually shared via FTP on a daily basis. The files, once retrieved from the FTP, would require someone on the receiving end to merge the files together, sometimes requiring copying and pasting objects from one project file to another. This method worked, but was very cumbersome and time consuming.
Another network solution has surfaced in the past few years that has greatly helped Revit succeed in multiple office networks. These are hardware devices called Network Accelerators. A popular brand is Riverbed from Riverbed Technology, which has targeted the AEC industry with devices that are optimized for both CAD and Revit files. These devices are set up at each location and then caches files that are frequently opened. This mechanism allows for faster consecutive opens as the cached files reside in the local office on the device there. The devices keep the most popular files up to date in the cache. These devices can work in tandem with many of the collaboration technologies discussed in this article to make them even faster.
Some companies have distributed file systems (DFS), which allow for cloning a storage space on one server to another. This has been a great solution for sharing CAD files from one office to another across a long distance. This immediately was thought to be a great solution for Revit, but initially it had an obstacle. Even though users open Revit files from a network drive letter, Revit uses a UNC (universal naming convention) path. DFS servers have different names, thus Revit thought the cloned projects were different. Eventually, a solution was found where the DFS share could be
Along with hardware network accelerators, some companies have created software based network accelerators. One such solution has targeted BIM with specific support for Revit files. This software is called WAFS by Globalscape. WAFS works by replicating (caching) files from one server to another in real time. This allows Revit users in multiple offices to work on the same project at the same time and have it cloned to another server. This again is a good solution for multiple offices within one company, but doesn’t help when external parties are working on the project.
August 2011
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