Case Study—Ice District: Multiprime Multi-Skyscraper Collaborating on A360

FELIX TAN: Hey everyone. I'm Felix Tan. I am a BIM manager of Stantec I work with Aubrey and I help take good care of our models and try to manage it to be a very healthy model as much as possible.

AUBREY TUCKER: So the style of this panel, we're just going to do a quick overview of the project's massive scale, and then talk about the complexities of transitioning to what was A360. And then we'll open it up into benefits of the cloud environment and Team, and then other issues that we're seeing now, and then we have Jake here who can help us direct your questions about the future of what's going to happen with these products. Because we're all going to switch into Docs, and we don't really know exactly what that looks like.

It's similar tools from everything that we've seen so everything that kind of resolved here you'll probably be able to use in Docs environment. But we definitely want you to participate. So just show of hands right off the bat, who's done a Team project to date? And have you delivered it in Team, is it done?

How long have you been in the Team environment-- BIM 360 Team? So there's BIM 360 and there's BIM 360 Team. So your company would have hosted as a hub, and then you would have a project that's underneath that hub. No?

MARTIN NEAULT: This is a good discussion because when I started to work on this project, oh great. [INAUDIBLE] tried to understand the difference between Collaboration for Revit and A360 Team. [INAUDIBLE]

So Collaboration for Revit is where you post the Revit models in the cloud. That's where you work. But A360 Team is basically a hub, a portal, where you publish the model and all the documents that non-Revit users can have access. It's very important to understand the difference between both. OK?

AUBREY TUCKER: So this was the first time for us to do it. We've done three other projects since this one started that we now have, and we're in the CD phase on two of them and we're in the conceptual phase on one. So we can look at kind of all of this, but we're going to keep it Ice District centric. So do you want me to hand this over to you to start if off?

MARTIN NEAULT: Do want me to start the intro?

AUBREY TUCKER: Yeah.

MARTIN NEAULT: OK. That's an ice breaker. OK. Let's move on. Panel introduction. We've done that. So Aubrey, myself, Ice District project. DIALOG OK. So let's talk about the project on its own.

So this project, Ice District, is a project based in Edmonton, which is Northern Alberta. And it's basically built around a major building, which is the new arena for the Oilers, the Edmonton Oilers in the NHL. So it's a building that is being designed by 360 architecture. It's a-- I think they have 18,600 seats and it's a $480 million project. And with the buildings around the complex it's $600 million Canadian.

The Ice District is sitting across the street and what's happening is-- what they did is the arena has what's called a Winter Garden. It's basically a big bridge over the street that lands on the plaza on the Ice District. And the idea was to develop a kind of an [INAUDIBLE] environment around this space and they ended up to have three towers around that.

It's a combination of retail, offices, residential, and it's all sitting on a parkade that has 2,100 parking stalls. So it's a pretty complex project, all phased. Design was pretty complex. The Stantec Tower is going to be, when completed, will be the tallest building in Western Canada. And the two other towers are much smaller. Oh, and I forgot to mention, there's also in an hotel there.

So the challenge we had on this project is that the project was kind of divided in two, even if it was one project. We had three architectural firms. Stantec, that was responsible for the Stantec tower. And DIALOG in partnership with [INAUDIBLE] based in Toronto, Ontario. So we have three architects. We ended up with two interior designer, trees structural engineers, two mechanical, two electrical, plus all the specialized consultants involved with the project.

So we had to deal with firms based in Toronto, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Denver, New York, Boston. So because of the complexity of the project and the number of consultants, we had to figure out how we're going to do that. By avoiding to work with the upload download from an FTP site.

So we ended up with something like around 50 models. Everything has been divided by-- let's see, in our case by zone. We had the parkade, we had two podiums, we had two towers, and Stantec has pretty much one tower sitting on top of the parkade.

Over than 150 users, the reality is more 135 that we have on this project. I would say probably about--

So probably about 90 to 100 users working on Collaboration for Revit. And we had about 135 140 users registered on A360 Team. OK? And DIALOG took the lead for our scope of work, which is the parkade and the two towers, and Aubrey's team took the lead for the Stantec tower.

So this is a view of the site. It's a rendering view so you can see the arena, and that little thing at the bottom is the Winter Garden, which ended up on the plaza and you have the three towers around that plaza.

So this is the Stantec tower and the two towers, that's the hotel there and that's the residential. And the old project also included development around this whole complex. So the real Ice District project is not only that scope of work in the arena, it's pretty much all the buildings around, which is going to be done in the future. But I think there's already a tower already constructed here. It's all part of-- I understood that this is one of the largest residential or complex projects in North America right now. It's a couple billion dollars all together.

BIM Execution Plan. So obviously, with the complexity of the project, the numbers of users, locations-- one thing we didn't want to do, as I said, is to work with an FTP approach. So we had to find a collaboration process. When we started that project, Collaboration for Revit wasn't basically available. It was probably under research and development. So I know Stantec was aware that it was coming, not necessarily us. But we had to come up with a different plan, which I'm going to talk a little bit later. But this whole thing has to be documented. We had to really plan this whole game ahead of time and know where we were going with this.

So when I started the BIM Execution Plan I basically made sure I had an overview of the entire project. And after that, we had some discussion with Stantec and we kind of agreed that Stantec-- because Stantec is taking care of its own building internally. So we decided they'll take care of their own project, have their own BIM Execution Plan, and we were going to take care of the rest and then eventually collaborate together at some point.

I don't want to spend too much time on the BIM Execution Plan. This is a little bit of summary of the Revit model that we had to create and coordinate between the different firms and the different disciplines by zone. And I know we have more than that now. A couple new models have been added, and eventually the Stantec block on the building on the side.

The tools we were using. So Revit was our main tool. This was basically a BIM project. It was required by the client. They really wanted this project as a BIM process. Unfortunately, they didn't have an idea of what means BIM. In reality, what they asked is they wanted the product in Revit, not BIM. So we took the leadership to make it a BIM process but it was mostly [INAUDIBLE] process during the design, DD and CE phase.

The contractor is not-- they don't really have a VDC process, so it basically ended up at the CD phase. But because it's all phase, we have some portion under construction and some is still under design at this point. So Revit was the main application. Then we started to use-- we did include bluebeam studio. We use project, so we decided to upload all the drawings to the cloud. So we have one central location so we don't end up with duplication or work with the wrong set.

We used revizto for the visual coordination. Once again, it's a cloud based tool. We export the model to revizto, track issues from there. This works extremely well. People are buying this tool. Great success. NAVISWORKS for the clashes on the parkade, A360 Glue for above the ground. The parkade is extremely complex. It's a pretty big parkade, and with all this systems-- the mechanical systems-- piping, ducts, we decided to run NAVISWORKS because NAVISWORKS has a more solid management tool than A360 Glue.

Ideate BIMLink and Ideate Explorer for some quality control. We used IMAGINiT Clarity for automated tasks. So something that we try to avoid to do is print manually, export manually, upload, download, that kind of stuff. So all of that can be automated from IMAGINiT Clarity. So now we have tasks running at night to export to [INAUDIBLE] if we need to create PDF, export to NWC for NAVISWORKS, upload to A360 Glue. So that's the tool we're using. And for sure, which is the discussion for today, is Collaboration for Revit.

So those all the tools that we are using on this project. So a little screenshot of the-- this is the residential tower sitting on its own podium in the parkade. This is Revit. This is NAVISWORKS, color coded. This is revizto, also color coded. So revizto and NAVISWORKS looks exactly the same. So for the staff moving from one, they are pretty comfortable with the model. It's just two different environments.

OK collaboration. So the real story with this project is we did start it about three four years ago using IMAGINiT Clarity for collaborating between the different teams. At that time, as I said, Collaboration for Revit wasn't ready. So we needed to find a solution where we could collaborate live so we don't spend that time of uploading and downloading, and work with the wrong model, and all kind of risks like that.

So we-- it has been decided to use IMAGINiT Clarity Connect for that. And Clarity works on top of Revit server. So basically, we had in that time we had-- we were working with four firms. Everybody had a an accelerator. So it's basically a server. We had a server at DIALOG. Everybody were running a Revit server on top and Clarity running on top of Clarity.

So basically it's running Revit server through internet. and that did work well at the beginning because the models were small. We were able to communicate. We were able to work with live models, but it basically failed pretty quickly. So we ended up to move away from that solutions just because some firms needed about an hour, an hour and a half, sometimes two hours just to open a model. So that became entirely unproductive.

So at some point I was the first one to tell the consultant get out of there, you're not going to meet your deadline. So we went back to square one, where we didn't want to be, work with FTP. And we have firm like DIALOG. We used Revit Server. With Revit Server you can't really copy and paste a model. You have to open it and save it over. Large project takes time. Totally unproductive. so we had to come up with another option. And I think Collaboration for Revit at that time was ready. We were already using it on a smaller project. Stantec were using it on other projects. So we had some experience. We had some good results. But on a project like that, we were not sure

And when I was starting to talk with Aubrey, Aubrey came up one morning, say hey, I talked with our expert in Boston, Robert Manna, and he said like, are you sure about the cache file? And personally I wasn't too sure at all, because we didn't know if the cache would be proportional or exponential. On a product like that there is no way we could afford to miss the target again because our first solution didn't work, and everybody had to invest about $10,000 in hardware, software, licensing. So this had to work. So we could not afford to go in Collaboration for Revit and say, oh well, it's not designed for large projects.

So we had to do all the testing. So we had to demonstrate that the cache file would be under control. So it took us about six months to get there. First, we had to convince the principal to trust us one more time after the failure we had. So that was a bit challenging. The most difficult firm to convince was DIALOG, not the consultant. But we finally made it. Then start to talk with the PM about moving to a live environment. After that we started to develop some best practices.

Moving to a live environment solved problems, but it creates other problems that we're not used to. So we needed some very strict best practices that we did develop, that we keep turning anyway today. So that was really, really critical. And one of them, is you need to understand, is if you go in Collaboration for Revit, you are now exposing your model to the rest of the team. So you need to provide guarantee to the engineers and architects that nobody will come and work in your model, make changes that you're not aware of. There is no options right now to control access to the model, and that's an issue that I hope Jake will be able to talk to.

But the beauty of Collaboration for Revit is there is no investment to do on the hardware side. So us as DIALOG, when we used Clarity it was all at our advantages because we were sitting beside the server. The one sitting beside the accelerator had to struggle. For us, opening the model was fine. It's just the consultant were not. With the solutions like that, everybody is equal. We lead the process, but if Collaboration failed it will fail on us. If it worked, it will work for us. So that was a really positive aspect of that transition.

Open/Sync Time Improvement. Yeah. If you have a good internet connection, dedicated, you're going to be fine. If everyone has the same connection, everybody has the same Open/Synchronization time.

Flexible licenses, this is fantastic. You're not buying a license for a year. You can be extremely flexible. You can-- I think the licensing is still the same-- monthly basis, quarterly, or annually, yearly.

AUBREY TUCKER: You can buy even multi-year as well. So if you have like a three year project you can but it for three years.

MARTIN NEAULT: So you can add quickly people to your team. So you can start with a team of five, and expect to-- if you expect to add more staff later you can add them as you need to, and then it's just a matter to manage those licenses.

So that's the transition we had to go through. The migration-- so problem number one we had is we're working on Revit 2014. And Collaboration for Revit at that time was supposed only 2015 and newer versions. So we had to upgrade a large project from 2014 to 2016. And that is always a nervous move to do. It's a lot of work. You never know what you're going to get. And you need to understand on a large project like that we have all kinds of deadlines. And when you upgrade, you have to upgrade together. And you have to find that bracket where everybody has the opportunity to do that.

So that was the problem number one. So during the testing, what we did at DIALOG is basically we did upgrade ourselves all the models, tried to track the issues-- which ended up to be not a problem at all-- and then we did a simulation, we created the project on Collaboration for Revit, posted all the models there linked everything, and then cleared the cache and start from there.

So open the model. The trick with Collaboration for Revit is you pick the model that has the most links and you load everything. And then it was going to pretty much cache pretty much your project entirely.

So yes, the first time we opened like-- the biggest model we have on this project is the parkade because it has all the towers sitting on it. So we just opened this one and took I think two hours to cache. So when that was done then we were able to do some simulation. So we started to open the same models. It opened very quickly, open other models and tried to track the cache files, and ended up to work very well. So the cache we understood-- and I think Jake you can add your feedback on this-- but every time you open a model, it caches it twice.

There is a local cache and a central cache on your computer. And on top of that it's going to do the same caching process for all the links you have. But if those links are linked to other models, it won't re-cache that. It's only going to cache the host model. So once you have all your links caches, you're kind of good to go for the other models.

So we kind of realized with time that caching wasn't a problem at all. So and the upgrade to 2016 wasn't a problem. And so we were kind of ready to make them move. So from there we just agreed on the date to make the upgrade. One of the coordination we had to do is Stantec at that time were dealing with some strict deadlines during that process and we decided that we will upgrade our scope of work to the cloud.

Stantec gave us a copy of their model that will stay in 2014 for a couple more months. But at least we have a copy in the cloud. And then when they went through the deadline then they started to upgrade their model to 2016 and then we were able to work together.

AUBREY TUCKER: This was another issue too because our legal team at Stantec actually didn't want to allow our files to be live on a cloud environment that was hosted by a competing architecture firm. So we got the directive to not actually host on A360 but to just copy to A360 because we were able to convince them that it wasn't any different than an FTP site, but they just didn't like the idea of it being live. So we still had to do our live work at home on our offices, and then we would just federate it and copy it out for A360.

So that was a really silly thing that we ended up having to do. And what I'm trying to do now as we move away from this is I stop saying the word cloud and we just say web server. And it's funny, but it actually has different results. People just really don't like that word. They think it's not safe, it's not secure, even though their bank money's on it, you know that's just one of these things that is kind of psychological game you have to play because we're all trending that way and it makes so much more sense to be live and you don't have to worry about internal external relations on your networks. So anyway, for this one project we're not live, we're not on A360 with Stantec tower.

MARTIN NEAULT: Yeah. The Stantec tower is just a copy of their models in the cloud. The goal was to bring our scope of work at DIALOG with HPA to the cloud so we have a full collaboration, which included Electrical Stantec because they had some work to do on one of the towers.

Now what you need to understand is, if one firm is not working in the cloud you cannot override the model in the cloud. You cannot do that. You have to delete it and replace it by a new one. What happens when you do that, you have to reload from each time. So we did a project before that one thinking we were smart enough to say, oh, let's use the cloud because we needed to collaborate with another architect.

And we were just going to override the model coming from the consultant and we realized that it doesn't work. Started to delete, replace, reload from, and it became like-- I was getting calls from staff on my team that already were pretty much crying because it became huge time consumer to do that.

So we just decided-- so we went onto the cloud and off the cloud. But for this project we already knew the deal we had with Stantec is, you manage those models in the cloud. You upload them as needed and you let us know. So from our side we just have to reload from. But it was a tower that doesn't affect the other towers. It just affected the work that we needed to do in terms of coordination on the parkade. So the damage was pretty minimal at that point.

But we will not authorize any other consultant to work off the cloud because they were too tied to the production side. So that worked well but that's an issue. If you go in the cloud, go all together. Don't go on your own or with another firm. You have to bring everybody together. Highly recommended to do that.

OK. Lesson learned. So success. Well, we were able to add over than 150 users in the could. None have been rejected. So it can handle that. Open sync time works very well. For sure if you work on a large project, a large project stays a large project, in the cloud or the network. So if you open your model and you load too many links, it will take time. I get people complaining right now it takes me an hour. Yeah, what are you doing? He's trying to load everything. Well, that's a price to pay. It will be the same situation if you work on your network.

AUBREY TUCKER: Plus, you have to deal with the exchange. On every exchange to update, that's going to be that time that you're either going to spend at least every two weeks an hour to four hours and big projects all day for one user.

MARTIN NEAULT: Something I didn't click at the beginning is if you work daily on Collaboration for Revit, there's no issues with the cache. Cache will update very quickly. But if you're a user that accesses the model once in a while, it becomes a problem because now you have more cached information to download on your computer. So if there's been a lot of work done from the consultant and you come back like three days later, it will take some time to open just because you're caching more data. But if you work daily on the project, the model will open pretty much the same speed as the day before.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARTIN NEAULT: No, if you clear cache you start again. Yes. We clear cache-- there's been some discussion this weekend about when should you clear the-- I think Jake you can add on this but-- eventually your cache will get corrupted. We had issues where we get that error saying, cannot synchronize or something is corrupted. So we know that the-- there is one cache that is corrupted. So you either delete that cache if you can find it. Remember, the name of the cache file is about that long. You couldn't have made it longer? [INAUDIBLE] It's about that long and it's unreadable unless you can read the journal. But there is a way to figure out which one by checking on the date.

Or if the project becomes unstable, sometimes it's good to delete the cache and re-cache and start from fresh. It's a little bit like a local file. Never open the local file. Always open the central so you get-- yeah, same concept. But eventually your cache file will get corrupted at some point. And you can talk about that experience you had.

AUBREY TUCKER: So we had a user that was in Yellowknife whose computer maybe was on a laptop and the battery ran out while he was attempting to open a model. And so when he did that, that's when we learned with Autodesk that the user's computer will actually have a perspective-- or what they think is, the computer will have a perspective of the environment that it's about to open. So his computer knew that there was a structural file, there's a mechanical file, an electrical file, and then the file that he was going to be in, the host file. So when his computer went to-- when his computer battery turned off in the middle of the open, it corrupted the perspective of the structural file in the Windows cache.

So you have three places where it can cache. It can cache inside of Windows. It can cache inside of program data. And it can cache inside of your app data. So and those three places, those are three places where the cache can get corrupted. So anyway, whenever he would open the model, his computer would think oh this structural model is corrupted and I'm not going to open it, and so it would unload. So every time he sync'd he would unload it for everyone else. And so we had this really frustrating problem for about 40 people with everyone being like why is the structural model always unloaded? They could load it. They had no problem loading it. Structure had no problem working in it. We had no idea why this guy couldn't see it.

And so then we just went in and we didn't know that there was a Windows cache to even wipe. But once we wiped that, then it was fine and then he got in no problem. But it's just one of the things where I'm not even sure Autodesk anticipated that was going to be the type of problems we'd be dealing with. But since you're coming in through Chrome and you're accessing the internet, you do have a Windows Internet cache. So that's-- anyway, interesting little lessons learned on that one.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

AUBREY TUCKER: No, it's not through Internet options. It's in places you really shouldn't be deleting things. It's like in system 32 somewhere. But we only had to do it once. And it was kind of a weird situation when it happened and Autodesk was pretty great in terms of just like hopping in and helping us figure that one out.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

AUBREY TUCKER: Brute force cache clear?

SPEAKER: That's a little bit more on the technical side than I can get to. But it's a new one. I've never heard that. So that's good to know.

SPEAKER: Well, if you need the location of those cached files or those folders we can-- let us know and then we can send it to you.

AUBREY TUCKER: So right now you've heard kind of like the complexity and the size and like a lot of the kind of whatever I guess dryer parts of this really big project that we made work. What are your interests and what we could talk about? Because we kind of want to do back and forth with you guys.

AUDIENCE: We use C4R on big projects. The problem that I've come across is the [INAUDIBLE] where Autodesk has said use the communicator at the tool to-- because we were closing the communicator. We opened up projects and usually we were closing the communicator and we would just work like we were on Revit Server. So come to find out, a couple people tried to sync at the same time, corrupted the file. So Autodesk's reply was use the communicator at the tool to see who's in the model, who's syncing, and use that to manage your sync times.

So we've been doing that but the communicator isn't always current on what the activity of that user is. So even though you're looking right at the communicator and you know a user's syncing but it doesn't say he's syncing. So that was a problem for us. We had to close the communicator and re-open it. Which it takes 10 seconds to do that. But still, it's kind of like the whole-- we're pushing people to use the communicator and it's just another step, another goose, they're like, aw, we gotta close the communicator. You know it's more bitching but-- but that was one of the problems we had. But other than that, the desktop app was a problem too so getting updates from Autodesk to the desktop application doesn't work. So that's a problem for updates for Revit of C4R. That's just tickets that we have out with Autodesk now for problems to be fixed.

Also with keynotes, user keynotes, we've come to find out that in 17 there's a bug that doesn't populate your schedule. So it puts a keynote and your schedule doesn't update. So Autodesk band-aid fix is, you have to adjust the coupling to like eight feet. You have to update all the sheets that that schedule is associated to, then it will populate all of your keynotes in that schedule. Then you can adjust your coupling back to whatever it was. So some screwy workarounds but when you have-- for us that's a big problem because when you're doing a huge project, 1,000 sheets just for MEP, T, that's a huge process for us to do. We're trying to figure out workarounds with DIALOG but those are kind of the struggles that we've been dealing with with the cloud.

AUBREY TUCKER: But no client issues or perception issue? No client issues or perception issues to sell them on it?

AUDIENCE: No. The overall concept of the thing, I love it. The cloud's-- it works great. Once they get the bugs worked out I think it's the future.

AUDIENCE: I'd like to circle back to the update [INAUDIBLE]. How did you guys manage that? If you were on 2016 R2 Update 4, how did everybody make sure they were on Update 4?

MARTIN NEAULT: More you're connected, more you're collaborating, more you need to communicate. OK? That's my approach. That's what I learned. And when I say communicate, is not chatting. It's really talking face to face or through meetings. When we did that switch, I spent a month to explain how important it is to follow best practices and develop them. When we did the switch we had no issues as all.

Everything like-- when we turned on Collaboration for Revit, the next morning everything was running super smoothly. But I had one guy I didn't trust, and two days later I got an email from one of the consultants saying my boss is extremely worried about someone inside our model right now. And the rule was clear and we repeated that continuously, do not open a model that doesn't belong to you because we cannot control the rights. It's all open.

But we had to go back and talk about that. So that's my approach. More you collaborate, more you need to communicate. And it's kind of the opposite today because today we're communicating through blogs, through chatting, through email but that's not the communication I'm talking about. Through meetings, WebEx, face to face. It's extremely important. If you don't have that level of communication, you are going to lose control in a project like on the cloud.

AUBREY TUCKER: Another issue we're seeing there too-- just because Stantec has a really large internal IT team, software deployment is actually becoming a new issue that we're focusing on. Because if someone's new to the project, there last project was say in 2015, they're going to get the latest install of 2016 or 17 or whatever we see in the product set. What IT hasn't kept up with to date is they're just going to send whatever is the latest and greatest thing from Autodesk to send to that new user. So they're going to get whatever the most recent update it. While the majority of us who have been working on it are going [INAUDIBLE]. Now we're trying to figure out a way to figure that out because there's two problems there.

AUDIENCE: And the other issue that I see, even in my own firm is, one person might get the Autodesk Desktop Pack that says, hey, you have a new update. And then three days later somebody else gets it. They haven't seen it for three days and I'm sitting there going oh, that's impossible. We're on the same [INAUDIBLE]. And I'm scratching my head on that one.

AUDIENCE: We've had that same issue where some people are at the same [INAUDIBLE]

AUDIENCE: Correct. So what we ended up doing is we would go [INAUDIBLE] to find where to go to. Download the update, have it on our network, and then go out and deploy it to everybody [INAUDIBLE].

But it kind of veers away from what Autodesk is presenting in the keynote that oh yeah, we're going to be all up to date and everything.

MARTIN NEAULT: But don't worry too much about A360 Team OK because the app is connected to Team. The critical one is Collaboration for Revit. You have to be on the same version. Because that's the source. Team is just a published version of what you have on Collaboration for Revit. Don't worry about that part there. Worry about this cloud here.

AUDIENCE: What about the actual model?

MARTIN NEAULT: Exactly. That has to be perfect at all costs.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARTIN NEAULT: It's a very interesting concept that this is about that open cloud and environment when we're dealing with projects that nobody should be seeing. So it's like a social media approach and I'm a person [INAUDIBLE] very nervous about that. [INAUDIBLE] anyway that's my approach.

AUBREY TUCKER: No, we hear that and we get that. I think it's kind of a trade we see and we're working towards more of a hybrid long term. Because I think what you get when you have that open environment is the ability to rapidly iterate with teams in a very fluid open space. The trade-off then is if you have big projects like you're talking about here and you have hundreds of users, it's harder to make sure only the people who need that access to this specific model get it.

So I think what we want to do ultimately is maintain that fluid dynamic that exists. So you can all be accessing and rapidly iterating. But then also add the controls where you need them. So actually the full-- I mentioned, I work on Project Delivery. The full title is actually Project Delivery and Controls. So the controls aspect is definitely a big area we know we need to continue to invest in.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

AUBREY TUCKER: So I can answer that but I'm curious if you guys-- did you do that in your project? Did you use-- or have you even gotten to that stage yet?

MARTIN NEAULT: Yeah well, the scope of work I was really involved was the parkade. Because the complex of the parkade I preferred to use NAVISWORKS because I have a much bigger control on what I want to clash on. Glue it's you clash categories against categories. Where NAVISWORKS you can clash whatever you want based on the search set. But if you want to use Glue, yeah you still have to basically publish from Revit to Glue. And it's a copy. It's not a live model you have on Glue. Same with NAVISWORKS.

And you need to understand, when you do coordination you don't want to work with a live model. You want to lock it and take this at that stage and coordinate it during the time the design team keeps working on it. Again, then you fix the problem. So you definitely don't want to do coordination to a live model. And that's one of the problems with Collaboration for Revit. One of the big problems I have is-- on a project like that is everybody has different deadlines. And we do know that mechanical and especially electrical, they are at the end. Electrical is at the very end of the process. OK they need to wait until the design is finished to really finish their design. Now on Collaboration for Revit, if I don't, me as an architect, sign off my design, there is no way mechanical electrical can finish their drawing-- can finish to lay out their devices, if I keep moving walls and doors and stuff like that.

So we came up with an agreement between the consultant which is, through our coordination meeting, mechanical electrical has to specify when they have a deadline, how many days they need to finish that, and then the architect has to sign off the model at that time so nothing changes. That doesn't mean the architecture team is doing nothing. Now you can focus on annotating, coordination. But you need to plan accordingly.

And I think one of the personally a feature that we need in Collaboration for Revit is to be able to lock a version, so I-- me as an electrical consultant, instead to work from the live, I can work with a version of that live model for a certain period of time. The FTP is good because I can upload whatever I want to share with the consultant then they can work with them and keep working. But in Collaboration for Revit you cannot do that.

So now we need a process in place to allow consultants like electrical mechanical to complete their work without having to know everything to synchronize [INAUDIBLE] start moving around.

AUDIENCE: So that's what BIM 360 Team is doing now is pointing Collaboration for Revit you publish a milestone so that everybody then has a model or sheets or whatever was published that can then be collaborated on, redlined, commented on that's static, it's not changing, it's not live.

AUDIENCE: That's not a model though. So what we've been doing-- what we have architects do is they would come to a solution of saving out or having a copy of that model like two weeks [INAUDIBLE] frozen-- so architectural frozen model or whatever-- then we reload that one into our [INAUDIBLE] then architect keeps moving and pushing [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: The problem with that approach from what I'm hearing is when you update [INAUDIBLE] model, they'd have to reload from [INAUDIBLE] that workflow. Is that not correct?

AUDIENCE: Stopping design? [INAUDIBLE] How are you-- what are you doing-- I guess that was my question-- what are you doing on your end to let the MEP catch up? You're just stopping--

MARTIN NEAULT: Well, we plan ahead of the game. And we agreed during coordination meeting-- we have weekly coordination meeting. Well, the plan is, if we say next Wednesday, your background has to be locked. So me as an architect, I need to make sure this work is done. So instead to focus on detailing, I'm going to focus on the layout. And when I hit my deadline I freeze that. I still can use design option if I want to but-- The problem with architects, if you don't stop them they're going to keep designing. There's the problem. Architects they know what doesn't work, they don't know what works.

That's why they keep designing. So at some point you need to stop the process. But as you said, there is other alternatives by creating a new model in the cloud, reload from-- but this is really dangerous, because now you're duplicated model. Someone might work on the wrong one. You might delete something. It's kind of dangerous. For us I think the solution--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] then from [INAUDIBLE] the model. That one's locked.

AUDIENCE: You're not working on the entire model. Is there a way to mark up certain things?

MARTIN NEAULT: But that's the thing. That's the thing. That's the thing. It could be just a zone of the project. A project like that, you don't lock the entire project because they have a deadline. That deadline might be in one portion of the building. That has to be signed off. So I can keep designing somewhere else.

Another option might be yeah, you publish to A360 Team, you download to your reload server, you reload from that copy there, and you work from there. But then you have to reload from the other one and who knows what's going to happen. You're taking some chance.

AUBREY TUCKER: The only other thing I'll add into this to kind of bring it back to kind of the future talk of Docs-- what you have when you're in C4R, in my philosophical perspective, it's good that it's live and it's good that it never stops. It's good because you have one file that you're going to rely on to be the architectural content model for this tower indefinitely. And you always know it's live. And it's fine that it's live because once you're in Revit you publish from C4R to now BIM 360 Teams and in the future BIM 360 Docs.

And so on the published version, that actually is versioned. And so it will be versioned and dated. So if I show you that on Team, it'll look something like this. So in this one particular model it's just only on version 7. But if I were to take you back to like one of my other ones--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

AUBREY TUCKER: Yeah, I'll show you down here. So--

MARTIN NEAULT: The one you publish to A360 you decide what--

SPEAKER: What view you want.

MARTIN NEAULT: So you can publish the entire set of sheets or you just pick what you want.

AUBREY TUCKER: And so that's where the other class that I gave this AU was about reviving the redline process but digitally. And so if you were to take your [INAUDIBLE] that you have now, and just put that red hand process-- that redlining process on the sheets with a stylus, they could be on a full scale sheet and even use drafting tools if they're on a drafting table with a short throw projector on it.

So you could have that process activated so that your markups are actually on a version of your live C4R model. So there are ways to do that now, and the tools that will be in Docs-- and maybe this is where Jake can sell you some-- the tools in Docs are going to be everything you have in 360 Team plus some. And so you're going to have an RFI process in there, and then future talk, way future talk, is having quantum in the background where you're now sharing lots of different types of information through that. So to me philosophically, pausing a model or freezing a model, I don't like that as an idea because I like that model to be reliable. I like that to be my connection to that Team.

AUDIENCE: That's a workaround. But we're working on the cloud live. Like this is an example. One guy-- we have a designer or an engineer or whatever has dropped in a bunch of devices on the wall right? And he has this whole room laid out level or whatever. Architect is working at the same time and within a couple hours moves all the walls, changes the whole floor. Come back in, couple hours later, and all the devices are [INAUDIBLE] off the wall. I mean there we are trying to catch up. That's just an example of what an happen in a couple hours when you're live like that.

AUBREY TUCKER: But you can push back even on C4R. So you can reload back someone-- you can roll back to a previous sync.

MARTIN NEAULT: But he doesn't want to roll back.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARTIN NEAULT: Back with the same thing. The more you collaborate the more you have to communicate. [INAUDIBLE] has to be communicate. It's clear. It's clear to me.

AUDIENCE: I'm all for it. But there has to be a time where the architect has to stop to where we can finish our design and have a decent set that goes out. We can't be catching-- I understand communication's big, I'm all for that. [INAUDIBLE]

AUBREY TUCKER: But I don't think that's ever going to stop, because that's not a technology problem right? It's just a-- so I mean Yeah, I would agree. I mean it's not-- that's more of a agreement process between your companies or whatever. But I think there are things we can do to help facilitate that in terms of letting other people know who's doing what or tracking that process and adding schedules and kind of workflow into it, like process tracking, which might help to facilitate the communication where it's OK, we know that in this window we're updating xyz and then that will follow and then if we're doing the walls here, we know that that has an impact on this device that you just added.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] just changing color. [INAUDIBLE]

MARTIN NEAULT: Be careful with that. Because I work on a project right now where the structural are doing that, and everybody's getting black eye-- black wall [INAUDIBLE]. So the best practices I have is do not change the setup of your objects in Revit. Use filters. So maybe by applying a process where I can just add the primaries to the walls and say OK change. And you on your side you have a filter that can track that and change the color in the view for coordination. But if I change my wall red, someone is going to call me.