I have a Revit problem that seems at least for the moment to have given
pause to the technical people at my Autodesk reseller. I will describe
it here, and hopefully one of the readers of this newsgroup can offer
me relief. I run a company, called Archline CAD Services, Ltd. For the
last 13 years we have used AutoCAD to produce architectural working
drawings for architects. We have present and past architect-clients in
26 states and the US Virgin Islands. We are an internationally
dispersed wide area network of CAD collaborators who come together on
an as needed basis over the Internet. We use an FTP server to collect
and distribute work product. It works very well for us. Now we are
seriously considering a switch to Revit, and I am having some
coordination and management problems. I am being told by my Autodesk
reseller and other Revit users that our CAD collaborators must do their
work in real time directly on a centrally located Revit server. Most of
our CAD collaborators have various levels of limited bandwidth, which
would make the real time telecommunications links difficult to
impossible. I use PCAnywhere on a 7 mps connection to my company's
remotely colocated server, and as fast as it is and even when I am
online to the server all by myself the speeds sometimes are
compromised. The whole idea of real time networking collaboration seems
to me to be a formula for laggard productivity. Even at 100 mps on
local area networks I have seen significant slow downs in transmission
speeds, when a lot of connections are active all at the same time. And
if the central server goes down or is compromised in any way, then the
entire production team is compromised. If the server hard drive crashes
then the whole operation crashes too. I have also seen a tendency in
organizations for the IT person to exercise more or less arbitrary
control over the network activities, often to the detriment of the
company. If our company is going to use Revit productively according to
the opportunities and constraints inherent in our business model, we
need to be able to slice and dice the Revit model and parcel out work
assignments indiscriminately to as many remotely located CAD
collaborators as we deem appropriate for the respective tasks. And we
damned well do not intend to use Buzzsaw, which is too complicated, too
slow and entirely too expensive. We are currently paying $100 per month
to keep one of our 120 gig hard drive computers at a cohost facility,
where we are hooked up to a 100mps Internet backbone, and we are using
FTP server freeware. If it is necessary to use a project web server,
then we will get our own software and set up our own project web
server. But I cannot see now how such a server could allow each of our
CAD collaborators to download sliced and diced Revit data so that each
of them could do their respective work assignments and then upload
their completed work back to the project web server in such a manner
that everyone could keep from walking all over each other's dirt (an
old ditchdigger's advice). If any members of this newsgroup know of a
simple and practical and inexpensive way to solve this problem, then I
would really appreciate hearing about it.