The Nuts and Bolts of BIM 360 Team and Collaboration for Revit

AARON VORWERK: OK.

AP PERCOWYCZ: All right.

AARON VORWERK: Cool. Hi, guys. Good morning.

AP PERCOWYCZ: Good morning, everyone.

AARON VORWERK: Last day of AU. Hopefully you all have had a good week so far. Hopefully you are still awake after last night. We're going to be getting into, obviously, BIM 360 Team and Collaboration for Revit, today. So before we introduce ourselves, let me just ask, for whom is this the first C4R class of the week? OK. So most of you are familiar with it. Who has been using C4R in their firm? OK. Great. Cool. So this will be, this will be review for most of you. Maybe you'll pick up a few new things. Or maybe it's just a better all-around picture of what the solution does.

My name's Aaron. You can see the names on the screen. I'm a registered architect. Also a civil structural engineer by background, out of Fort Worth, Texas. I've been with Autodesk for going on four years now. I'm a subject matter expert around buildings, which just means that I come out of that industry. I've got my 10,000 hours implementing Revit in a couple of firms, did consulting for about five years, and came over to Autodesk. And then with me is AP Percowycz, off of our same team. I let him introduce himself.

AP PERCOWYCZ: Yeah. So as Aaron said, AP Percowycz, also a technical specialist with Autodesk. And my background is in architecture, as well. So although I didn't necessarily use C4R in practice, a lot of its principles, its application, directly applicable. So yeah, excited to be jumping in with it, you guys, with you guys.

AARON VORWERK: Didn't use in practice-- extremely jealous of those living in this time-- that's the way I would put it.

AP PERCOWYCZ: Absolutely.

AARON VORWERK: So I'll start with some slideware, but not bore you to death with it. And then we'll switch over to AP showing some BIM 360 Team. We'll switch back to kind of introduce the topic of C4R Collaboration for Revit, a little more deeply. And then I'll show some Revit action. And then we'll get you on your way. This is going to be fast because we've got a lot to cover in 60 minutes. 60 minutes, right?

AP PERCOWYCZ: Yup.

AARON VORWERK: OK. So you've seen the class summary online. I'm not going to bore you with that. But really, this is about Team. We'll talk a little bit about A 360 becoming BIM 360 Team, and so on. Talk a little bit about the history of Collaboration. It might be review, but we'll do that quickly. Let's jump in. There we go.

This is slow. I'm going to do it the old fashioned way. So BIM 360 Team. We have a BIM 360 platform now. And for those who haven't been following along, we've been buying things along the way, building things along the way. They've been a disparate collection. So we started out with Field and Glue. As many of you may know, years ago, Vela Systems, Horizontal Glue became our first two products on the BIM 360 platform.

We've been adding other products that we've either built-- Point Layout was an application we bought called Get the Point. BIM 360 Docs, we've just built. BIM 360 Team has a long history, we'll talk about in a second. Building Ops on the back end is something we've built recently, a very cool application for pushing straight out into the hands of an owner.

And we see BIM 360 Team as the entry point. We're going to talk a little bit about why that is and how it works for us. We'll show a little bit of that. But this is where we all come together early on. And my argument would be that BIM 360, as a platform, which is now becoming one backbone of products that all have been rebuilt to work together, is not really a BIM 360, is not a, it didn't really represent the full breadth of BIM until we had BIM 360 Team.

Because it was really a pre-construction through hand-over platform, if we're honest. And that kind of ignores the entire design process, right? So again, we'll go through what BIM 360 Team is, and how it helps us. But you know, we have this evolution that's happened. And if you're kind of following along with this, you know, we started with Autodesk 360 a number of years ago, which is kind of like the Facebook of Autodesk, of file sharing, right?

So very similar to Box, Dropbox, except it was able to understand and view many more files than those generic solutions because they are, in fact, generic solutions. It's just that some of the social sharing stuff and the organization stuff wasn't there that really needed to centralize our projects or organize our data around projects. So Autodesk 360 rebranded as A360. The A360 free version was really the same old thing, except that for it had a nicer viewer, the large model viewer, as many of you are aware.

And then we introduced A360 Team. A360 Team being the first time that Autodesk had a cloud-first solution, if you don't consider Buzzsaw like to be a cloud-first, but more like cloud-enabled. So the first time we had a cloud-first solution that was project-centric. And so now we have this thing that's, OK, so A360 Team signifies that Autodesk might be getting into the project management or organization space, a little bit. Not about the financials of the project, obviously, but around organizing the data around a project, especially the models.

A360 Team has matured quite a bit over the last year, but because of the fact that we are a broad company, we've split that, right, into BIM 360 Team and Fusion Team. The manufacturing folks need tools that are specifically geared towards manufacturing. And likewise, those of us in the AEC industry need stuff that's less generic and more focused around AEC.

So one of the catches, or things we've had to explain over the years is, OK, well I have all this stuff at A360 Team. I have BIM 360 Glue and whatever that my contractor is using. You know, how are we doing this on two different platforms? Does this make sense? The truth is, as you may have been hearing in the keynotes, and so on, we've been building this common data environment in the background. And really, all of that stuff lives in the same place.

So for us to go from A360 Team to BIM 360 Team is a rebranding exercise because the files already live together. And as you will see, as was mentioned in the keynotes, all of that will just sort of flow as this BIM 360 platform is really realized. And that's the advantage to that is, of course, we can design. We can connect with each other so easily with tools like Collaboration for Revit on the front end, if that's our focus. But then we don't have to really do anything to push it on downstream into pre-construction and construction. And that's where the real power is, that we're connecting the whole lifecycle.

So yes, we can share files, view them, search them. This slide's been up for a little while. I don't want to gloss over it too much because it's over 100 file formats, right? So we might be able to do that with three or four or five file formats. You know, I'm not knocking on a solution like Box, right? It's awesome for the one thing that it does well. We even have a corporate box account, right?

But it doesn't understand what a design file is, what the structure of that file is, how to get into the innards of that file-- and some of the stuff that AP is going to be showing in a minute-- comparing design changes over time. That's just something that a generic service isn't built to understand. It's not really it's mission.

Now some of the highlights, right? It's project-centric, as I mentioned. We have this Live Review feature we'll play with in a little bit. It is the most extensive 2D and 3D viewer in the business. It is awesome. I mean, I'm coming from the old timers' world a little bit, in the sense that for us to even open a satellite office down the street was a major hassle. What are we, going to run disks back and forth? Or pay a huge amount of money to run a T1 line from office to office? Some of you don't even know what a T1 line is.

But there was no solution that just allowed me to go home or go to Chick-fil-A and log in and just work on a Revit model. That was-- I'm in, I'm in Texas. So I could not do that. And now it's trivial, right? And I can be the client with my feet up on the desk at 4:30 in the afternoon on an iPad, spinning around a 1-gig model in a browser on an app. That's sweet. Like that completely changes the nature of the relationship with the client. Completely. If you're willing to teach them the three buttons and allow them to mark up your designs through the app.

Built for Distributed Teams, obviously, design markup, these are features that we'll get into in more detail. Again, it's in any format, whether it's ours or somebody else's. Right? And depending on the intelligence of that native format, there's more things you will be able to see, or less. Right? In an AutoCAD file, even if it's well attributed, it's going to be less data than what I get out of a Revit file. The same thing would apply to third party formats. Generic formats are going to be generic. Intelligent formats or proprietary formats are going to be more intelligent.

On any device, that's just the way it works now. So without further, you know, explanation of that, I want to jump in and have AP just show it. This is BIM 360 Team.

AP PERCOWYCZ: Absolutely. Thanks, Aaron. All right, guys. Just to reiterate some of the things Aaron mentioned early on. Really, the way I look at BIM 360 Team at a high level is a Box or Dropbox-like service where you can obviously save a lot of your data, put it in a platform that you can enable the extended team to basically access.

One of the biggest advantages for it, as well, in my opinion is it kind of serves like a Facebook page for a project, as well. It allows you to basically comment, collaborate, set up these live environments that we'll obviously go through. So for a lot of you, this may be review. But nonetheless, at this point, I'm just in BIM 360 Team, the main hub, if you will.

And what a hub basically is is, again, a location where your project structure is all housed. So at the top, you guys see Team Skyscraper, International Autodesk Hub. This is our internal hub where technical guys like Aaron or myself basically just set up demo projects. Nonetheless, right, the main focus here-- I don't have access to every project involved here. So even in an architecture firm or in an extended team environment, you may have access to be able to see a lot of projects up there, but you obviously need to be invited in specifically as a user to gain that access.

So if you're worried about controlling who is going to have access to what project, this is just the first stopgap in that process. So I have the ability to request access if needed, but nonetheless, let's just focus on projects that are obviously shared with me. So these are, again, all projects that I've already been invited to. And for the sake of our discussions today, we're going to be focusing in on this as Autobahn project.

AARON VORWERK: Hey, AP, just to remind people about that hub and project concept. So you may be showing a little bit more of that later with consultants, but for those of you that don't know, you know, it's going to be myfirmname.autodesk360.com is the hub that should be granted if you're on-team. Right? We obviously have at least 195 hubs, so inside Autodesk, we've been playing with it a little bit.

But you'll have this hub. And then you'll host your own projects. But if you're not the prime, like if you're a consultant to somebody else on 90% your work-- so let's say you're a structural engineer and you're working with your favorite architect-- they're going to have a hub and you're probably invited to projects on their hub, as is the case with what AP just said. He doesn't own the Autodesk 195 hub, but he's been invited to participate in projects on that hub.

AP PERCOWYCZ: Absolutely. So now that I'm in my specific project, right, I can see a very similar folder structure to any local drive, even a Box-like service, again. So I can fully customize these out, adding folders in, whatever structure really makes sense for your specific firm, totally able to set up in this environment. And here you see things like just specific folder structures. You know, I have my 100% CD set. I can house things like DWGs in here, you know, all listed out. I have the ability to actually jump into them and view the file itself.

And really, for me, this is one of the biggest advantages in this tool set is that, again, when we talk about people outside of a company, not everybody necessarily has access to a common data structure. Some people may have AutoCAD, some may not. But they still need to be able to view data at certain times. This just really enables that process to be able to go in and view, see what's actually going on in that data structure.

So I'm just going to pop back out. Obviously, I have the ability to house things like PDFs, as well. Same idea applies, just the ability to view those who go in, see what's going on in my data structure. But for me really, the biggest advantage in using BIM 360 Team, obviously being able to store that data up is important. But we talk about a BIM environment and a Revit workflow environment.

Again, that typical circumstance with, maybe I'm working with an owner, that I still want to be able to view my project. But they don't necessarily want to have to buy Revit. That's a big expense. They just want to be able to view, comment, see where the design is at any given time. Again, for me, this is the biggest advantage of BIM 360 Team is that we have the ability to natively view these data structures, specifically Revit in this environment.

So we have a full, large model viewer that, from an editing perspective, I can't make changes. But nonetheless, I am able to navigate around my project as needed. You know, it's pretty fluid in this environment, just being able to navigate around wherever I need in my project. Also, I have the ability to add things like sections. So if I have to look at the interior of my projects, you know, I can very easily cut a section in my model, easily navigate into whatever area of my floor plan that I want to add comments to. Maybe in this specific example I want to take a look at this table, of the room lay out. I have the full ability to basically look in at any object properties associated with this model, as well.

So here if I select in on things-- and wouldn't you know it-- it's not popping up for right now. But nonetheless, if I do select in on objects, it does bring up that property tree, typically. For some reason, it might be lagging out with the internet. But nonetheless, full ability to add comments, as well. This is one of the bigger advantages here is that I can add a comment to a specific point in the model, or even on a specific object.

So if I pick a point, again, if I'm focusing in on this room, it's going to recognize that point in space. And from here, I can direct this either project-wide-- just have it as a broad-based comment-- or I can even direct this at a specific user. So here, Aaron-- apologies for spamming you here-- but if I want to go ahead and direct this at Aaron, say, you know, let's look at this door hardware. Basically post it up.

AARON VORWERK: Remember when live demos in the cloud were scary?

AP PERCOWYCZ: But nonetheless, right, when I add that comment, again, no matter where I navigate, in or out of this model, that comment is going to stay contingent to that point in space. And here it looks like I didn't actually select on that door, so. Nonetheless, though, I can also view all the comments that are associated with this project. Here's another one that Aaron actually added up, which is just basically a red line markup at one specific room.

So again, just enabling a tool set that allows you to share information a lot quicker amongst the extended team and a common shared environment. So again, just relaying of information, providing clarity of what design intent, and extending it out to, again, users that may or may not have access to Revit in that environment. So let me just back on out here.

There's a couple of other features with BIM 360 Team that just lit up in the last couple of weeks that, personally, I'm pretty excited about. And first and foremost, I'll just pop back into this model. What you guys will notice is that I'm now on Version 7 of this model, in the upper part of the screen here. If I select in on my versions, I have a full listing out of my history of this model.

So any publishes that have been made from Collaboration for Revit-- Aaron's going to go through that in a little bit-- are all going to be listed out here. So when we think about a workflow in a working environment, I don't necessarily want an owner or outside consultant seeing my live, active model, changes that are being made that may or may not be at a state that, you know, they're ready to review. So at this point, I can basically choose what I publish, and thereby, you know, replace my version as needed.

One of the features that just came onboard was the ability to compare versions of this specific model. So if I select in on Compare, it's basically going to launch open another screen that allows me to compare these models together. Usually it takes about a minute or so to load up. I'm just going to pop over to this environment where I've already had it set up. At the top, you guys can see that I'm comparing Version 7 versus Version 3.

You know, at a standard environment, right, nothing's really jumping out at everybody. But I do have the ability to click on this Overlay feature. Basically what this brings up is it is absolutely comparing those two models with each other. And it's giving me a readout of all the changes that have occurred in the version over version of this model. So from Version 7 to Version 3, I can see that four elements have been added, nine have been removed, eight have been modified, and they're all listed out in this little dashboard.

I can also filter these out by elements or by disciplines if I need to. So I can choose to hide electrical, plumbing. I can hide the mechanical. Obviously in this case, most of the changes that I'm showing are all on the architectural side of things. But if I zoom into this environment, I can see that the four elements that have been added-- if I select in on them-- I can see that this is a piece of case work, a double drawer that's been added, elements that have been removed.

It looks like this is just a window element that was probably placed in the wrong location, just wanted to clean up. Can see that I've also added a sink mop to a specific space that's been part of my design. Can also see that part of the room layout has changed. So these walls are lighting up as elements that have been modified. So when I select in on them, I can see that the changes between 3 and 7, there's been an area change. The length has been moved by one foot of this wall. And the volume has increased by, obviously, its calculation.

AARON VORWERK: AP, the significance of that, just right there, is that this is not just letting you know, hey, something's different. It's letting you know, hey, maybe the estimate has changed by this amount. Right?

AP PERCOWYCZ: Yes.

AARON VORWERK: So you can see where the potential of this goes in the future.

AP PERCOWYCZ: Right. Right. When we talk about a workflow environment, one of the biggest things I always struggle with, dealing with even outside consultants, or even sometimes members of my team, is tracking down exactly what has changed in a model. Oftentimes, you're contingent, you're relying on them to relay that information, either communicating, or maybe clouding that drawing and figuring out what's changed.

So as long as you're publishing the versions over version, it really enables that, you know, stops those times where things might just fall through the cracks. I have the absolute data structure where I can see exactly what's been modified, thereby, you know, mitigating those times where I might miss information.

AARON VORWERK: Let me ask, who is familiar with Docs? Only a couple folks have tried it. OK. So in Docs, you have almost like a virtual light table where you can lay over drawings, version to version, and see how things have changed, right? It's about document management. This, you know, conversely, is about comparing those models at different stages before you even have documents, potentially. Right? So they have different functionalities at different stages in the process.

AP PERCOWYCZ: Yup. Absolutely. And there guys, look, I got the properties. It worked this time, so.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

AP PERCOWYCZ: I'm sorry?

AUDIENCE: Click the version 3 button, is that--

AP PERCOWYCZ: The question is to switch to a different version. Is that what you're saying?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] would you be able to see the changes?

AP PERCOWYCZ: So at this point, it's just showing me what elements have been modified. It's not going to actually isolate out that specific version in this environment.

AARON VORWERK: I think it's just choosing which is your model that you're looking at in the viewer right now. Is it 3 or 7?

AP PERCOWYCZ: Yep. Exactly. Also one of the other features associated with Team, when we talk about, again, a working environment, that common area for people to collaborate. This is a brand new feature as well. It is really the ability to live share, live review models within this environment. So I'm just going to switch screens over for point of reference, everybody.

This is now Aaron's screen on display.

AARON VORWERK: I'm not driving.

AP PERCOWYCZ: Aaron is not driving. But in this live environment, you guys can see on the right hand side, I'm the host. Aaron is also in there. We have the ability to add comments in this environment. But as you can see, as I navigate around this model--

AARON VORWERK: You'll see that AP's little image there is red. So he's the red dot. You can have a bunch of people in here with different colored dots. He's driving at the moment. We're all reviewing together on one shared view.

AP PERCOWYCZ: Exactly. So we talk about having to share information effectively. Maybe you're on a conference call. Whatever the case may be, really just allowing this environment where we can isolate in on specific areas, specific elements, convey changes that need to be made. Going through design review becomes a lot easier across an extended team when you're not always in the same location. So that's one feature I think we're all very excited about. On top of the model, compare, really just enabling access to that data. Yeah. That's most of the ins and outs of BIM 360 Team.

AARON VORWERK: All right. Let me jump back to the slide show and see how this works. C4R. OK. So good stuff there. And I'll maybe reiterate this if we have time at the end. But being that Team is free for most people, and low cost to others-- included with C4R, so not even a question when you're talking about those folks-- you know, it's a pretty good deal given that you get these amazing features that are not limited to just Revit, but to I think 110 or so formats at the moment.

So Collaboration for Revit. What is it? Why do we have it? What's significant about it? Maybe my battery is dying. I like to talk about the evolution. You may have seen this slide before if you've been in other C4R-focused talks. But the world I grew up in was, you know, like the Revit of 2005 was a very different animal in terms of collaboration. So we had work sharing back then. Work sharing has been around for 15 years, despite what other folks or other vendors might say. We've had that for a long time. And it's been very good.

But it was limited to one office and it didn't really track anything. You know, you may run the work sharing monitor still today, or many years ago you may have used Bluestreak when that existed. Those are outside apps running, right? So either as add-ins or as external applications that were telling us a little bit about what the model was doing. But it really didn't track it very well in Revit. You know, work share display settings didn't exist back then, right? So you couldn't really see what somebody else was doing in the model, even in that regard.

And of course, it was within one office-- excuse me-- within one office. And you know, it was really dependent on folks to make sure their local files were refreshed at regular intervals, and they behaved correctly with respect to the central file. In other words, they stayed out of it. Things like that. And so that was where we started.

And then, gosh, like seven years ago now, we rolled out Revit Server. Now Revit server in its idea is actually very good. And we gave this software away. But for those of you that have-- who has familiarity with Revit Server? OK. So you know that I'm not telling the full story when I say that. The software is free. The hardware requirements to run it is anything but.

And most small to medium sized firms, let's say, don't have a spare server in every office, or even virtual server space and a spare copy of Windows Server laying around to be able to set up Revit Server. And even if they did, and they set it up beautifully, then it's completely dependent on the speed of their connection between their offices as to whether it's going to work well. And so that then sometimes necessitates third party WAN acceleration solutions, and so on.

So this sounds very expensive, and it is, for the small to mid-sized firm. However, a lot of the mid to upper sized firms have been using Revit Server for years because they overcame that end. It was a way for them to collaborate across multiple locations. Now the limit to that still was that it was designed for use within a single domain. In other words, in a single firm across multiple offices. So if you wanted to break and go beyond that, now you're talking about using VPN tunneling or other methods to make it possible for other firms to share with you.

All of that really technical stuff meant that you had to have IT expertise in-house, or pay a bunch of money to somebody else to do it. You had to maintain that solution. Some firms are still doing this heavily today because they already have the infrastructure and thousands of projects worldwide sitting on Revit server. So it works, but there's obviously some limitations there that really kept a lot of the small to mid-sized firms, especially, out of the game. OK?

And even then, like unless you were so sophisticated-- as a few of our customers are-- that they would put a Revit Server Accelerator on their laptops so they could go out to the field or go to Starbucks and work, unless you were at that extreme end, you still didn't have that ability to go home and work on a connected Revit file, or go to the job site, or go to the client's office and work in a connected Revit environment. So we needed a solution to address that, and that's obviously what we're trying to do with Collaboration for Revit.

So I'll get into the mechanics a little bit more. But for those who don't understand this fully yet, who have not heard this stuff yet, Collaboration for Revit is not Revit in the cloud. We can do that too. But this is not Revit in the cloud. This is your models living in the cloud. This is being able to access them with an A360 login from anywhere, on even a slow network. And I'll talk a little bit more about how that works. We can prove that right here.

So you know, any conference is very hard for them to keep up with the bandwidth that we want. And so we can we can always test it on WiFi. So obviously, multi-firm concurrent authoring, even multi-location-- obviously within a firm, concurrent authoring, that's kind of a given-- is one of the key benefits, right? We want to be able to just work from anywhere, with anybody. That doesn't mean we're all living in the same model. You can do that. But the general Revit collaboration practices still apply, especially because contracts, scopes, and liabilities typically dictate that more than the technology.

This is like the most technical slide I'll show. So it's not technical at all, really. But I wanted to explain what's, why this works well at a high level. OK? So the right side models are living in the cloud. We get that, yeah? They're living on Amazon Web Services. We engage with them, like we have an interface, obviously, in Collaboration for Revit that's engaging with AWS.

But back on this side, there is some magic happening on the local user's machine as well. So instead of the traditional local file that you see when you're doing work sharing, you know, with the username appended to it and so on, that's all kind of quietly managed now. And there's a file that doesn't, is not recognizable as a Revit file or a journal file sitting in the user data cache. So it's a text file that's roughly the size of a Revit model, OK? Big text file.

And that is the local cache, the one you see on the bottom of the screen. And then there's a bunch of delta caches that appear, small files that appear all the time and kind of come and go in that same place. What's actually happening is that every time a user is making a change anywhere-- so AP is in Denver most of the time-- and so AP is making a change on his file. And one of my other colleagues is in London. So they're making change in their file.

Before they've ever seen it, but you know, they moved that wall or whatever, there's a little blip that goes across the server to my machine that says, hey, there's a potential change here that involves moving that wall. And there's a potential change with whatever AP's doing to my model. So I've got a bunch of little stuff that might happen, sitting as a delta cache file on my machine.

So what does that mean? That means that when they choose to sync, it just flags those files as, hey, those are actually going to commit. Those are actually going to be legit changes. And when I sync, I'm actually syncing locally with all that data. I'm not reliant on the cloud for speed, right? Because the delta changes are already sitting in my computer. Unless we're all trying to change everything at the same time and sync at the same time. So you still have to kind of coordinate your syncs a little bit.

But that means that this connection right in here doesn't have to be awesome. Right? So a 2 gigabit per second connection-- 2 gigabit-- 2 megabit per second connection speed is really the minimum acceptable threshold to not notice the slowdown. And that's not fast. I mean, that's hey, I'm having a problem with my internet connection at work. So I'll just tether. Right? That's fine on LTE, even 4G. So that's reasonable performance, even on the job site, is what that means.

Now I mean, at home, I have 100 megabit per second dedicated connection. So I mean, most of us will have far more than that. Anything above a dedicated 8 megabit per second, per user, both ways-- I've been told-- is just overkill anyway, because there's a certain transaction time it takes with Amazon. And you know, big firms will generally be able to accommodate even the upper threshold there. So for most of us, we're going to get good performance at Starbucks or at Chick-fil-A, you know. So it's really a, it's really an impressive solution from that perspective.

And the other thing is-- when I'm in Revit I'll show this-- you're not worried about local files, central files, all that terminology anymore. It's all managed by the service. In fact, it's easier than the normal collaboration process, to the point where a lot of firms have been asking us, hey, can we just do that in regular Revit work sharing? We don't want to tell users to create a new local file every day. We want it to just do that stuff. And so our developers are looking at that, too.

I could put an asterisk on this one, maybe. Because you still have to be able to, you still have to be able to install the Revit updates and go into Autodesk accounts and tell users that their provision for the service. But you will never have to walk over to your server closet to make this stuff work. And that's very significant. I mean, not only when I talk about ROI for Collaboration for Revit, I ignore the costs of maintaining servers, which is a huge cost for any firm, other than the small firm that's got a NAS box in the corner, and that's all they've got. Question?

AUDIENCE: Those local cache files, they're all link models within the project, like a cache file appears on the server?

AARON VORWERK: The question was whether local cache files include link models, and so on. There will be cached information about the linked models sitting locally as well. Yes. The caches will get big. That is something to watch. If you skimp out on hard drive space, you'll notice that with a lot of C4R usage. That's a good question. Yes?

AUDIENCE: That networks thing you mentioned, that's per user?

AARON VORWERK: Yes, that is. Now of course, there's-- this is presuming that everybody would be syncing at once, you would want that. So when you get to 100 users, you obviously don't need, you know, 8 times symmetric, times 100 users. You don't need 800 megabit per second connection to maintain top speed because obviously there's a staggering there.

I will say, for very large projects-- and we've had some customers doing crazy large projects-- you do need to schedule syncs. You know, when you have 18 users in one model and you have 45 models, which we've seen, then you know, you need to kind of plan a little bit. Because that's intense. Yes?

AUDIENCE: How about latency?

AARON VORWERK: Latency is-- that's one of the things we're solving here, right, is the fact that we're not doing it all live. So the question's about latency. Revit Server has always been very susceptible to latency because of the round trip time. In the case of this, because we're a little more disconnected-- we're staggering some information locally-- latency is not a key concern.

High latency, you might notice a little bit of lag. But not so much. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

AARON VORWERK: Currently we're-- yeah. So currently-- question about where the servers are located. Currently, Amazon AWS East and West are primary servers. And we're-- I don't know if this is public yet-- we are standing up a, so if you haven't heard this already, we're standing up a server right now in Ireland. So that will be live, if it's not live now, it'll be live in the next couple of weeks.

Others are in discussion. But right now, everything's hosted in, you know, the most, one of the largest, the most secure-- in northern Virginia-- is AWS East. I could get into, if we have time at the end of the session, I can tell you exactly how large that facility is. But it's obviously a very secure location, close to DC. And then we added the West server because of the high, very high usage on the West Coast of the service. And that reduces latency of our service.

We can come back to these questions more. I want to--

AP PERCOWYCZ: We have one more in back.

AARON VORWERK: OK. One more.

AUDIENCE: One location for Europe and [INAUDIBLE].

AARON VORWERK: Yeah. As I said, for now we're standing up one in Ireland right now. But others are still negotiating. One more.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] hosted on all the servers? So if a team is in East Coast and West Coast, are they actually using the same server or different servers?

AARON VORWERK: OK. Last thing I'll say about server data centers before we move on. But AWS East, for example, is at least six data centers connected by multi-terabit hard lines with more than 50,000 servers per location. Whenever a data packet hits an AWS data center, it's immediately blasted all over the place. Amazon developed this infrastructure. In 2006, Amazon was a $7 billion a year business. Every day, they put in that much infrastructure today.

They can support another $7 billion dollar business everyday right now. They are very large. So it's an extremely redundant service when it hits AWS. We also have created multiple stacks now inside of AWS. So if C4R has a major problem that brings it down, we can switch to another stack so people can keep working. So a lot of-- I'll move on. We don't want to get too much in the weeds.

So one thing I want you to just think about it for a minute, this last one is not a today thing, so much as just a, here's what's possible thing. And I mentioned this a minute ago when AP was showing the quantity changes, right, and how that immediately flags me to say, hey, that changes the cost estimate, or that changes my labor factor. I've got to reschedule, reshuffle when the trade shows up in that room. All of that information could start to be automatically processed based on this. Logic can be added, right?

So the same thing. Once our models live in the cloud-- and some people think this is just about access, right? And that's not it. There's big data. There's machine learning. There's processes that right now are very transactional that can be automated. So right now, for example, I want to do rendering in the cloud. And our rendering service is amazing. I can run 100 concurrent renders at, you know, 4k, and get them all back in 30 minutes to an hour. That's awesome. I can't do that on-- I don't care how much I spend on a local machine-- it's not possible.

But it's transactional. I had to send them there and either go get them, go look at them in Chrome or something, or go download them. That's very transactional. What if it was just scheduled? Or what if they just, the latest 360 degree, stereoscopic panorama was always available? I just, because the services could just run on their own in the cloud. And for example, things could already be parsing into documents on Docs. I didn't actually do anything.

Or they could already be feeding me-- like say an owner is sitting there on their iPad at the end of the day, and they say, OK, well, here's the current cost estimate with x degree of uncertainty based on the quality of the model. And here's the current progress towards lead goal that the same kind of criteria. Here's like, these are bigger questions that can be answered because the data can be processed all the time in the cloud.

We're already doing this with our energy analysis services. If you want to stop me and we'll talk about it later. But we're doing machine learning. We can do predictive analytics because we've run so many millions of simulations at this point. And we write EnergyPlus and we write DOE-2, at this point, for years. And so we're able to tell you, as you're sketching a mass, how that building is going to perform, based-- and what decisions you might want to make-- based on the millions of runs we've done in similar locations in the past, and buildings that have been similar in shape and size.

And so we can do the same thing with these models. All right? So keep that in the back of your mind that once models live there, they live in a place where lots of magic can happen. All right? OK. I'm going to get into Revit and let you add some color commentary. But I'm going to jump into Revit and show a little bit of C4R. Switch over.

Now one of the things I like to make very clear is that-- and this is instructional demo, we call it, but really it's just a guided tour-- so one of the things that is really important for all the Revit users in the room to understand is that C4R doesn't mess with your workflow. It's very minimal intervention, which is like, at one time it's exciting. Then it's kind of like a letdown because C4R doesn't dramatically change my Revit experience. The thing is, it just works.

It's like we went over and flipped this big switch in the corner and now you can share models, you know, from anywhere. Right? Otherwise, it doesn't ruin or enhance, whatever, your Revit user interface. It's pretty much the same thing. So let me, let me very quickly show some of the changes.

So if I'm going to go open a file-- been open in this one for a while-- yes, yes. OK. So if I'm going to open a file, I now have a BIM 360 Team icon. I didn't have that before. You can go home and check, or fire up your laptop. Right? That's the same. If I go to open a file-- so if I go to BIM 360 Team-- as AP said, it's just, it's kind of like the publish thing. It's only showing me the projects to which I've been invited, or shared with me, on BIM 360 Team that happened to contain Revit models. Those are the only ones that are going to show up. So if you don't have any models there yet it's because you haven't put any there yet and nobody's been there yet.

So if I go into this Audubon 2017-- that's the file I happen to have open, here's the Audubon Arch 2017-- what you'll notice looking at the screen is these Detach From Central and Create New Local options are grayed out. As I said, it's even easier really than the traditional model management process because you don't manage it. C4R does.

And it'll never show some silly user name at the end of it. And in a minute, we're going to show how you can rename files without breaking it for everybody else, and all these things you can't do in normal work sharing. But I could open this file and that's all I would have to do. I'm already in it, so I'll cancel out of that.