Using Navisworks Freedom to open NWF files read-only

[Anonymous]

I just have a product upgrade suggestion... We have roughly 75 employees including designers (CAD Monkeys) and engineers. To keep costs down, all of us CAD Monkeys have Navisworks Manage, but our engineers have Navisworks Freedom. It would be really helpful if Freedom could open up .NWF files, even if the files are read-only. It's kind of a pain to have to stop what you are doing, and clean up the model (unhide things as needed) just so we can save a .NWD file for the engineers to see. Things are constantly changing, and having to make bi-weekly, daily, hourly models for the engineers slows us down, not to mention that it costs network space because you don't know who all has the model open, so you have to make a new one. Hopefully this makes sense. I get the purpose of having Freedom vs. Manage, and I'm not asking you to change that, it would just make life easier for in office Freedom users to just be able to open the .NWF file on their own.

[brettgatti]

I think this is a good idea but it could be problematic if the people who would be using Freedom are not be on the same network with the same "linked" files being available (Revit, AutoCAD, etc...).   The use of NWDs allows the files to be fully portable without the need for any links.

[Anonymous]

I agree, in order for it to work, all users would need to be on the same network, mapped to the same location. At my work, we are all on the same networks, and it would work. If we are sending the model out, it has to be an NWD, but other than allowing our engineers to see it now, the only time we send out models would be to the client. I'm just asking for the internal capability.

[Tomislav.Golubovic]

This may or may not help. If you're an Autodesk customer with BIM 360, you'll have the ability to have a true Central-Source-Of-Truth model living in the cloud. That way you can have everyones comments and markups in the one model.

The downside is the cost, you have to buy one seat for everyone.

[dgorsman]

Look into the auto-publish feature, this can take a lot of the load off of publishing (I'd recommend doing that over save-as to further ensure correct settings).  By providing a specific options file along with a dedicated NWF file the output can be tailored more to a standardized NWD file.

[Anonymous]

If you just want to see the 3D model or a part of it, you can create a 3D PDF with a Bluebeam add-in in Revit or Navisworks.