Searchable in-house content

[mccurdyks]

We're in the process of family clean up, and I thought it might be nice to (finally!) generate a file of some sort that indexes our families, maybe provides some additional information about them that's not part of the family itself. I thought I might use a multipage PDF with a view of each family. But Revit doesn't seem to "know" how to search that - or at least I can't figure out what type of metadata it needs to understand the file.

So, my question is if anyone has created such an a database for in-house content? And what works? What doesn't? What would you do differently?

Related to this question, I'm generating some in-house how-to's and would also like to make those searchable in-house. I'm thinking html? Anyone have any suggestions, hints, complaints to share before I throw myself down a particular rabbit hole?

Thanks in advance!

[Alex Page]

Im not a big fan of documentation like that - its generally out-of-date as soon as its finished, hard to maintain and users only look at it once....thats my experiance anyway!

Have a look at this product - I reckon it solves your problem in a different way

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=121673&highlight=tool+palette

[twiceroadsfool]

Yup. What Alex said. We hand built an HTML solution, that users could even load content from... But it was a LOT of time and effort to maintain. Once the Family Browser came out, we abandoned our solution immediately. You can see our implementation of the Browser in my Blog.

It updates on the fly as content is added.