Worksharing with Fire Safety Consultants

[prasadienator]

This is our Pilot Cloud Project, so pardon me if some basics are missed out.

We are working in the capacity of Fire Consultants. The Project is set up in Revit 2022 and shared with other parties(Structural engineer, HVAC consultants) with BIM Collab Pro.

We have access to the model through BIM Collaborate Pro and have identical rights as the Architect so that we can fill in Parameter values, and create Plans, Views, Filters, etc. With the current setup, we see multiple Problems.

1. The architect has access to all the Fire Parameters and could change them inadvertently.

2. We, the fire safety consultants have access to all the Revit elements and could inadvertently delete or move them.

3. We, the fire safety consultants have to bear the cost of BIM Collaborate Pro subscription for the entire life of the Project, although we would be working in the file for a very short duration of time.

How could these problems be addressed? Is there a prescribed workflow from Autodesk perhaps?

[RSomppi]

Those are not problems if you are working on your own model as you should. You shouldn't be working in other people's models unless that has been agreed upon by all interested parties. You should link in the other models.

[prasadienator]

Thanks, that's true. I believe that is the case with the Architects, HVAC consultants & Structural engineers. Not with consultants.  Consultants such as fire, acoustic, etc. never have their own model.

However, as Fire safety consultant (coming from an Autocad background) we traditionally never drew anything, rather placed our 2D elements over the drawings provided by the Architect. On the same line of thought we expected to add only the information to an Existing model.

[RSomppi]

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@prasadienator wrote:

Thanks, that's true. I believe that is the case with the Architects, HVAC consultants & Structural engineers. Not with consultants.  Consultants such as fire, acoustic, etc. never have their own model.

However, as Fire safety consultant (coming from an Autocad background) we traditionally never drew anything, rather placed our 2D elements over the drawings provided by the Architect. On the same line of thought we expected to add only the information to an Existing model.

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Sorry, but that isn't going to work while collaborating in the cloud for the very reasons that you pointed out in your first post especially if the users cannot be trusted to play nice in other people's models.

[prasadienator]

I fully agree with the part about playing nice with another specialist model. However, things might happen unintentionally. A safety net is always good to have, where one could perhaps limit access to only certain things.

Kind of like worksets, but only for Parameters or group of them. 

On a different topic, we used a Web-based room book where our ARC department had write access to only a set of parameters. Would have been helpful if Revit offered the same in Collaboration mode.

thanks a lot for your input though. I believe I am up to date with the limitations now. cheers!

[RSomppi]

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@prasadienator wrote:

I fully agree with the part about playing nice with another specialist model. However, things might happen unintentionally. A safety net is always good to have, where one could perhaps limit access to only certain things.

Kind of like worksets, but only for Parameters or group of them. 

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That safety net is separate models linked together. Consultants have been doing this for years even when outside of cloud based modeling, again for the very reasons that you've stated above. The liability issues of having third parties with access to your information are too big to ignore and linking the information rather than putting all the eggs in one basket eliminates human errors.

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@prasadienator wrote:

I believe I am up to date with the limitations now.

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I'm not saying that what you are suggesting cannot be done. It's not recommended. I'm sure it has been done successfully many times but the workflow is uncommon and everyone involved has to be on the same page or inadvertent stuff will happen. Your limitations are the users involved.