By Heather Alley, IMAGINiT Building Solutions
1. The Publish button is REALLY important.
Originally I thought every time I Synchronized with Central, my latest model would be updated in the cloud, but it turns out this is only partially true. Yes, everyone who has an A360 C4R license sees your changes instantly, or as soon as they synchronize. However, for those people who are not Revit users, and are only part of the A360 Team, they do not see the “live” model. They will only see the changes when you Publish! We went the entire first month of the project not understanding this, and this caused frustration amongst the team.
Lesson: On the Collaborate tab, click on Manage A360 Models, then next to each model there is a Publish button. It is best to Publish the model 1 day before you really need it, as it can take hours for all of the updated sheets to appear in the cloud.
2. Controlling your Views for A360 is important: Including at least one dedicated 3D view for viewing.
When we first started the project, we published specific sheets to the cloud for viewing, but we were surprised when we lost the ability to see the 3D model in the cloud. The reason was: we never selected a 3D view to publish to the cloud, only 2D sheet views.
Lesson: Set up a specific 3D view for continual publishing to the cloud, along with your sheets.
3. When you download 1 model, you get all the linked models.
This is a puzzling part of the way A360 works. If your models are linked together, and you need to download 1 model, you will actually download ALL the linked models. We found ourselves explaining to the Construction Manager and Kitchen Designer that although they only wanted 1 Revit model from the cloud at 250MB, they were actually going to receive 1.2 GB as they had to download 12 models at the same time.
Lesson: Prepare your team with the knowledge that downloading one Revit model will actually give them the most recent PUBLISHED versions of all of the models.
4. Retrieving data from old backup models works differently.
We had a situation where we needed to go back in time to recover just a small part of our model. Our first instinct was to go through Revit and the Manage A360 Models button. By clicking on each model, there is the option to View Versioning. However, if you use this feature, it actually restores the old model and deletes your current work!
Lesson: If you ever need to retrieve a previous version of your model, do so by logging into your A360 Team site online. Click on the specific Revit model Here you can download previous versions locally to your computer, without the risk of deleting your work. Each version listed here is every time you have PUBLISHED, not every time you synchronized from Revit. Another reason to PUBLISH OFTEN!
5. It works better than you would expect.
I must admit my expectations were low. I thought my Synchronize times would increase dramatically. I was dead wrong. Yes, the first time you download the model to your local machine, it took a few minutes. That is because you are downloading the entire model for the first time. However, after that, you are only syncing your changes, and this took no longer syncing with the cloud than syncing to my local server.
Lesson: Go for it! Try out Collaboration for Revit on a single project and grow from there. I know you will have a great experience with it.
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