I do have one other follow up question.
I think we have 90+ seats or something like that of C4R.
As one of the early adopters, (Dec 2014 If I remember right. Right after it was introduced at AU) the Licensing for this product has always been somewhat of a mess. Once you paid for your hub you were allowed to invite others to the hub where your project data was posted. Then a while back Autodesk Changed their policy. If I start a new project now, and I want to invite other consultants or Clients (remember our clients are already paying for the data we produce....) they have to purchase a Hub license (or what ever the heck it's called these days....SkyScraper, A360, BIM360.....) in order to view the data. I understand that it's relatively cheap to do that, but still. I'm paying a ton over here to host it. I should be able to allow others access without making them jump thru hoops. Nuff said. On to the next point.
The first few projects I worked on with C4R were good. I like the product. But now we're seeing a big change. Many of our consultants won't actively work on their portion of the project on C4R. They just upload a new model once a week. With is disheartening, since the point is to work together and not in their only little silo. Part of the reason they do this is the price. It's expensive. Prior to C4R, I worked on a project, with 5 other firms, built from 90+ models. Some of those firms (including the one I work for) had several office locations working on that project. We accomplished this by using a lot of Remote Desktop connections back to the one central office for the Arch files. We exchanged all of the files using SFTP and rsync. So everyone was able to exchange models 4 times a day. We hit a few snags once in a while, but overall it worked well. We already owned the Ftp server so cost to the project team was Zero. Well almost zero. We had to pay for power and cooling. We had about 200 people in total working on that project for almost 2yrs. Cost to the project team if we would have been C4R would have been in the neighborhood of $320k if we bought yearly licenses. I mention this process because it works and I own my own data.
We played around with Revit Server for Inter Office collaboration. Imagine trying to update that many models and reloading them on a daily basis. My guess is that's one FTE for the duration. Plus you have to buy and maintain the hardware. RDP machines cost money too. We figure $2400 for the workstation, which gets refreshed every 3yrs. Do the math on that solution and you end up about $800 per year. Or the cost of a seat of C4R. So we started to go that way, even for just inter office collaboration. Our employees liked it much better than RDP.
We touted that we had C4R and got our partners to say they were going to use it during come project interviews, which helped us to win some work. Only to have those same partners just upload weekly and not work on it.
On to the next point (one which Autodesk Really does need to address, and frankly should be a rather simple solution), Permissions.
I want the ability to have my contractors pull a post model off the Hub. In order to do that I need to give them editor permissions. Problem is those same permissions apply if you have a C4R license. So my contractor, owner or anyone that I invite to the project and give the ability to pull models, can also go in and make changes in the live model on the C4R side. That's unacceptable in my mind. I also want to have ownership of my model. I don't want my consults making changes in my models. Buzzsaw works this way. Why can't C4R?
I have a longer list, but those are my heavy hitters. If Autodesk wants to continue to get our yearly check for about $70k you have some work to do. I won't even mention the down time, model corruption issues, the lack of automation to publish model, or any of the other growing pains we've experience while being out on this Bleeding Edge.
I do want to say thanks to Kyle and Adam for being patient listeners thru all the wondering rants I've come up with. But I still give C4R a "Needs Improvement" ranking.
Wait, I forgot to ask my actual question.
Will my older projects that were supposed to be grandfathered be affected for those that we've invited but don't have a Hub licenses.
