Ask Me Anything: Revit Architecture Roadmap

REBECCA RICHKUS: All right, I think we're getting going. Welcome, everyone. We're happy to have you here for the Revit Architecture Ask Me Anything session. And with me, I have a whole host of people.

But we're going to go through a few slides first before we do introductions. I'm Rebecca Richkus, I'm Director of Operations for the Building Design Product group. And I will be helping guide the conversation today.

If you haven't already discovered, there is a live discussion chat and questions placed in the bottom right corner of the window. It was-- it's like a tiny little thing at the bottom and you can open that up. There's a chat section. But for the questions, if you type your questions in there, you can also look at the questions that have been asked and vote up the ones that you're interested in. We will get to those shortly.

So first, we, even though there was already a safe harbor, we're going to just review the safe harbor, which is to say that we will be talking about some of the things we're thinking about and working on for the future. But we are not making any promises with our conversation, and you should not make any purchasing decisions based on what we talk about today. And Harlan is going to come on and talk about what we have just released in Revit.

HARLAN BRUMM: Thanks, Rebecca. So yeah, 2022.1 just became available. You can actually go download it today and check it out.

We really focused on three areas, first, around design productivity. So this includes things like the ability to duplicate parameters, the ability to duplicate sheets, making it really easy to kind of create new sheets from existing sheets. And one of my favorites is the ability to actually load, which is great.

And then also, the second area was around-- and so one of the highlights from this release is the support for the Design Alliance IFC tool kit, which improves our ISC interoperability, which I think is also awesome. And then also, you get new file formats for things like Rhino and SketchUp where we support their latest versions as well as some improvements to the interoperability between FormIt and Revit. We're now in the two applications, which is also great.

And the last thing we want to talk-- let's see, which includes some enhancements around how you can find things in the project browser, being able to-- all in different areas of the product, making it easier to find things, find where they are, and be able to-- where you are in the project. And then also another, I think, long-standing customer request is what we call auto lock with the align tool. It'll save you a couple of clicks. You don't always have to click the lock icon that shows up on the screen. Instead, you click the lock and it will just automatically do that every time you use align.

So if you want to learn more about 2022, you can go up to our blog post. We'll add the link to the chat, and you can read all about what's new. So thanks, Rebecca.

REBECCA RICHKUS: As a reminder, a lot of the things that we're happy to have questions that are on our roadmap, and we have a public roadmap through Trello. You are welcome to go to the website and take a look at things that we're working on. And you can also, within the trend, give a thumbs up to the specific areas that you're particularly excited about or interested in. And that helps us understand too.

And for the ground rules of today-- questions we can't always answer every question that people ask, especially if it starts with a-- when. So we can't, because of the safe harbor kinds of-- certain dates. So no timeline questions. That said, if you ask something in a are you thinking about, is it on your radar kinds of questions, we can often conversation. So that's just a pro tip.

And then we're going to do introductions. So I'm actually going to stop sharing so we can go in the gallery view. And Harlan, why don't you kick us off? And I'm going to have everybody introduce themselves and also say what is a project or future that you're excited about that we either have just released or is on the roadmap.

HARLAN BRUMM: Thanks, Rebecca. So I'm Harlan Brumm. I'm a product manager for Revit focused on Architecture. And what I'm most excited about or looking forward to is some of the things that we're doing around modeling and documentation in particular. So we're making some enhancements around things that you can model, making it easier to model more complex geometry, specifically for walls and site. And automated documentation, so getting rid of some of the tedious workflows around automation is also-- or with automation is super exciting to me.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Thank you. I'm sorry. I'm just hearing that the sound is not working very well. Thank you for letting us know.

I think we have our technicians helping. OK, we'll keep an eye on it. I think the technicians are helping in the background. Lilli, would you mind introducing yourself?

LILLI SMITH: Sure. Hello, everyone. Lilli Smith here, Senior Product Manager in the AEC Generative Design group. I am really excited about some of the work that we are doing around bringing a lot of the features that we've developed, been developing past couple of years in generative design, merging them with Dynamo Player, and also making a lot of Dynamo easier to author custom workflows. And I'm really excited that that can bring custom workflows to a lot more people. So we should be seeing that coming up.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Thank you. Bogdan?

BOGDAN MATEI: Hi, everyone. I'm Bogdan Matei. I'm a product manager for Revit Cloud Work Sharing.

What am I proud of or excited? Well, we try to focus on the things and performance and the way we handle data. So I'm very excited that we just released, with Revit 2022.1, the option to access every single sync version of a cloud work shared model. You can open it and check it and do whatever you want with it. And for the future, I think FedRAMP support is the biggest one.

REBECCA RICHKUS: All right, great. Sasha?

SASHA CROTTY: Thanks, Rebecca. So I'm Sasha Crotty. I'm the Revit Product Manager covering the Revit Platform as well as Cloud Services. I'm a little bit out of practice, seeing as I can't even say what my title is. I'm just coming back from maternity leave.

One of my things I'm very excited about is actually all the opportunities that we have with data going forward and all the things that we're thinking about in terms of opening up, making-- opening up Revit's data, making it more accessible and more available. Some of those things are coming now, and then some-- I mean, I think there's so much opportunity in that space in the future. So we want to be able to let you do more with your data and make it easier for you to do so.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Thank you. Zach?

ZACH KRON: Hi. Zach Kron, Product Line Manager in the Generative Design group I'm very excited right now about a lot of the work that we're doing around sort of-- there's different strategies that we have for extracting capabilities from the different sort of flagship products that we have so you can start seeing them showing up in different environments. And it's just sort of a trend that we're pursuing that people should start seeing sort of emerging in different ways going forward. And I find that just to be a great way to start getting beyond products and into just helping people get their work done.

REBECCA RICHKUS: All right, thank you. And Cesar.

CESAR ESCALANTE: Morning, everyone. My name is Cesar Escalante. I am a technical marketing manager for Architecture.

One of the things that I'm very excited about, the latest release has the ability to read new types of files, file supports. We have now the ability to import and export STLs, OVJs, and preserve the materials of OVJ. It's going to really make the connection between Revit and 3D printing more seamless. And the-- we are continuing and improving and enhancing the IFC compatibility. So those are the things that excite me because allow us to expand your workflow with a broader set of CAD formats.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Awesome. Thank you. And we have a few behind-the-scenes folks. Many thanks to David, helping things behind the scenes. And I think Aaron is mostly going to be working behind-the-scenes, but you'll see them in chat and questions.

All right, so let's kick it into question gear. And I'm going to start with the top voted from Andy. Why does there seem to be so much focus on adding new features with limited applications, such as generative design, when there are still so many core functions of Revit to fix or build upon? So Harlan, I'm going to aim that at you.

HARLAN BRUMM: Yeah, no problem. I'm happy to take the first one. It's an interesting question, I think, actually in general, and kind of speaks to a lot of different areas that we work on with Revit overall.

But I would say, it's actually pretty hard to define what is a core thing these days and what is not. And what is kind of a-- what is really a new feature? Because if we work on walls, for example, and we do something there, is that core or is that new? Or if we add something to it, like slanted walls for example or tapered walls, is that a new feature or is that core thing that we're improving? Kind of it's open to a lot of interpretation I would say there. But I would say one of our priorities is definitely to focus on what we would call existing functionality and making it better and improving it overall.

And Sasha's cat showed up. That's awesome. And so if you're wondering if it's live, this is live.

And it's a balancing act that we have to try to use, especially for like Revit 2022 and 0.1. That was a big area of focus for us is to try to continue to enhance things that have been around a long time and long-time customer requests in general. And really, we're not looking at it from a new feature, not new feature perspective. We're just looking at how do we best solve customer problems.

And so at the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do, solve as many customer problems in as best way as we possibly can, whether that's new, old or whatever. It doesn't really enter into our thought process, I would say that much. So we're just kind of looking at how do we add value? How do we make sure we're providing tools that are helpful and that solve problems?

REBECCA RICHKUS: Right. And Lilli, did you have another thought?

LILLI SMITH: Sure. I mean, I hear you that we need to do a lot of work around Revit, certainly. We also want to spend a certain amount of our effort investing in new ways of doing things and extending the applications that we have in custom ways. We are never going to be able to code everything, test everything, put out all the software that everybody would want to do things.

And our customers are very creative people and come up with all of these amazing things that we see being done and generative design being done with automating BIM workflows in Dynamo as well. And a lot of the work that we're doing in Dynamo, and in Dynamo Player, in Dynamo for Civil 3D, and Dynamo for Revit is extending those workflows too as well as generative design. So yeah, I don't know. Zach, do you have anything more to add to that?

ZACH KRON: Yes, sorry. Couldn't get my mute button off for a second. Yeah, I agree with everything that has been said.

I think that the principal thing is that as a technology company, it's our obligation to keep a foot in the present and a foot in the future. And that's part of what you're seeing with work that we do in things that may not be mainstream right now but we think that there's great potential for in the future. And we can chew gum and walk at the same time. We are going to be pursuing both the current state of things and the future state of things at the same time. It's exciting.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Right, thank you. I want to-- so Aaron has gotten his video working. So I want to give Aaron a chance to introduce himself real quick before I jump to the next question.

AARON VORWERK: Hi, guys. Thanks for joining today. I run the building technical marketing team here at Autodesk. So I'm just-- I'm just happy to be here amongst all these product experts.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Great, thank you. All right, the next question is, it seems Revit has abandoned stairs, ramps, and railing. Is there a plan for an overhaul?

HARLAN BRUMM: Abandon, strong word. I think, if I remember, last time we did something there was kind of 2018 major stuff around multi-story stairs. That's an area, I guess going back to the last question, that is kind of core. And right now, there's not a huge plan to do a massive overhaul or anything like that. But it is something we're constantly thinking at.

We did some work last year on ramps, I think. And so it is going to be an area that we'll continue to go back to over time. But we can't really do everything all at once. And so we have to kind of pick and choose what we're going to focus on for an immediate time frame. And we haven't gotten back to doing anything major in that area right now.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Right. The next one, I think it might be on Sasha's list. Why hasn't revision clouds been added as a category we can schedule?

SASHA CROTTY: Well, it's one of those tough things. So any-- we have to prioritize this relative to everything else. And the best way to get something to-- for us to pay attention to is to get it on Revit Ideas, right? If you haven't heard of Revit Ideas, I think most people have, it's an opportunity for you to follow your wishes on there and to vote for them. That helps us understand how important it is relative to everything else. In terms of kind of why revision cloud specifically, our challenge is it's just one of those categories that we've never really addressed. And it's kind of hard to make sure that we do it properly in a reasonable way. And I think Harlan also wanted to contribute to this as well.

HARLAN BRUMM: Yeah. This falls in one of those things around consistency that we've been working on a little bit is just being able to have similar behaviors across things, I would add. So something we're going to look into and we'd love to be able to get to it.

We'll decide-- we'll look at when we can get to it, when we can add this as something to do in our roadmap. But being able to schedule and tag everything is top of the list. I know this idea is out there. We definitely are aware of this one and want to be able to do it.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Right. Just as a reminder, in case anyone joined us a little late, the live discussion widget that sits at the bottom when you pop it open, that's the place to use the chat and ask questions. And I'm currently basing the questions that I'm asking on the voting in the questions panel. So if you go to the questions panel, you can thumbs up other questions in addition to asking your own.

So, could some simple text formatting within a schedule cell contents be made available? Like bold, italics, underline, that would be nice.

HARLAN BRUMM: It would be nice. Don't disagree at all with that sentiment. And again, we have been working quite a bit on schedules, actually, for the last couple of releases, mainly focused, I would say, on how do we handle the large data sets better. So the ability to Zoom in schedules, the ability to highlight rows that you're working on.

We had to split schedules just last year, or just in 2022. And we added some new API and some new help this year. So schedules are something we're going to continue to be looking at is how we can improve them.

We haven't really touched formatting though yet because, I think generally, what we want to be able to do also is give you better-- Revit's not Excel and probably shouldn't ever be Excel really and give you that ability. But we want to make sure you can create the documents that you want. So it's something we'll be looking at.

LILLI SMITH: And if I can jump in and add to that.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Yeah.

LILLI SMITH: Why Revit's not Excel? Because Excel is a software with a development team all by itself. And this is what they have been focusing on. So building Excel again in Revit just doesn't make sense because that's what Excel is excellent at. So what we do want to make sure that we make it easy for you to access data. And this is where we talk about the easy access to data in other places. Because if we could build a better connection between Revit and Excel, for example, you can actually start to do some of those operations without having to wait for the Revit development team to implement everything in Revit.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Right. There was another stair and railing question. Looks like somebody's having some issues with their multi-stair being broken to not show railings.

HARLAN BRUMM: This would be a good time also to, if we can put into the chat, the link to technical support. So you should be able to explode a multi-story stair, which is part of this, it looks like, is being able to actually revert it back down. And if there's problems with railing visibility, that's something we should be able to help with as well because they should display and they should work according to View Range. So we should be able to help with that. But we'd love to be able to understand more about what's happening there.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Great. Are there any plans to allow rooms to be assigned to phases to allow for demo and new work visibility control?

HARLAN BRUMM: This is something that's also top of mind for us is how do we handle rooms. Room spaces, areas, zones are all kind of this big bucket of stuff within Revit that we would love to be able to get to. Actually, you might not know this, but actually rooms do get assigned to a phase today. You can't demolish them, which is the big request.

You can assign based on the view that you're in. So if you set your view to be in new or existing when you create a room in that view, that room will be on that phase. So it can exist. However, demolishing them-- and the issue generally with some of this is that-- is how do those things react to other changes in the model is a real big concern when it comes to phasing. But rooms in general and rooms and spaces is definitely top-- an area of interest for us and something that we'd love to be able to get to in the future.

REBECCA RICHKUS: All right. While I've been looking at the top of the list, I just realized there's so many more questions that I can't see. So I'm going to go-- I'm going to ask everybody here to take a look and see if there's a question that kind of suits your area of specialty.

And then I will go back and ask about-- speaking of other areas of specialty, will Dynamo tools be integrated as part of Revit tools? Oh, it just jumped off my screen. I find it unnecessary for users to create their own when there are great tools out there that can easily put-- be put into Revit to add automation. Part of the day-to-day automation. There you go.

LILLI SMITH: I think that kind of gets into the edge of or what I was talking about as we will never be able to build all functionality that is useful in doing-- in architectural workflows. And yes, there is a line that some things seem like you do them so much that it should be included just in base Revit and should work like that. But a lot of times, people want to customize some of this functionality. And so having a way to do that inside Revit is really useful. So I mean, if you have specifics about what tools you would want to see, you can talk to us too about those as well.

REBECCA RICHKUS: OK, great.

LILLI SMITH: Anybody have anything else to add there?

ZACH KRON: Sure, yeah. I'm trying to sort of get my head around that question a little bit is that if it's a question of can we make Dynamo tools easier to be integrated into Revit or can we evolve the ones that have proven themselves to be useful into being based Revit tools. And I think that they're both good questions. I think that you just answered one of them, Lilli.

The other thing is that we are actively working on making tools that are being created in Dynamo easier to deploy and easier to absorb into additional workflows. That is, right now we know that there's a lot of issues for distribution and wrapping of Dynamo workflows into reusable tools that you can distribute throughout an office, throughout your team. So that is something that we're also working on.

It's kind of a funny problem because in a lot of ways, Dynamo works as sort of a steam release on difficult problems. Like, it makes them just not urgent enough because somebody has a solution that they figured out in Dynamo that maybe we don't have to make another solution in the product. And we are juggling those things. And I think that one of the things that you see with Dynamo is that people prototype and prove out that there's a high value in certain workflows. And those things do get considered for migration into sort of out-of-the-box tools, for the most part, in order to make them more performant or more available to a wider group of people.

HARLAN BRUMM: I would just add a quick, quick little example. Duplicate sheet. Lots of Dynamo's curves and graphs you set up to duplicate sheets. And we just added that to Revit. And actually, took a, not to say inspiration, but looked at a lot of what was available and said, OK, how can we do this in the product and make it easy to use?

REBECCA RICHKUS: All right, I'm going to jump around a little. There was a question about import export. So will Revit add more import export? It's letter soup. FBX, NWD, blender, vector works, ArchiCAD, STL, SAT, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Sasha, do you want to take a stab at that?

SASHA CROTTY: Yeah, sure. So you've probably noticed we've been adding a lot of different types of imports exports recently, and certainly enhancing and reworking a lot of them as well. And as part of doing that, and for example, working on format and kind of better connection to format as one, as we're doing that, what we're doing is we're actually restructuring Revit's internals to use Autodesk standard technology. And the cool part about doing that is that every single time then we add a new import or export after that, we can use that technology to make that process a lot faster.

Doing all these imports exports as one offs is really, really costly. And it's really hard for us to maintain. If we can do start to standardize this, if we can start to connect this to Autodesk docs for hosting some of this data, we can actually start to make some of these translations between formats a lot more seamless. And then it really won't matter what the format is. So I guess the short answer is, nothing concretely for the most part for most of these. However, in the future, I actually anticipate us having a lot better connectivity with all of these and us getting it in a way, hopefully, without even have to modifying Revit at some point in the future.

REBECCA RICHKUS: All right. So Bogdan, I'll aim this one at you. Are there any plans to bring back some type of communicator for working in our work shared projects?

BOGDAN MATEI: Short answer is yes, it's already something out there. It's called the activity indicator. And it shows you when someone else is synchronizing in Revit's cloud workshop model so that you don't overlap. And we are thinking and it's on our radar to improve this functionality.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Thank you. Oh, I lost-- here's one that was still up at the higher level of the votes. And Harlan, this one's for you. Will Revit improve site or landscaping tools instead of using floors? But I think it's about the site or the landscaping tools.

HARLAN BRUMM: Yeah, that's a great question. And yeah, that's something that is on our roadmap. And actually, did we mention-- we did show the roadmap slides. And we can add it to chat where that is, the public road map. It's listed up there.

Site design is something that we're starting to embark on. It's going to be-- take a while, I think. Multiple your initiative to be able to do that.

But we're focused right now on solid topography, so the ability to actually create solid geometry for sites, do things like cutting holes in them for tunnels or doing underground structures, and just better general editing capabilities. And we are taking some of the ideas that people have used in the community around using floors for sites as inspiration for some of the work that we're doing. So we want to align actually how those two things work so that they can actually be improved holistically together as well.

REBECCA RICHKUS: All right. Sasha, is there a way to link live Excel sheets?

SASHA CROTTY: So there's not a way to exactly link live Excel sheets right now. There are a number of third party add-ins that do actually allow you to do kind of a bidirectional import export to facilitate a lot of these operations. What we are looking at as part of our Forge platform is, again to my earlier comments about me being excited about opening up our data, is making our data more available and then having APIs that connect to things like Microsoft Power Automate, which allows you to automate a lot of these processes.

So this is kind of the powerful thing that we can do because not only does that allow you to connect live, potentially, to an Excel spreadsheet, it can also connect anything else that Power Automate it can connect to. It can be Microsoft Teams. It can be kind of you name it, Slack, if you want a Slack message to come up when some of your data changes. So those are the kind of areas that we're exploring. And again, really exciting because I think we can do a lot with the platform that we weren't able to do with the individual product.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Great, thank you. And I'm going to ask Zach to answer this one. Are there any plans for merging Space Maker with Revit?

ZACH KRON: A great question. I'm really excited about all the questions in various venues that have been coming up around Space Maker. No, it's not going to be merged as a plan right now. This gets back, actually, to sort of my original comment at the beginning about shared capabilities between different applications.

One of the things that we are constantly trying to make the interoperability between different applications better and better and better. And sort of the first steps with Space Maker are going to be around that, about making data transfer better between the two. If you want to find out more about what those sorts of plans look like, I really recommend going to the AMA tomorrow for Space Maker, which I believe is at 11:00 Eastern Standard Time. And you'll see some of the work that is under development by the Space Maker group in partnership with the Revit team around working closer together and finding where the strengths of each one of those applications are.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Great, thank you. I'm going to go back to the top of the voted list to catch this one. With the rising popularity of programs like Blueman, Twinmotion, and others, will Autodesk or Revit be creating their own instant visualization platform?

HARLAN BRUMM: That's a good question. To start things off, there's so many great third parties that have been doing that. And I think what we will focus on in general is making Revit best in class when it comes to graphics and graphics fidelity and continue to lead that charge. We want to empower you to get the jobs done that you need to get done when it comes to that.

And so I think we want to focus more on the graphics side within Revit itself, on the inside of Revit, when it comes to graphics performance and visual fidelity, things like that we can focus on. When it comes to rendering and visualization and kind of creating those tools, on the platform side, kind of the movement towards immersive visualization is definitely top of mind for us. But right now, we are looking at how we can leverage our partner ecosystem to be able to help do that instead of necessarily building it all ourselves. So we don't necessarily think that's the right answer is to build it ourselves when everybody else is doing such a great job. We want to instead connect to those platforms and do a better job integrating them.

REBECCA RICHKUS: OK, thank you. So IFC is a hot topic. And I see one. Why can I not export IFC with linked models? I need a special code mil export for now. Or code m3, sorry.

HARLAN BRUMM: Yeah, IFC. So I would just say, for IFC, this is definitely a priority for us right now is to improve IFC functionality. We've been working really heavily on the tool kit, like kind of the back end, behind-the-scenes piece, mainly around performance and stability so that we can actually bring in larger and larger models. Next up is really focused around the user experience of how do we actually handle the integration with IFC, how do you handle export classifications, making IFC a lot easier to be able to manage. And we're going to continue to do that and continue to make incremental updates as well to fix issues that crop up with IFC. So yeah.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Yeah, I would just add on that one, just we have a lot of different threads going on for IFC. And so we're also working across building an infrastructure to try and pull our story together so that it's easier to follow all that we have going on at Autodesk for IFC. So stay tuned for more information there as well.

I just lost the one that I was going to ask about. Oh--

HARLAN BRUMM: Becca, there was a follow up, I guess, on the graphics thing because I could expand on that a little bit more maybe when I talk about what does that look like, how is it going to get better. This is something that we're starting down on a journey around how can we actually leverage some of this technology better. We think big items are around performance, making Revit perform better overall graphically, taking advantage of the hardware that you have. So being able to support things like DirectX 12, being able to take advantage more of the GPU, offloading some of those tasks, and making it possible. Visual fidelity is definitely top of mind.

But for us, it's a little bit different. It's not just, like, making things look good on screen. We actually have to make them look good when you print them or export them to PDF and ensure graphic fidelity. That's what we mean by that, that what you see is what you get on the screen, which is a kind of a totally different animal when it comes to high-end graphics. Like, trying to get ray tracing to work in a Revit view where it's totally GPU-dependent, literally-- you can't really get that to print and export in a view.

Like, you can't print a game, right? It's kind of difficult to do that unless you [INAUDIBLE] everything and you take a screenshot. So we need to be able to actually focus on that documentation aspect as well, which is just part of what you'll see.

So hopefully, actually on Revit side, you'll just see things like performance and scalability improvements, ability to handle larger models, bigger data. And you'll see things print well, perform well on screen and display. But fundamentally, how things look, we don't really want to change that much. Unless we're talking specifically about like rendered views or like that kind of visual style, then we think enhancing that is probably definitely something you will see at the end of the day when we get there.

But mainly, this is about performance and graphic fidelity. So thanks. I just wanted to jump in and clarify that, if I could.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Thank you. Here's one. I'll start with Sasha, although I'm sure others will have thoughts. Do you worry about tech build up on the platform? When is the time to start new?

SASHA CROTTY: Well, those are probably two different questions, but I'll tackle them. Yeah, absolutely. If you talk to any of our software architects, they will immediately tell you hey, when are we cleaning up this tech debt? We've got this tech here.

The answer is, yeah, 100% we worry about it. And we actually go back and we clean it up. So a lot of the time when you see things taking a long time to develop, for example, some of the wall features, right? Why don't we start with elliptical walls? Because what we did that entire year that we worked on that is we went back and we cleaned up the wall code so that we could do things that moved the platform forward, like slanted walls, for example. So we actually go back and we clean up that tech debt.

And so I guess the answer to the second half of that question is, we are constantly rewriting. Maybe not completely from scratch, but it's just something you don't see. We actually have so much regression testing, so many great tests that cover functionality that you don't see things breaking, hopefully, fingers crossed, when we actually rewrite a lot of that internal functionality. It makes things a little bit slower, but at the same time, it means that we feel like we issue a pretty solid product even when we are going back and rewriting things, sometimes even completely from scratch. It does happen, especially in import export. That happens quite a bit.

HARLAN BRUMM: And just again, to reiterate that basically, because of that rewriting stuff, you're not seeing your documents change. You're not seeing things drastically get different in your-- when you upgrade year to year. And we do that on purpose to try to make sure that we can actually have a quality product every year.

REBECCA RICHKUS: Any other thoughts on that topic? Because I think everyone on the development side talks about it regularly.

HARLAN BRUMM: Well, I'll add one other thing which I think is important to recognize. Like, for those who don't know what technical-- tech debt or technical data and software development, like every time you write any piece of code, you incur technical debt basically. Because tomorrow, there's a better way to write that piece of code, probably. And so no matter how old your platform is and your products are, you have technical debt. It's not, like, just because of the age of the platform you've incurred technical debt. And so that's a big thing.

A lot of the-- like Sasha said, we're rewriting stuff all the time. And everything we write incurs new technical debt. So it's always something. Something we wrote two years ago we might need to rewrite next year.

REBECCA RICHKUS: I'm going to go back to the top voting because we're jumping around to try and cover different topics and things. But I don't want to lose track of some of the ones that got voted up. So any improvements around keynoting system and use of text, especially when using Autodesk Construction Cloud?

SASHA CROTTY: So I guess nothing right now concretely. But I think there is certainly a possibility of doing something like that in the future, right? So what we want is a lot of these files that happen to be text files or something that are sitting around, aren't very well connected, we want them to be accessible to the entire team so that you have multiple people editing them at the same time. So there are opportunities to do that. And nothing immediately on the roadmap, but at the end of the day, what we want is your entire project to live in the cloud in a seamless way so you don't have to maintain a shared drive somewhere for part of your project because that really means that we're not getting your workflow to be as efficient as possible.

REBECCA RICHKUS: There's a couple of questions sprinkled in there about the MGIS integration. Does anyone have any thoughts on potential work there?

HARLAN BRUMM: I'll take that one because it's sort of related to some of the stuff we've been doing around Civil. I think overall, we want to be able to connect our tools together and be able to share information with as many possible parties as we can. So actually, we've had conversations with companies like-- I can't even pronounce it now. But ArcGIS, for example, about how they consume Revit data.

We work with our Civil and Infrastructure teams around how does InfraWorks fit into the overall method, how do we bring that data in, how do we leverage it across products, how do we connect these tools. So interoperability and being able to share data is definitely core to what we want to work on. And Civil Infrastructure on buildings is probably the hot topic, I would argue, around how does that work from very early stage design work all the way through the entire lifecycle of the project. So yeah, we definitely think that's interesting and want to be able to extend into that space as we go.

REBECCA RICHKUS: OK. Here's a good one about Revit Ideas, as we had mentioned that earlier and still want to give a plug. Our Revit Ideas weighed more than AUGI wishes when Autodesk is reviewing customer feature requests. So Sasha, you want to tackle that?

SASHA CROTTY: Yeah, I'll start with it. I bet you Harlan is probably going to want to toss something in there after me. So there's not a specific weighting. There is not-- when you chew-- when you're project managing, you're trying to figure out what is the most important thing that we build into our platform. You're not looking at a weighted calculation. It's not like I can say, this is twice as valuable or something like that.

The way that we use Revit Ideas and then AUGI Wish List as well is we look at what's on the list and we start exploring that area to try to understand what it is that-- what is it that our customers are looking for? That means we're talking to-- talking to customers, our development team are talking to customers, trying to understand the area better. Other times, we may be looking at a specific area of the code. And we're interested to say, OK, since the team is working here, are there any Revit Ideas or AUGI Wish List that we can fit in?

So this is when sometimes you see lower voted ideas making it to the top because we hear feedback from customers and sprint demos or from our beta. And we say, OK, yeah, we can probably go fix that while we're in this area. So there's not one formula and it's not more heavily weighted. I would probably say we spend more time in Revit Ideas realistically.

HARLAN BRUMM: Yeah, everything Sasha just said is 100%. I was going to say, it's more-- being a product manager, and not just us, it's not just product managers making these decisions, by the way. Like, it's our entire organization. We as a collective whole are looking at all the different sources of input. And it really is more art than science. And that kind of plays into what you see, can accept it, or what's available.

SASHA CROTTY: Yeah, I guess the other thing I always-- I end up writing this answer every once in a while in Revit Ideas or some other areas. You can probably dig up a few versions of this answer. But one of the things you have to consider is not all development teams are created equal.

So when we're considering what to invest in, we may not be able to say, OK here's the top idea, but the team that is capable of doing that work is not available so we have to consider something else. So there are so many things that come into trying to balance the right investments. It's certainly kind of desire from our-- desire from customers, team availability, size. Some of the top voted ideas, realistically, the reason they haven't been implemented is because they're huge, right? And we tried to make sure that we're doing some of the big ones and some of the small ones at the same time, trying to make as much progress for all of you. Because at the end of the day, what we want is for you to be as effective as possible given the resources we have.

REBECCA RICHKUS: All right, I actually saw two kind of related questions. One was about Versions Galore. And the other was, would you ever consider making Revit backwards compatible? I feel like it's about the time in the ask me anything where we have to answer.

HARLAN BRUMM: We have to--

REBECCA RICHKUS: How difficult? But then the other part is, how difficult would it be to do this?

HARLAN BRUMM: Yeah, we have to answer a bunch of these tough ones now. Yeah, so we should handle the other tough one that we know is coming too probably, right? So this one. So backwards compatibility.

Actually, Sasha quite a few years ago wrote a really great post on Revit Ideas explaining kind of all about backwards compatibility and the challenges that it represents for Revit. I'm not-- I don't think we can dive into all the details here really. But maybe we can add that and find it and put it into the chat so people can read all about it.

Suffice to say, it's not an easy thing because Revit files formats kind of needs to change. And in order to understand that data, we'd have to be predicting the future all the time. And what it would mean is basically, if you think our development time now is slow, dealing with things like tech debt, making sure we have high quality and that we print, that will basically just stop any new things or even fixing old things coming into play.