Revit: Publish >Autodesk Seek

[Chad Smith]

I made some recommendations directly to the Autodesk Seek Senior Product Manager late last year about a local LAN version, and reflected the general idea here on AUGI.

While I don't expect my generalised ideas to be a final solution, hopefully they sparked some internal conversations about the concept. For a product such as Revit that relies heavily on locally created content is really needs a more informative way to browse it, and I think a simple Seek alternative would be great.

[cliff collins]

All:

This boils down to Intellectual Property Law.

I would suggest that Adesk gets some serious legal advice pronto,
and think about a WU to address shutting down the Seek upload feature
for firms who wish to do so upon legal review.

Also, each firm should get counsel and implement a policy.

Not paranoia--just smart business.

Aaron Rumple raises a very good point--custom content created by a firm for
a specific project is intellectual property and should be monitored, copyrighted, and protected as such.

( This has a very sinister Napster-like sentiment, I know.................)

Brave new world is correct.

cheers............

[cjneedham]

Also could someone use the capabilities of a free product like the BIMHighway at www.digitalbuildingsolutions.com to create your own intranet type internal "Seek" site?

Last time I looked at this product, it appeared to require the creation of multiple thumbnails of each component. I think this makes things more complex than they should be. Presumably with the new Family API, perhaps it's possible to display a live preview of an item, rather than only still images.

The original specification did not include an "Off Switch", and thus delivering it would constitute new functionality, which we can't deliver outside of our formal release cycle. Had we seen this feedback in the beta timeframe perhaps we could have made the changes.

Cheers,
Kyle B

Kyle, Can I vote multiple times for the internal Seek idea? Corporate organisations and even Local User Groups could benefit greatly from this.

Noting your comments about not being able to turn off Seek outside of your formal release cycle - does that refer only to major releases, or could a web update address this?

[Marek Brandstatter]

Last time I looked at this product, it appeared to require the creation of multiple thumbnails of each component. I think this makes things more complex than they should be. Presumably with the new Family API, perhaps it's possible to display a live preview of an item, rather than only still images.

The main limitation is that Revit API functions can only be run from INSIDE Revit - which precludes web apps or standalone desktop apps such as ours. 3D DWF is an option but of course that's not a "live preview" of the RFA file. IMO a DWF preview is good enough (for now) as its unlikely that an RFA will be changing constantly. However even with a live RFA preview, most building products would benefit from having multiple images, photographs and files (rfa, pdf, jpg, doc, etc) to fully represent or describe themselves.

[Jason Grant]

There has been a lot of great discussion on this. There are (2) ways that I see online content being used. These relate to the size of the company and the type of work that is being done.

For a small firm 20 or less users doing residential or commercial (maybe retail) online content is great. Usually you have 1 or 2 users in the file and the project is not too large so that the inefficiencies of online content does not affect their project. It allows people who do not have time to create content to easily get some.

For the medium to large firms, if the content is not managed effectively you get the garbage in garbage out effect. The file begins to be unusable or unmanageable. You don't even know where to begin fixing it. Therefore, blocking Seek, Revit City, Turbosquid and any other is imperative to the survival of projects.

I have seen both these senerios play out first hand. I looked for any free content availible for 3 years at a 3 person residential/commercial/retail firm the more I could find the better. Now being the manager of Revit at a 180 person Lab and Hospital firm I look for every oprotunity to control the families. Not because I do not trust the users but because even if I wrote a 100 page book on correct procedures for family creation, there would still be something that would have been left out and would cause frustration with the other users on a team. Not using parameters correctly, not hosting correctly, not viewing correctly... the list is forever long. These things can really slow down the productivity of a team. 99% of the time, something from the web is never going to work exactly how you need it.

I had actually did some user feedback with someone coming to my office to discuss this new seek and publish ability. I had said that our firm would never publish and would probably block it if possible from the firewall level. I told her that the absolute best senerio for our company would be that we could change the path that seek is using and self browse or self publish to our own servers.

[Jshaver]

If this hasn't already been mentioned...

This function can be disabled through the Revit.ini

[ContentSearch]
Site=http://seek.autodesk.com
PublishURL=http://revitseekstore.autodesk.com
[ContentInstalled]

Just change or remove the address.
Users will be prompted with a connection warning.

[cliff collins]

If it is true that all you have to do is edit the .ini file, couldn't we have saved
about 4 pages of thread and a lot of meaningless rambling?

Although, I suppose this disables all functionality--including downloading content.
Is there no way to disable just upload, perhaps in the API?

FWIW-- When it comes to proprietary/intellectual property,
I still think it very wise to consult legal counsel on whatever policy you decide on,
then implement it.

cheers......................

[Jshaver]

"Although, I suppose this disables all functionality--including downloading content.
Is there no way to disable just upload, perhaps in the API?"

Luckily it doesn't. If you remove ONLY the publish address the search and download functions remain. Personally I would disable both to discourage users from downloading families that do not comply with your company's specific standards and family creation procedures.

It should be noted that they are both just web addresses, even if both are disabled in the Revit.ini you can still access the sites from a browser.

[twiceroadsfool]

I wonder if we can replace those addresses with Local Network addresses then, to make it search local drives for content. Probably not, or we wouldnt have discussed the possibility two pages back.

As for legal counsel... It matters, IF the firm owners care. If they flat out dont want us doing something, the legal counsel is irrelevant for them, lol...