Sharing Worksets Between Offices.

[sifuentes]

We have the following situation: we have 2 offices, which are not joined in a WAN.

We have a project in which we want to work simultaneously from the 2 offices, with the network condition stated above. The main work will still be done in office 1, while someone on office 2 will annotate the interior elevation sheets.

What I think we can do is the following: have the person in office 2 work exclusively on the interior elevation sheets of her local copy, without touching anything else. When we receive her copy in office 1, we'll save to central, to update the worksets she work on. Meanwhile, on the office 1, no one will touch the worksets being used in office 2.

I believe this should not present any risk of loosing work, as long as each office stays out of the other's worksets, right?

Any comments?

Thanks,

[irwin]

The person working in office 2 will not have access to the central file while she works on her local file. This condition is known as "editing at risk". However, there is only risk if she makes something editable while in this state. (The risk is that someone else might have changed the same element -- in that case you will not be able to save _any_ of the work done in office 2 back to central.)

Also note that if you copy a local file and save the copy to central then the original local file will no longer be valid.

So, the following should work:
1) In office 1, change your user name to the name of the worker in office 2.
2) Make editable all of the worksets that will be changed in office 2. For example, the view worksets for the interior elevations being annotated.
3) Save a local file.
4) Send that file to office 2.
5) While working on it in office 2, make sure never to make anything editable.
6) Stop working on the file in office 2 and send it back to office 1.
7) In office 1, change your user name to the name of the worker in office 2.
8 ) Open the local file and save it to central, making sure to save the local file _after_ the save to central. (You might close and open the local file after this to verify that the local file opens in the presence of the central file.)
9) Send the new local file back to office 2.
10) Repeat steps 5-9 as needed.

If you need to violate step 5 and make something editable while in office 2, you run a risk that the resulting file won't be able to be saved back to central. This will happen if the same element is changed in both office 1 and in office 2. This can happen even if, after the file was sent to office 2, someone in office 1 makes that workset editable to the user in office 2, since the element might have already been changed or borrowed by then. If you're confident that no one will change the same element in both offices you can try it but be aware of the risk you are running. If even a single element gets changed in both offices then save to central from this file will not be possible -- none of the changed elements can be saved back, even the ones that don't have a conflict.

Also watch out for step 6. No one should change the file in office 2 once it is sent back to office 1 for save to central, until the new version of the local file is sent back from office 1.

If all of this seems too complicated, or you try it and something goes wrong, you can try using Copy/Paste to move the work from the local file to the central file.

[sifuentes]

Very good, thank you very much Irwin.

[sifuentes]

One more question; what should we do with the backup folder? Do we transfer it to office 2 as well?

[irwin]

One more question; what should we do with the backup folder? Do we transfer it to office 2 as well?

I don't think this is necessary. Just the rvt file should suffice.

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Dear Bill Gates,
I am trying to accomplish some real work with a piece of software you designed some time ago. Can you please take time from your busy day to explain, in detail, how I can work around a limitation in your software. Thanks....

Yeah, right!

Only in the Revit forum can you get a thoughtful response such as this from a 'founding father' . Good man Irwin and cheers to the whole Revit forum and their community approach.
I love this stuff

[Wagurto]

Hi Irwin, thanks a lot for your explanations. Although, they sound confusing or hard to keep track. Shouldn't be a piece fo software inside or outside revit to handel this little things?
I have a two office situation too and I am tring to find out the best way to produce drawings simultaneous from the two offices. I definetly think revit is the way to go and workset is the rigth way to do it but I just a little concern how to manage the situation.

[sifuentes]

Hi. Last time we worked on two offices following Irwin's guidelines, everything worked perfectly. That time it was a single person working on office 2. Now we intend to have several people working on both offices. Based on Irwin's guidelines, I defined a workflow to allow for several people to work in each office. I would like to see if someone would take a look at it, and see if they see any problem with it.

Apart from the proposed method to share the work. I think the easiest way to do this will be to do modeling in one office, and annotations in the other. We'll have the views that will be placed on sheets, with all the annotations, and have duplicate "modeling views" as required to do the modeling work there.

Any advice is greately appreciated. Please see the attached drawing.

Thanks,

[irwin]

Hi. Last time we worked on two offices following Irwin's guidelines, everything worked perfectly.

Cool!

That time it was a single person working on office 2. Now we intend to have several people working on both offices. Based on Irwin's guidelines, I defined a workflow to allow for several people to work in each office. I would like to see if someone would take a look at it, and see if they see any problem with it.

Apart from the proposed method to share the work. I think the easiest way to do this will be to do modeling in one office, and annotations in the other. We'll have the views that will be placed on sheets, with all the annotations, and have duplicate "modeling views" as required to do the modeling work there.

Any advice is greately appreciated. Please see the attached drawing.

Thanks,

I'm not sure I follow all of the steps in your flow chart, but I think you are suggesting saving a local file in office 2 as a central file and later trying to save that back to the original central. If so, I don't think this approach will work. This idea of hierarchical central files might make sense in theory, but it has not been implemented. You're proposing manually making all of the editabilities match, but there is other information stored in the central file that won't be right (e.g., every change in the local file knows if it has ever been saved to central).

As far as I know, there is no way that you can have the people in office 2 working interdependently on a file at the same time as people in office 1 are working together on the same file (except VPN).

My suggestion is to have each of the people working in office 2 independently work with office 1 using the methodology I described above. That limits the ability of the people in office 2 to work with each other (for example, they can't combine their changes until they have each synchronized with office 1), but it should work if you can divide the work appropriately.

[jbalding48677]

There have been a few people that have been successful using the remote desktop features in Windows. This allows them to all work in the same "virtual" office and still be able to STC etc.