Live Link Architectural File

[buck1017]

Our company has structural engineers, architects, and MEP in the same office on the same servers. Our corporate BIM team is telling us that we should never be livel inking other disciplines' models, and that we should detach from central every couple of days for the other disciplines to link in. I mentioned that i thought it was a waste of time, but they kept saying that it was mainly for the Revit MEP users. I'm a structure user myself, and we link with architectural just fine. Have any of you had problems live linking with architectural or structural?

Thank you

[CoreyDaun]

That doesn't make sense to me. I am from an MEP firm that must link in periodically updates architectural and structural files from other, outside firms in the same way. I would think that directly linking in the other disciplines would be the optimal setup. Maybe they are afraid that an architect will haphazardly delete a wall, synchronize, and destroy the MEP hosted elements or something. And that doesn't make sense either - that is what Coordination Review is meant to handle.

I myself, do not see any downside to directly linking in other disciplines. Creating that "Detached from Central" and reloading it repeatedly can be a pain. Hopefully, one of the Autodesk people will chime in - they can probably give you the best input.

[CrazedEngineer]

I agree. I have done the "Static" linking, and it doesn't really help speed up your model.  The worst that happens is occassionally you will get the your is the file is being accessed by some one else message box, when either someone is reloading your model or opening it for the first time. 

How big are the models you are working with? Square footage wise?  

[dennis]

I will address this from an MEP point of view.  We recommend highly using a copy-of the arch model and updating the model just once a week.  Some of our reasons are: cleaning out and purging of the arch model makes performance better and load times faster, updating just once a week so that the MEP folks are not dealing with constant changes while the arch-designer is doodling to figure out what they want to do, once a week updating allows the BIM/CAD Mgr to handle all the "Coordination Reviews" in one session and the users not have to deal with it at all.  We have had clients try the active linking procedure, and then bail out it after a few weeks for the reasons mentioned above.

However, if your findings end up being different, I would like to hear about it.  I for one like the concept of linking the active models, since that is the BIM concept, but seems we aren't to the level of StarTrek computers to run it that way.