Harnessing Next-Generation Cloud Collaboration: BIM 360 Design

MATT DILLON: OK, I have 9:15, so let's go ahead and get started. Can you all hear me OK in the back? Everything good? All right. Good morning. My name is Matt Dillon. For those who don't know me, I'm the Core Services Director at Applied Software. We're a reseller based in Atlanta, Georgia. My office is in San Antonio, and my house.

I manage about six guys that do a variety of consulting services, implementing Revit, Civil 3D, teaching classes, et cetera. And of course, we've been doing a lot of work with BIM 360 Design. How many of you all have been to some of the other presentations on BIM 360? OK, good, there's been a lot of them out here. I only was able to make one, and fortunately they didn't contradict anything I want to say. That's always a worry.

So our agenda this morning is just a real quick overview of just what worksharing is, for those of you that may be relatively new to this. And I'll keep that short, just kind of high-level. And then kind of how we got to where we are, to BIM 360 design, what kind of led up to this. And then I'm going to do a real quick comparison between BIM 360 design and the older, kind of first generation BIM 360 Team and C4R.

And then we'll go through the project setup process and cloud collaboration what that looks like. And then really the meat of this is this piece down here. I'm going to spent most of the time probably on that topic there, the design collaboration workflows, because that's really where BIM 360 design starts to look way different than BIM 360 team. And then we'll finish up with just some basic troubleshooting. Some typical things that we see happening with customers that are using it for the first time, and how to resolve those. Because once you get the account set up, those things are usually pretty easy to fix.

OK, so real quick, just for those of you that may not be 100% familiar with what work sharing really is. Traditional work sharing-- what we've had in Revit pretty much since the beginning-- involves putting a central file up on a server. You can't have more than one person working in the same file at the same time. So in order to have multiple people working on a project at the same time, you have what's called a central file which is up on your server, and that is your project. Nobody works in that file directly, everybody works on their own local file at their own local workstation. And as they make changes, they can periodically save those changes by synchronizing to the central file.

And you're not saving your whole project, you're just saving what you've changed. And usually during that process, you're also downloading what other people have saved to the central file. And that's what allowed multiple people in an office to work on a single project. That's basically the functionality that allows that. But it's essentially happening on a LAN, so a local area network, right?

The problem for several years was people were starting to want to collaborate, not only with other offices in their organization that might be geographically dispersed, but also with people outside their office, outside of their firewall. So we had two issues. First off, people that were on a wide area network, and when they first tried to host a central model, say, on a server in Philadelphia, and then synchronize to it from an office in Dallas, well, come back in an hour or two and maybe it's done, right? Just the bandwidth wasn't there. I mean, there was all kinds of issues with it.

So Autodesk came out with a solution called Revit Server to address that. Revit server works. The software itself doesn't cost any extra, it comes with Revit, but again, Revit Server was intended to address people that were still in the same LAN. What if you wanted to collaborate with another firm? Like, an architectural firm in Chicago wants to collaborate with an architectural firm in Los Angeles, right? That was an issue.

And there were solutions to that as well. They either involve third party cloud hosting solutions where essentially the entire Revit session was running in the cloud. You basically set up a virtual network in the cloud, and your computer, when you're working in Revit, essentially was a terminal. All the processing, everything was happening up in the cloud. And that way, multiple people, you were independent from your firewall.

And you could either contract with a third party to host that for you, or you could do it yourself. The technology was available to do it yourself. Either way, whether you use Revit Server or you did some sort of a cloud solution, it usually involved significant resources. Revit Server typically requires more servers. You have to have a server in each office. It typically requires more IT resources to set up and manage. So you've got that expense. And if you were doing the cloud-based stuff, you had to either pay somebody to host your projects on their site, or you had to do it yourself, which, again, meant more expenditure in hardware and IT resources, right?

So in January, I believe, of 2015, Autodesk released A360 Collaboration for Revit, which pretty much everybody immediately decided was way too long a name to be saying very often, so we all started calling it C4R. And that was released, again, in January. And that came with a product called BIM 360 Team. Which a lot of people that used Collaboration for Revit, never even saw BIM 360 Team. It was just like, yeah, we're just hosting our model in the cloud. And never even went into BIM 360 Team at all. Which presented some problems which I'll get into a little bit later.

And that was OK. But it was a high-trust environment. We'll talk more about that in a minute. People wanted a lower trust environment. They wanted more controls over permissions, and who had access to what. And so Autodesk came out in April of this year with BIM 360 Design, the next generation cloud collaboration. And I will tell you they also released 2018.3, which was basically an update for Revit to allow it to be compatible with BIM 360 Design. And of course, Revit 2019 is already compatible.

But I'll tell you, in my opinion, Autodesk messaging on this was really vague. Because we were trying to find out, OK, what about our customers that already have BIM 360 Team? I'm sure they're going to have access, but how is that going to work? Do they migrate their projects forward? What about customers that are buying BIM 360 Design, because the way it was worded was like, well, BIM 360 Team will no longer be available for purchase. Well, you could read that as it's no longer available, right?

And people were like, well, what's going to happen? I need to work a project in Revit 2017. That won't work with BIM 360 design. What am I supposed to do, right? There was a lot of questions about that. Well, what actually wound up happening when it came out was it was no big deal.

BIM 360 design-- existing BIM 360 Team customers had the same access to BIM 360 Team that they always did. Nothing changed. They just now had the ability to go activate a BIM 360 design account. And let me stop here and talk about terminology. I think Autodesk missed the boat here.

They call a BIM 360 Team hub, the repository for all your files, they call that a hub. That makes sense. When you're in BIM 360 Design, the comparative functionality they call an account, which I think is misleading. I like to call it a site. So if you hear me say BIM 360 Design site, Autodesk refers to that as your BIM 360 Design account. But I just think that the terminology is a little confusing.

So anyway, if you were an existing BIM 360 Team customer on April 9, you suddenly had the ability to go activate your BIM 360 Design account site, but at the same time, you still had the same access to BIM 360 Team. Nothing changed as far as that's concerned. If you are brand new BIM 360 Design customer, you never had BIM 360 Team, but now you're purchasing BIM 360 Design, you get an entitlement to BIM 360 Team as well, so you still have access to both. You can activate either or both.

So basically, what it boils down to, it's dependent on your version of Revit. If you're using Revit 2018.2 or previous, that will only work with BIM 360 Team in C4R. OK? If you're working with Revit 2018.3, you can choose either one. Which one do you want to use? C4R in Team, or BIM 360 Design. And if you're using Revit 2019 and on, when 2020 comes out, for example, that's going to be BIM 360 Design only. It's all basically what version of Revit you're working.

Note the little red note there at the bottom. How many of you all use Communicator within 360 Team? It's pretty cool, right? It's not available anymore. If you're on a team project, you still have Communicator, but it's not included with BIM 360 design. What I was told early on, would had something to do some security protocol or standard in Europe, and it wasn't compliant, and so they just decided we're not going to offer it anymore.

I heard in one of the sessions yesterday, they might be working with some sort of maybe integration with existing messaging functions, which they probably should have done to begin with, like maybe Skype or whatever. I don't know. It could be idle gossip, so don't take my word for it.

So that's basically, what it boils down to. What version of Revit are you using? And this is what it looks like. If you're about to initiate collaboration-- so in Revit, when you're about to start work sharing, and you're going to establish your central file, you have a choice. Are you going to do it in the cloud, or are you going to do it locally, the traditional work sharing? So they all have that choice, right? Collaborate within your network.

But if you're using 2018.2, it'll just say collaborate using the cloud here, and that's BIM 360 Team, right? If you're using 2018.3, they change it up a little bit. OK, well, we can collaborate in BIM 360 Team-- and I love this-- you can also collaborate in BIM 360 Document Management. Which again, is anybody from Autodesk in here?

It's BIM 360 Design I mean, I know that document management's part of it, but really, we're talking BIM 360 Design. I don't know why they term it that way. We'll talk more about that in a minute. And then, of course, in Revit 2019, your choice is BIM 360 Design OK? Pretty straightforward.

AUDIENCE: So if you're saying document management in these it's totally incorrect, because it refers to some other functionality called document management.

MATT DILLON: I wouldn't say it's totally incorrect. It's about 80% incorrect. Because when you're collaborating with Revit, what you're really using is the design collaboration service, not the document management service. OK? And that's why I would argue that this should whoops-- this should say, BIM 360 Design. But it's semantics terminology. As long as everybody understands that's what they're really talking about.

AUDIENCE: OK.

MATT DILLON: OK? So what are the differences between the two? BIM 360 Team, again, was a high-trust environment. If you invite someone to a BIM 360 Team project as an editor-- someone who can edit a Revit project-- they have access to every file up there. Every folder, every file, they've got edit access to every single one of them. You can't differentiate, right?

BIM 360 Design has permissions. You can say, OK, this group of people can do this with this folder, and this group of people can do this with this folder, and this group of people can't see this folder at all. So you have permissions just like you have on a normal, say, file system on a network.

BIM 360 Team, aside from Communicator, you really don't have a whole lot of notifications as to maybe when you need to take action on something. You need to know to go up there and check. And like I said, a lot of people never even-- a lot of people never knew that BIM 360 Team was there. They just thought they were using C4R, because they in Revit. They just stayed in Revit all day long, right? So that was kind of a problem.

With BIM 360 Design, there's a variety of ways of getting notifications. We have something called issues, which is part of the document management stuff, so it's all integrated. So you can create what's called an issue and assign that to someone, and they'll get an email with a link to that issue to show them what needs to be done. And maybe it's a markup or something that they need to address. You can also subscribe to folders. You can literally right-click on a folder and say, I want to get an email notification anytime something in this folder changes. So you do get notifications with BIM 360 Design.

This is huge. BIM 360 Team was standalone. There was no connection to any of the other BIM 360 services. Nothing. It was like, there it is. And Glue, and Field, and Docs, and all that, those were all over here totally separate. So in BIM 360 Design it's a service that's part of a larger bundle, which I will show you, that includes Docs, and it could also include Glue. I think they call it Coordinate now, or whatever.

AUDIENCE: Model Coordination.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. Model Coordination. Build used to be Field, right? Names. But basically they're more integrated, right? So instead of being a standalone product over here, it's part of a larger group, or bundle of products that you may or may not include in your particular subscription.

This is a big one here. Sharing of data is automatic in BIM 360 Team. And again, because it's a high-trust environment, as soon as you upload something, or increment something to the next version, everybody sees it. There's no control over that. In BIM 360 Design, you choose when you want to share data with other teams. And until you choose to share that data, they don't see it. But once you share it, then they can decide whether they want to do something with it. So they can decide whether they want to use it right away, or if they want to hold off and maybe wait for another version. So you've got control on both sides. When you want to share the data, and when you want to consume other people's data. So the big difference here if you had to sum it down to one word, I would say is control.

But with all of this, especially the permissions and other things, the workflow, it does mean that the interface and the workflow's a little bit more complex. Notice I didn't say complicated. It doesn't have to be. It can be fairly simple. You just need to know what-- it's like anything else. If you know what to do, it's simple, right? If you don't know what to do, it's like rocket scientist. This is fairly easy to get a handle on.

So what BIM 360 Design actually includes is the design collaboration service. So that's the whole collaboration thing which we're going to be focusing on in this class. It also includes the Revit Cloud work sharing, and something called the Desktop Connector, which if you haven't heard anything about that any of the classes, we'll get to that a little bit. But that's what allows us to, for example, link a data DWG file in from the cloud, among other things.

It includes a document management module. So the older BIM 360 Docs is part of this. This is all kind of built on document management. And then it also, of course, includes the older BIM 360 Team for your earlier projects. 2017 and prior. Or 2018.2 and prior. So the idea here is everything is built on this foundation of BIM 360 Docs, and then you have these other packages that come in on top of it, depending on where you are in the BIM process. And so BIM 360 Design is really intended for more for the front-end stuff, the offering part. So when we're working in Revit, for example, that's what that's for. But then that data can then move forward and be used in BIM 360, Glue, Build, and even further on into BIM 360 Ops for building management. OK?

So once you've got your account set up, let's see, you've activated your BIM 360 Design account. Has anybody had trouble doing that? OK. There's issues that can come up, but they can be fixed. So sometimes it just takes a little work. But once you've got your account set up, the project setup is fairly straightforward.

The first thing is you must be a BIM 360 site or account admin. Once you set up your account, you're automatically an admin. I would immediately invite at least one more administrator to your account. Have at least two administrators, because if you're out sick or whatever, someone needs to be available to take care of the administrative functions. Because for one thing, only a site administrator can create a project. In BIM 360 Team, anybody can create a project if they're a member of the hub. You've got to be an admin in 360 Design.

Assuming you're an administrator, though, you can create the project. And the first step in doing that is just entering some basic project information. Things with asterisks are required. This is old. They took away this requirement. You can still input a project value, but it's not a required field initially. Doesn't really matter. You can put a bunch of fake stuff in here if you don't know, because this can all be edited at anytime. OK, this is just to get the project started. That's fairly straightforward.

Once that's done, then the next thing is to enable the services. This is the most important part. I don't know why you have to do this. Well, I kind of know, but at any rate you got to do it. So the next step is-- and you'll be taken to this automatically. Once you get through that first slide, and you say finish, or next, or whatever it is, then it'll take you to this box, and you'll see whatever services you have available for your site. In this case, we only have document management and design collaboration. That's typically your BIM 360 Design.

And you have to activate those services. If you don't activate those services, nobody can use them. So it's kind of pointless, right? When you activate the service, what you're actually doing is you're specifying a project admin for those services. And again, I would recommend having at least two project admins for your services. You want a backup. OK.

Once you've done that, then you can start inviting members. And I would recommend, if you've got, like, for your company, I would go ahead and add those members into your site before you even go ahead and create an account. So you can actually add members to your BIM 360 site and assign them a company. So you can create companies, you can create users, and say, OK, this user typically belongs to this company. And that makes things a little bit more streamlined later on as we'll see here in a minute.

So before you even create the project, go ahead and create your typical users. You can always add more later. Then once you have those users as members of the account, you can add them to the hub, or the project, excuse me. OK. So you go, and notice I'm in the project admin section. The interface here is kind of, this is how you get around to the various--

AUDIENCE: Modules.

MATT DILLON: Modules. Thank you. Services. So you'll have project admin, document management, insight, design collaboration, et cetera there. And you'll notice up above that you're seeing our actual site name, the ASTI/AETG design collaboration only. That's the name of the site, and the name of the project is just Sample One. That's where you navigate between different sites and different projects.

OK. But I'm in project admin, I'm adding members. Basically I'm just inputting their names here. And you can input several names. You'll see a select button here's, it's kind of grayed out. You'll pick that. They'll show up down here, and you need to assign them to a company. They'll have a default company most likely, but you can change that. But make sure you assign them to a company. This is really important to simplify the use of permissions.

OK, so make sure you assign them to a company. You also should assign them a role. I'm not a real big fan of the roles here, because right now you've got a fixed list of roles. Engineer. What if I want to break it out into structural, or MEP, or whatever? All you've got is engineer. So I don't really-- I heard that that's going to be changing. Questions?

AUDIENCE: Do those companies that we have discipline [INAUDIBLE]?

MATT DILLON: So the question is, are those companies be a discipline? Or could they be a discipline?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, within the same organization.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, they could be. Sure, you could use it for that.

AUDIENCE: We use that [INAUDIBLE].

MATT DILLON: Yeah. I mean, it's just a name. In this example, I'm actually using companies. But you could say, yeah, I just want to make an architecture company.

AUDIENCE: Protect your disciplines with working programs.

MATT DILLON: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's very flexible.

AUDIENCE: They just released the roles.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, so they're constantly changing this. And I know that one of the plans was-- and I haven't looked at it lately, but that they were going to make the roles customizable, which gives you more flexibility. OK, we'll talk about how these come into play in a minute.

Notice, also, when I'm adding a user, by default, they have access to the two services that I've already activated-- the docs and the design collaboration. And then I can make that person a project admin, too, by just clicking on that little icon right there. OK?

AUDIENCE: Do you have any way to load bulk names with a CSV file? Or--

MATT DILLON: I don't know of any way to do that, but I'm sure there's a way to do that, if with nothing else, doing some programming with Forge. But I don't know of any way to--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] There is a CSV [INAUDIBLE].

MATT DILLON: OK.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: OK, well there you go.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

MATT DILLON: OK? So once you've got your project members added, then the next step is to set up your teams. Now, you don't have to do this. You can skip this step. If you want to use BIM 360 Design just like BIM 360 Team, you can. But my attitude is, at least explore the new features of Teams, and Permissions, et cetera, and see how they work.

And there's a couple of ways you can do this. When you set up a team, you're assigning members either based on their names, their company, or their role. So for example, if you went and created companies, and you put those-- when you added those members, you assigned them to a company, you can simply enter a single company name here, and everybody in that company will then be a member of this team. You can also add them individually. You can also add them by role, right? So just a way of kind of automating that.

When you do that, if they're going to have a default permission level. Typically when you add someone to a team by any of those means, their default permission is view and edit. So they can view all the documents in whatever that team's folder is, and they can edit those documents as well.

There is another level called share which you can assign to certain users on an individual basis, which gives them the permission to not only view and edit, but also share data with other teams. So again, it's very, very configurable and granular. You can go down to the user-by-user level to make those changes.

Now, when you set up a team, it wants to create folders. And there's a couple of ways to do this. In my example, I'm letting Team do all the work. I'm a lazy person. If I can get someone else or something else to do the work for me, I'm going to do that. And if you just let Team handle the folders, this is what you're going to get.

I've created an architect's team. And I've added the members to it. And when I created the team, it created an architects folder. And then under the architects folder is a consumed folder. And then there's a shared folder with the architects folder in there.

And essentially the way it works is, everybody in my team by default has view and edit permissions over anything under the architects folder, and has view permissions in the consume folder. And we'll see where the slot comes into play later on when we start sharing data.

The shared folder pretty much everybody has view permissions, all teams have view permissions for the shared folder. So anything that's in the shared folder, by default, is viewable by any member of the project, but typically not editable. I'll review that in a minute.

You don't have to use these folders. If you want to set up your own folder structure, you have the ability to do that. And I don't know if I've got it on a slide here or not, but somewhere in here there's a button that says, I want to use these folders for this team. So you don't have to use the default folder structure. If you do use the default folder structure, then BIM 360 Design will also assign default permissions that pretty much make sense. And then you can tweak them from there if you need to. OK.

All right, so once you've got everything set up, this is what the design collaboration module looks like. So I've gone up here, I've now navigated to design collaboration, and you don't see any folders here. This is not where we look at folders. That's what the document management part is for. So if I navigate to document management, then we'll see the folders in the files that are in them. But the design collaboration is where we do all of this sharing and consuming.

And so there are some terms we need to understand. The first one is swim lanes. So these are swim lanes up here. And you can expand these out. This is an older slide. Things look a little different here, but not significantly. But you can expand those swim lanes out to show every single team that has done anything. Now right now, I'm looking at-- I'm logged in as an architect. I"m actually logged in as an administrator, but I'm a member of the architecture team as well.

So I'm seeing my team swim lane. And then above that, I'm seeing all the other team's swim lanes combined into one. But I could actually expand this out and see multiple swim lanes, one for each team. And then on those swim lanes, you see these little circles. Well, that indicates something happening with data. Either the data has been shared, or it's been consumed. And it's based on time. So this is earlier in time, and this is just recently. OK.

And then we have these sets down here, which we'll talk about here in a little bit. To share data, the first step is to create a package. And that's what these circles represent. These represent packages that have been shared. So a package consists of data that's typically defined in a set. And that can be anything from a 3D model, to a 3D model plus what we call viewables. Sheets, other views, et cetera. And I'll get into how we create the sets here in just a minute.

OK, so you have a set, you turn that into a package. When you turn it into a package, it's still not visible to the other teams because you have to share it. Once you've got the package created, then you share it and that kicks off a whole series of events. Other people will then see it on the swim lane here, and it also starts moving some files around. We'll look at what's happening there in a minute.

And once the other teams can see your package on the swim lane, they can then decide whether or not to consume that package. And that kicks off a whole 'nother series of events with files in document management. So just kind of remember these terms-- swim lanes, package, share, consume, and sets. So let's go through the workflow, OK?

So I don't do live demos of BIM 360 Design. I don't do it for two reasons. A, if I'm doing a live demo, my wireless will probably go into what we call demo detect mode, and I'll suddenly lose access to the internet, right? The other reason is even if everything's working the way it's supposed to, a lot of these events that you kick off, they take a few minutes to process. It doesn't happen like that.

And if you've ever watched a demo where you're waiting for like 30 seconds for something to happen, it seems like an eternity, right? So I don't I don't demonstrate this live typically. If anybody wants to play around with it live after the session, I'll be happy to do that out in the hall or something, but not in here.

So anyway, the first thing that's going to happen. If I'm the architect, and I have uploaded my first project, I've initiated collaboration on my very first project, and I'm ready to share it for the first time with the other teams. The first thing I need to do is publish that project from Revit. Even though I've already started design collaboration, I still need to publish it. Well, yeah. Technically you can share it without publishing it, but I would publish it, and I'll show you why here in a second.

When you publish from Revit, the first step-- it's actually a three-step process. And there's one that trips people up every time. The first step is you go to your published settings, and you define a set. I'm just calling this set one. And then you choose what you want in that set. So here I'm choosing a 3D view, a plan view, and a few sheets, and a graphing view. And I'll save that set.

Once that set's been saved, those settings have been saved, I then need to synchronize with the central model. Don't go right to publish after that. If you publish right after saving your set, it ignores your sets. You've got to synchronize before it sees those, OK? So you do your publish settings, create the set, synchronize with the central file, and then you go to manage cloud models and you'll see whatever files down here in your project that are available to be published, that are not already the current level or current version, you can publish them with this little icon here, or up here, you can just say, publish them all. Publish everything that can be published.

So you do that, and that will increment your browser viewable to the next version. In other words, this is what you see when you first upload your project. Now, normally, it's going to be at a much earlier stage of development with this. Maybe this is something was happening locally for a while and now we need to put it up on the cloud. So we upload our first cloud file, and that first cloud file, without even being published, is up there and viewable as, for whatever reason, version two. I don't know why it starts with two, but it does. So don't freak out there is no-- that's supposed to happen, I guess.

So your initial upload from Revit is version two. Really important. When you're synchronizing, that version isn't incrementing. So you're synchronizing, that synchronized model is really kind of hidden from everybody in BIM 360 Design. The only people that are seeing that current model are the people that are actually working on it in Revit. When you want other people to see-- when you want to make whatever is happening in Revit the current version in BIM 360 Design, that's when you need to publish it. And that'll increment to the next version, version three.

And notice here, now, instead of just a 3D model, I've got the 2D views that were in my set, as well as the 3D view as well. It's incremented to version three. Here's why publishing is so important. Even if you don't intend to share this yet, because right now, even after publishing, nobody can see it except my team. These are your backups.

If you ever notice when you're in a cloud collaborative model, if you go up to restore backup, it's grayed out. The rollback function, it doesn't work that way. These are your backups. So I had a guy-- this was a couple months ago-- called me up. He'd been working in BIM 360 Team for about a year on a project. Suddenly he couldn't open his project. Get the lovely message that the file is corrupted, blah, blah, blah. Right?

No problem. We'll just take you to a backup. I can't. The rollback button's grayed out. I said, no problem. We'll go to BIM 360 Team, we'll just go back to one of your earlier versions, and we'll make that the current version. And he said, what's BIM 360 Team? Oh.

So sure enough, I took him up there and what he saw was what he had uploaded initially a year ago. Nothing in between. So I able to help him by laboriously going through his collaboration cache files and finding something that was fairly recent that he could use, but that was a pain and it took awhile. So even if you're not going to share the data, publish it. I would publish at least each day. That way, you've got a daily backup of your project. Because again, you can increment those versions. OK?

All right. So once you've published, you've got the browser is incremented the version, then at that point, you can take what that set that you've published, and you can create a package in BIM 360 Design. So again, in the design collaboration screen you'll use this button here on your swim lane, that little plus sign, to create a new package. You'll choose from the set or sets that you've got, it can be more than one, what you want to include in the package. And it'll show up on your swim lane. Nobody else's. You still haven't shared it. So now you've got a package, right?

Next step is to share the package. This is when things start happening. So when you share the package, two things are going to happen. That package gets copied to the shared folder that I showed you earlier. So now other members, team members can actually go to document management, go to that shared folder and view the files in there, because they have view permissions in that shared folder. It will also display the package on your swim lane for other teams to take a look at their [INAUDIBLE].

So it'll look kind of like this. Now I'm logged in as someone else. He's a member of the architects team. He's going to share the package, and on his swim lane, it will now show a dart saying, OK, this is a package you've shared on other people's swim lanes. It'll show on the architect swim lane as a non-filled circle, basically saying, here's a package that's available now. OK? So at this point, it's available to the other teams.

So far so good? Is this making sense? OK.

AUDIENCE: Do you have the option of not sharing the model, but sharing the views?

MATT DILLON: Yeah. I think you can.

AUDIENCE: What's the effect of that? Are you actually sharing a model of your background, but it's not accessible from the other team members who can only see the view?

MATT DILLON: They'll only see what you share, right? And the reason why you might only want to share viewables is because you may just want to be sharing it so they can mark them up, right? Because until you share it they can't do anything with it. Did you have a--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] the packages to be a big package, or like [INAUDIBLE]?

MATT DILLON: It's really just meant as a way of you to bundle some stuff together to use however you want to do it. It wouldn't necessarily be a specific milestones in the project. Obviously, it would happen then, but it would also happen several times in between. Anytime you want someone else to see whatever you're doing in another team, you've got to have a package and then share it. OK?

AUDIENCE: Kind of like a zip file in the cloud.

MATT DILLON: Kind of like a-- yeah, kind of like a zip file in the cloud, only a lot easier to extract from. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: I'm sorry, go ahead.

AUDIENCE: Sorry, if you're on a sharing site [INAUDIBLE], then I'm sure [INAUDIBLE] in there so it's not really technically a backup.

MATT DILLON: Well, the package-- so the question is, if you're only sharing the views and the model isn't part of the package, you don't really have a backup. Actually, that's not true. Because you've already done publish. The publish is what gives you the backup. It's just that other teams can't see what you've published until you put it in a set and make it a package. Clear as mud?

AUDIENCE: Can you retract a package?

MATT DILLON: Can you retract a package? I don't know. Yeah, I think you can delete it, or, yeah, I'm sure you can. Nobody's ever asked me that before, but I'm sure you can either delete it or unshare it.

All right, so when you share it, again, we're looking at-- now we're in document management, right? So I'm actually looking at the folders. And again, I'm logged in as an architect, so I don't see the other team's folders. I just see my folder and whatever is in the shared folder. But you'll notice in the shared folder is the architectural package that I just shared. That's the model right there. OK? Now, if I click on that model or that Revit file, I'll see all the viewables that were in that set. That makes sense?

This is also now available for linking. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But again, all the other teams can see what's in the shared folder. So just by sharing it, I now make it available for people to look at in document management by going to the shared folder. So in this example, I'm now going to be the structural engineer, and I'm going to link that shared model into my Revit project from the shared folder.

So the first step is I see that there's a package. I'm not going to consume it, because oh, look, I go down here to the shared folder, there it is. I don't even need to consume it to see that. So on Revit I can link it by going to the-- there will be a BIM 360 shortcut over here in the shortcut bar that I don't have on my slide. It'll take me to my project, and I can drill down to the shared folder. Here it is. You see this, right? External resource, BIM 360. There's my project. There's the shared folder, there is the architect's folder, which is what the architect has shared, and there's the project. I can link that in. I don't have to consume it, I can just link it right from there.

AUDIENCE: What does it mean to consume it?

MATT DILLON: Getting to that.

AUDIENCE: OK.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. All right, so now it's linked into my project. We'll come back to that in a minute. Now, I'm the NEP engineer, and I'm going to do this a little bit differently. I'm going to take a look at that package, I'm going to explore it, and if I like what I see, if I'm ready for that, I'm going to go ahead and consume it. OK? And that'll cause something a little bit different to happen.

So again, I'm now logged in as the NEP engineer. And I've expanded my swim lanes out and I can see, oh, look, the structural engineer shared something just a minute ago, but the architect shared something way back here. So I'm going to look at that first. So you're going to click on that little button there, click on explorer here, and they can go and take a look at the viewables, they can query objects for properties, they can do distance measurements, I mean, basically the typical things you would expect to be able to do to mark something up or just get information out of a view.

But if they decide, yeah, I need that particular version, then at that point they can consume. So they've again, chosen the package, they've explored it. They decide, yeah, we need that. We're going to consume it. And notice what happens here. That then copies that package down to that team's folder into their consume folder, and an architect's folder underneath that. So now that data exists in the shared folder, as well as in the consumed folder for my team as an NEP engineer.

And when I do the linkage, oh, yeah, [INAUDIBLE] check, right, whatever. I think I already talked about that. You can mark it up, you can create issues. I'm just showing this real quick. I don't want to focus on document management, because I'm more focusing on the design collaboration, but BIM 360 Design since it's integrated with Document Management, gives you the ability to create markups, create issues. And this is part of that feedback.

Here I've created an issue, and I'm leaving it on an open status, and I'm assigning it to a particular member of the team. And so when I save this, this person will get an email with a link to that issue, and they can go right to it, address it. They can answer the issue, ask questions, whatever. And then I, as the person who originated the issue, can decide when and where, or when it can be closed, and close its status.

So how many of you all are familiar with issues in BIM 360, what was BIM 360 Field? It's very similar to that, but much simpler. But one of the big changes they're making, or have made-- I'm not sure if it's taken effect yet-- is they're going to combine the issues for Field and Design Collaboration. So you can choose how complicated you want them to be. But essentially it's what they call integrated issues, or--

AUDIENCE: Unified.

MATT DILLON: Unified issues. Thank you. Yeah. So it won't be a separate set of issues for Field and a separate set for Design. OK.

AUDIENCE: They released it last week.

MATT DILLON: Last week. I knew it was coming pretty quick. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: Do we do this today? Decide [INAUDIBLE]?

MATT DILLON: Yeah, he just said that they released it the other day.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: Yes. Yeah, you could do that originally. But now the field issues and design issues are more closely related. OK?