Work on a shared Revit model from home?

[Anonymous]

We've been using Revit (2011 and 2012, depending on the project and the consultants) in our office with some success for the last 2 years or so. It's beginning to trickle through to all our departments and we have come upon a little stumbling block. The Senior Designer for one of our departments takes all the AutoCAD files for his projects home every night and after his kids are in bed will work on the CAD files until the early hours of the morning. When he arrives in the morning he overwrites the existing CAD files with the ones from home.

How can he continue this method with Revit? The easy answer is that he will have to work in the office until we have a cloud server set up, but that just isn't going to work. He's taken a copy of the model home to work on it already but when he tried to sync his changes with the central model, it wouldn't (not sure exactly what the error was, since I am getting all of this 3rd-hand). One option someone suggested was that he will have to remember all the changes he made at home and then copy-paste in place into his local copy of the central model but I don't see that working very well either.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated,

Dan

[Alfredo_Medina]

The only good solution is Revit Server. The central file would be saved in the server. He would connect from his home computer. No need to transfer or copy/paste anything. It is not easy to set up, though. You would need to hire some IT assistance.

Work at the office, work again at home, work again at the office,... Not very good for him, his wife and their kids, though...  🙂

[CoreyDaun]

We have done this, where one user would "take home" a Workset. He would create a local file and then check out everything he will work on, including the Views that he plans to use. We did experiments using a laptop that we could easily disconnect from the network until we got it working. I was not directly involved in this, and I know they did run into periodic problems. If you attempt this, I recommend testing the method the same way we did until it's "reliable".

********* I do not recommend this as your first choice of action - just as a possible alternative! **********

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the responses. We are a 90-person firm, so we have a full-time in-house IT guy and he's working on hosting our own cloud server, but it won't be ready for prime time for a while.

I think we will probably try having him check out the worksets and then sync when he gets back to the office, only because I really don't see another way of doing this. I did find out that the reason he failed when he tried this before was that he detached his local file from central before leaving that day. So of course the local copy won't be able to find the central.

As far as his family life goes, he's been doing this the entire 9 years I've been with the firm (6 years of that with him in his department, so I know how he operates) and he seems to make that work with his home life.

Thanks again, guys,

Dan

[Mike.Lapinski.SG]

I'm not sure of the specifics, but if your offsite user can establish a secure VPN connection from home, then maybe something like Windows Remote Desktop can work for you. Setup a workstation in the office that the offsite user can remote into and work on Revit from there. It will be as if they're sitting in front of the computer at work using Revit on the network. Just an idea. I don't know what the connectivity capabilities are of your offsite users. 

[Anonymous]

Funny you should say that. I forwarded the previous responses to our IT guy and this was his response:

There is another option, which I mentioned to him that I would like to try... This entails taking a laptop home which is joined to the domain and connect to our network via VPN... In theory this should work... Its the performance I'm curious about.

We all have the capability to remote in through a VPN tunnel already, but it's very difficult to work that way because of the response times -- I use it to Dropbox a file I need from work, that kind of thing. But I think if he can work locally at home then use the VPN just to sync, that could be a pretty good solution.

Thanks again, guys, for your input,

Dan