Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro for Civil 3D

SEAN HULBERT: Hello. Thank you for joining me for "Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro for Civil 3D." I'd like to share our safe harbor statement with you. I may say things today about some future-looking functionality in a product, and we would not want you to make any purchasing decisions based on those statements. And I will clarify those statements if and when they are being made.

My name is Sean Hulbert. I'm a principal implementation consultant here at Autodesk. I've been at Autodesk for just over seven years now. I am also a civil engineer in the state of Oregon with 30 years' industry experience. My passion is to open users' eyes to new workflows and to offer efficiencies with existing workflows. My focus is on civil infrastructure projects or civil site design projects.

Today, we will learn about BIM Collaborate Pro for Civil 3D. We will start out by setting our team up for success in the BIM Collaborate Pro environment. We will learn about the system requirements that are required, and we will talk about setting clear expectations with our team. We will prepare a Civil 3D project for migration to the cloud, and we will learn about managing that project, the individual drawings, and their dependencies inside the cloud.

Setting ourselves up for success-- what does our success journey look like? First, we need to understand what is BIM Collaborate Pro? We also want to ask the question, will we be starting our project new in the cloud, or will we be migrating an existing project to the cloud? Next, we will talk about planning our trust environment. How do we plan on collaborating with our teams both internally and externally? And then, as with any change that we're asking our teams to make, we want to help them with a change management model to follow to ensure the change is successful.

So what is BIM Collaborate Pro for Civil 3D? Well, BIM Collaborate Pro empowers teams with the coordination tools they need to avoid misalignments, catch errors earlier, and save money. Data is captured across the project lifecycle, displayed in powerful dashboards that shine a light on project issues, transparency, and the completion of major milestones. The functionality inside BIM 360 design or the Autodesk Construction Cloud allows teams in Civil 3D to collaborate seamlessly and securely on their design files. Storing the files in the cloud gives you the opportunity to work on the files where you are located on demand, and they are also set up to lock automatically when you do open those files.

So let's look at the BIM 360 environment, and let's look at what it looks like to start a new project. So we have a new Civil 3D project that we want to get started. We have to still talk about our sharing project-- or sharing environment. And we have to get our BIM360 or ACC project set up. Then we begin our design process. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it?

Now let's talk about what happens if we have an existing project. It's a very similar journey that we will be taking. We will set up our sharing environment. We will set up the project. But the other part here that we're going to introduce is the migration of the project to the cloud. So part of the migration process involves ensuring that our project is set up for success to be migrated as well as the information that we're migrating has been thoroughly scrubbed in the hygiene of the documents and drawings are superb.

Next, we will resume our design. So let's talk about our trust environment. We'll start with the very controlled low-trust environment. In this particular scenario, team A, the survey team, is asked to copy their survey down to a shared location in the cloud environment. Once the file is copied down to the shared location, the other teams, teams B and C, are then asked to copy those files up into their consumed location, then creating data shortcuts and leveraging the information shared by survey or the information shared to roadway by drainage.

The next scenario that we will look at is our medium-trust environment. Similar scenario-- our survey team is copying their survey down to the shared location. However, the change in this particular scenario would be that the roadway and drainage teams would make their data shortcuts to the shared location, not their consumed folders. This is the medium-trust environment because users are functioning in the shared drawings together.

The last scenario that we will look at is the uncontrolled sharing, or the high-trust environment. This is generally applied in a company where all users or all team members on the project are within the same firm and even, often, in the same discipline. So what we'll see here is that the data shortcuts are created by the teams that are responsible for the design of that content and then consumed in their native location by the other team members.

So we've talked a little bit about setting our-- pardon me. We've talked a little bit about what BIM 360 is-- or BIM Collaborate Pro. Excuse me. We've talked about getting our trust in set-- or environment set up, whether or not we're migrating an existing project, or are we starting a new project. So this is a lot of change for our end users to adopt. And we use the Prosci change management model, the ADKAR model.

So what we want to do is we want to make the users aware-- why are we making this change? And then as we start to educate the users on what this change looks like to them, we want to encourage them to have the desire to help adopt this change. And so the "what's in it for me" model often comes into question, and that's really one of the easier ways to get a change to be adopted, if there is some clear value for the users that we're asking to modify these new-- or to adopt these new workflows.

The next thing is you need to let the users know, what does this change look like, understand how to make the change, and the individual steps that will be required. And then we give them the skills, and we give them the necessary abilities to be able to do this change and to adopt this change-management model.

The last thing and then, I think, in my opinion, is probably one of the more important parts of the journey that we're taking you along, is the reinforcement aspect. We've all seen the traditional training models where we spend multiple days in a training scenario, where we're expected to absorb 24 hours of knowledge and then go apply that immediately without any reinforcement, without the ability to come back and ask questions, share successes or deltas in the adoption of this particular workflow modification.

Without that reinforcement, we really have left our users on an island, so to speak, by themselves. Now, if you go through the Prosci process, they'll tell you that there's a point that will identify where you'll stop along this journey. But what I'm trying to share with you is that this has been and is a tried-and-tested working model here at Autodesk.

So what are the system requirements, and how do we establish good expectations with our end users? So to start out, we want to talk about the fact that we are going to need a BIM 360 or ACC project and a project invitation. We'll need a BIM 360 Collaborate or a BIM Collaborate Pro entitlement in our Autodesk accounts. And then there are some system requirements for Civil 3D AutoCAD and Desktop Connector.

There's hardware requirements that we'll talk about or recommendations that we'll make. And then we'll do a deep dive into what Desktop Connector is because I'm sure that many of us are not familiar with that particular part of this equation.

So let's start out with the Construction Cloud project. So we need to get our project set up. What you're looking at here is what we refer to as an ACC project, which is the evolution of BIM 360. It's the next step in the BIM 360 journey. And so what you'll see-- it's a very similar process. In BIM 360, you want to set up your project. You want to invite your users to your project. And then we'll talk about the fact that the users will need specific permissions to perform their Civil 3D functions in the cloud.

Once your project has been set up by your account administrator, you'll assign a project administrator. The project administrator will be responsible for inviting the users to said project. So once the project is set up, you will get an invite that looks like the one that you see on my screen. It will welcome you to the project that you're joining. And then as soon as you hit on the-- click Go To Project, it will take you into the project that you've been invited to.

Now, one thing that happens often is once you get into the project, you don't see any files. So one of the troubleshooting steps that I'll offer is that when you do go into the project and don't see any files, or you get the notification that you don't have permissions in this file, that's exactly what's going on. The-- pardon-- account administrator-- or, excuse me, the project administrator has invited you to the project. But if you're not an administrator, you do not automatically get permissions to the individual folders in the project. So we'll ask you to reach out to your project administrator and ask for those correct permissions to be assigned.

The next thing you'll want is to make sure, again, you have that BIM Collaborate Pro license inside your Autodesk accounts. The top line here is the classic view, and the bottom line is our-- I think it's categorized view. Once you have your project set up, you've got your project invitation, and you have your entitlement, we'll want to talk about getting you the right versions of software.

This is definitely a much longer conversation than we have time for right now. But the journey of BIM 360 or BIM Collaborate Pro for Civil 3D has been-- over the last couple of years has been a very interesting journey to go on. We've had some very significant successes, and there's been a few times where we've maybe scratched our head a few times-- or scratched our head.

And so what you're seeing here is we have minimum requirements. You can use them Collaborate Pro or BIM 360 Docs or Autodesk Docs with AutoCAD 2020 and AutoCAD 2021. Both will require a separate file-locking utility. Civil 3D 2020 and Civil 3D 2021 also function in the cloud environment and do not need the cloud locking tool. It's automatically built into Civil 3D.

AutoCAD 2022 and Civil 3D 23.1 both have optimized performance features. So things in the product have been improved for performance. Significant performance improvements in Civil 3D 2020 2022.1. So for all of my customers who I'm consulting with, I highly recommend the 2022.1 version. You'll see that the .3 version-- the .3 indicates a couple of hot fixes that have come out after the .1. And part of one of those forward-speaking comments is that we will have 2022.2 coming out very soon.

The other conversation is Desktop Connector. I will let you know that Desktop Connector is scheduled to be-- it is updated once a month. However, not every update is critical for every user on the team. The recommendation, however, is that all users on the team are using the same version. So what you're seeing here is, for 2023, we need a minimum of 15.5. We generally refer to Desktop Connector with the first two numbers. We recommend 15.7 because there are some significant improvements that have been added to that tool and some additional functionality that is continuing to be added to the Desktop Connector.

Here are the basic system requirements and then recommended system requirements. And so right now, we are only supporting Windows 10 because of the Desktop Connector is only supported in Windows 10, and we are not yet supporting Windows 11. So my recommendation, or what I see for best results, is really focusing, again-- and we've heard this many times before-- focusing on your RAM, on your video card. And then the big one now is hard drive free space.

So because you are caching your project locally-- all the files that you're working on are being cached locally-- you will need a little extra hard drive space or a little more than what we maybe have become used to. Now, in later versions of Desktop Connector-- I believe it was the 17.-- or excuse me-- 15.7.0 version that was released-- gave us the ability to relocate-- excuse me, it was 15.6 release-- gave us the ability to relocate where Autodesk Docs stores our cache.

So we can now move it to a larger, maybe a slower, SATA drive, as a D drive or something else, rather than keeping it on our generally much smaller primary drive that our operating systems and programs are installed on. So that's why you'll see here that we recommend about 50 gig free space because projects can get large quickly. We also know that once you get down below 10% free space, Windows performance is impacted.

So let's talk about what Desktop Connector is. Desktop Connector is a new player in this equation. We have our BIM-- we have our cloud environment. We have our desktop environment. And now we've got the tool that's going to connect those two environments, literally. So what I like to say is that you think of Desktop Connector as your moving van. Desktop Connector will go out to the cloud for your project. It will look at the drawings that you are asking it to bring to your desktop application. And it will determine what files you need to go along with that.

Now, as we look forward, we're going to-- again, under our safe harbor statement, we will see some changes in the way that Desktop Connector functions. And we will put more of the onus on the desktop products on determining what happens to those dependencies as they are being queried. But Desktop Connector is responsible for making that query.

And so what it does is it carves out and it ensures that the files that you have on your machine are the same as those files on the cloud. And then when you open that drawing in either AutoCAD or Civil 3D, Desktop Connector is responsible for also locking that file in the cloud so no one else can make changes while you're in the file.

It also gives you the ability to drag and drop data into File Explorer, and then Desktop Connector is responsible for pushing that data up. Previously-- and previous presentations are available-- we would have instructed you to leverage that workflow to migrate our data to the cloud. However, with some recent improvements in product and some soon-to-be released tools, there's a much better method that we'll go into later.

As you heard me say, we have the ability to interact with these files locally because they are cached locally on our machines. When we get into the demonstration portion of the program, we will see inside File Explorer the different icons that will show up in the folders that are supported by Autodesk Docs.

As you can see here, we have quite a few of them. Obviously, the ones that you would really want to pay attention to are the errors, conflicts, and stale. Those are files that are not in a current state or could have problems. Always know that BIM 360 or ACC is the source of truth. That is where the files are coming from. So when you see that the file is synchronized, that means that your file matches the file in the cloud.

And I like to make that statement that way because it's a-- a misconception is that when you synchronize the file, you're actually pushing the file back to the cloud. And that is not what's happening. When you synchronize the file in File Explorer-- and we'll show you that in the demo-- you're actually making sure that the file on your machine matches the cloud. The cloud is the one source of truth.

In addition to the icons that you need to be aware of inside File Explorer, you'll notice, down near your clock, there is a new tool or a new icon. And that is our Desktop Connector icon. Now, the Desktop Connector icon was previously an open white Autodesk A, prior to our rebranding. So if you're still using that version of Desktop Connector, I would strongly recommend updating.

Also know that Desktop Connector versions are being retired. If you're running an older version, you'll get an email from Autodesk letting you know that you really need to update your new version, or you will not be able to access the files that you have in the cloud on the machine with the older version of Desktop Connector. So as you can see here, there's quite a few statuses.

Desktop Connector icon means that everything's smooth or you just have not yet signed in. The gray icon, obviously, is Desktop Connector starting up. The offline mode is something that has been used in the past. I personally do not recommend using the offline mode, with a few exceptions. We don't go into detail on that today.

The red icon is one that causes most people the most heartburn, in my opinion. And it generally means that something just requires your attention. It could be a failed action. However, in many cases, it could be the Desktop Connector in order of operation was not applied in the right sequence. And a quick interaction from the end user will correct any issue. And then the green icon is that the files that you have asked to be pushed to the cloud or to be pulled down to you are processing.

Another thing that's important to understand is the times that take-- or times it takes for Desktop Connector to do its interactions. So these are the maximum time delays that could occur during your project work. An account being created or being added-- or a user being added to a project could take up to about 12 minutes. Only about three minutes to create a project. Folders and documents are about three minutes. And up to about 35 minutes if you're changing user permissions.

Now, I don't think I've ever seen it take that long, but we try to set some good expectations, right? You've heard me talk about making sure that we're setting clear expectations. This is part of setting that expectation. We're pulling information from the cloud. In many cases, some of our projects are very large, with a number of dependencies, and that can take a little extra time to pull it from the cloud. So we want to make sure that we have those clear expectations and that users are not worried that the system is broken.

What does it look like for us to migrate a project to the cloud? The very first thing we want to talk about and the very first thing that I like to talk about is drawing hygiene. I talk about drawing hygiene on a daily basis. And I talk about drawing hygiene for all instances of all drawings regardless of where they're being stored-- cloud, locally, or otherwise.

The other thing we want to talk about is a migration tool. The migration the Autodesk DWG Migration for Docs tool is available, and I will talk to you about that a little bit. Some changes coming in that arena as well. And then we'll actually watch a project get migrated to the cloud-- in faster-than-normal mode, though, please. I assure you.

Dry hygiene-- this is where I see the most problems when users are migrating to the cloud. If there are issues inside your drawing, it will either not fully extract, so you cannot view that file in the cloud, or, in some cases, it will not move to the cloud. We know that audit errors and registered applications can spread throughout projects. So we really want to ensure that our drawings are clean prior to moving them to the cloud.

Autodesk ships a batch-save utility with Civil 3D that we can use to run our drawings through this utility to clean them up and make sure that what we are migrating to the cloud is clean. We do want to focus on the audit errors and the registered applications.

The other thing is is I will let you know that the lighter weight your drawings are, the faster those drawings run, again, across the board. Now, we may not notice 1,000 layers on a server-based drawing, and we may not notice it in the clouds either. But if we could give ourselves back even a few seconds-- 10, 15, 20 seconds-- per open on every drawing that we open every day, that's going to add up quickly.

So I always like to recommend, let's keep our drawings as lightweight as possible. Let's go ahead and purge [INAUDIBLE] layers and blocks that we don't need. If we need them back, Design Center will bring them back for us very quickly.

Let's also purge the Civil 3D styles out of our drawings. If we're working on a surface as a surveyor, there is likely no reason for us to have pipe networks or pipe catalogs in our drawings. If we need them, we can bring them back through an import process. But let's make our drawings as lightweight as possible, so we ensure success.

So I did want to share this with you. This is the Autodesk feedback portal-- feedback.autodesk.com. And the links will be in the documentation. This is where you gain access right now to the migration tool. So you'll go to the Autodesk features. You'll go to Autodesk Collaboration Beta Builds and then you will see here that we've got the Autodesk DWG Migration for Docs, Beta 8.

Now, it is currently in beta because it's waiting for improvements from Desktop Connector to be released into the wild. I would not ever migrate a project to BIM 360 or ACC without using this tool. I will also say that it should say Autodesk Project Migration Tool. The migration tool will give you the ability to migrate a number of file types to the cloud as you would hope-- or as I would assume you would expect because we have the ability to attach a number of file types to our AutoCAD and Civil 3D drawings.

So let's look at the project migration. Once you've installed the tool, we're going to go ahead and select a project. Now, I'll let you know here that we're selecting a project that I can give everybody access to after our presentation. Now we're actually going to find the files locally. Are these files on our local server? Are they on our local machine?

We can exclude file types through a data exclusion list, and then we can roll down our data list and choose to remove files or folders that we do not wish to migrate. As you can see here, we have a number of issues that we want to look at. This is our "character limitation has been exceeded" issue. We'll talk about that a little more in just a second. Here are circular references, which are supported. But we do want to let you know that they are there, so if you do have some issues with files, you'll understand on how to get that rectified.

One of the other issues that you'll see is that we have the ability to correct missing references before we migrate them. So we recommend that you use Overlay where possible. You really need to use related-- or excuse me-- reference paths instead of absolute paths-- relative paths, excuse me, instead of absolute paths. And the last thing that we just showed you here was an unsupported file type that could not be migrated.

The next step will be to move forward and start uploading. What you'll see here in just a second is that the statuses of the files will start to change-- files and folders. And then we'll see Desktop Connector pop up on the screen and start transferring the files for us. The next thing we'll do is we'll go ahead and open up our pending actions inside Desktop Connector and keep track of what's going on.

So one of the things you'll see here is the list of drawings will start to show up in our folders that are in BIM 360. So this is my cache location. And you start to see all these folders that are being created. So the process is to move from the location it's at to your cache location and then up to the cloud. And you'll see here in just a second that we do have some pending actions showing up. If we widen the screen now-- I like to tell people to focus on what's happening on the right side, not necessarily the left, first.

So we'll look at the multiple files. If something had failed over here, we could actually just clear that file and then allow the remaining files to process. We can do the same thing on the left side, but it's a little more impactful if you're clearing all files, and you have multiple files. Now, BIM 360 will-- or, excuse me, Desktop Connector will attempt to push back files that it needs in 10 minutes-- or in that 10-minute window that we just discussed.

So what you can see here now is that we've actually got our files migrated over to the cloud. And the JPEGs went with it. We can actually open up the "call before you dig" logo just to make sure we're seeing what we expect from the migration tool. So, again, after you're done with the migration, you're going to get the ability to export a list of the files. It's going to tell you everything that it did to the files that it migrated and whether or not those files migrated successfully.

You'll notice here that in File Explorer, you have a little bit different experience than what you might be used to. And so what we'll do is let you know that that is going to change soon, and it'll look more like OneDrive. Again, that's a future functionality. Again, you can see that all the files that were asked to go have been pushed up into the cloud. We see the long file path issue. Know that that's a Windows situation where windows has a 260-character limitation. Autodesk will tell you 244 because of some of the overhead with C colon and the name of your project, et cetera.

So the next part, after we've migrated our project to the cloud, right-- we're going down on the blue journey that we presented in the beginning of our presentation. We have an existing project. We know that our drawings are clean because we've tested and checked that. And now we've gone and migrated the project, let's talk about what it looks like to work with those files in our products.

So there are some AutoCAD commands and settings that I'd like to expose you to because they're really going to make a big difference in the way that you work with your files, both in BIM 360 and, some cases, locally as well.

A couple of the commands I want to introduce you to is AECCUNLOCKCURRENTDRAWING-- all one command. From time to time when working with files that are up in the cloud, the file will become read only. It often happens when we get a little bit safe happy. We've made a lot of changes, and we saved, and then we didn't remember that we saved. And we saved again. I've done it myself many times.

And so that can cause Desktop Connector to get confused, for lack of a better term. And so what we'll do is we give you this command that will unlock that file for you. You'd only use this file in a drawing that you are actively working in. And it will only unlock the drawing from that read-only status on your workstation. It will not impact BIM 360.

Another tool I'd like to introduce you to is status. The status tool will tell you all of the entities that are in your drawing. This can help us from time to time. When the drawing becomes extraordinarily complex, it will not extract in BIM 360 or ACC. The file will still show up, but the icon will be grayed out, and you cannot view the file in the cloud. So in most cases when that happens, there are some hygiene issues that we would want to take a peek at.

In some cases, the complexity of the drawing has exceeded what the DWG Extractor can handle. And that's where the status tool comes into play. And that's also where DWG Extractor Scripted comes into play. That last command that we're talking about there will actually test the extraction for the DWG on your local machine. If the extraction is successful locally, then we know that the file is likely too complex to be extracted in the cloud. If the file does not extract locally, then we know that it's likely a drawing hygiene scenario.

Over here on the right side of my screen, you'll see a couple of other AutoCAD settings. These are settings and recommendations that we make specifically if you're working on large projects. And I have customers ask me what large projects look like. And from my perspective, anything over a half mile or more of road would be a fairly large project-- not very large but getting large. Anything we can do to improve efficiencies, anything we can do to get our drawings open faster and get them to close faster as well, I think is a benefit and definitely worth considering.

So let's talk about, how do we manage the dependencies in the cloud? What happens if we do have files that are not behaving correctly? How do we unwind things that can happen on day-to-day projects inadvertently? In Desktop Connector, we've given you a tool called Reference Explorer. What Reference Explorer will do for you is it will help you unwind what we've referred to as the spaghetti mess of files that can be dependencies inside AutoCAD.

So, as you know, if you're working on a standard project, you're going to have potentially some data shortcuts, some x references, et cetera, even some PNG files like that for your imagery. From time to time, those files become missing. We're giving you the ability to locate those files and help you unwind some of these dependencies to make sure that your experience in the cloud is successful, setting the expectations clearly.

You see that the RidgeGate Alignment drawing-- the data reference for that drawing is-- or the data the data reference in the View Frame Group drawing does not find the alignment in RidgeGate so we would have to go into that drawing and correct that. Right now, Reference Explorer doesn't give us the ability to correct that. That is something that potentially will be on the roadmap. I will let you know that in upcoming releases of Desktop Connector also, that we will be able to show you whether or not the reference is an x reference or a data reference.

And this is what we're trying to unwind. This is one of the what you heard me refer to as a spaghetti mess. So now let's look at Civil 3D and what it looks like to actually work with our cloud environment. So if I jump over here to Civil 3D, you'll see that, on my home screen, I see Autodesk Docs. That means that I've got Desktop Connector installed, and things are working as expected. If I come up here and see some projects, that means I've been invited to some projects.

A little tip I like to share that a customer of mine taught me is that if you're a member of multiple hubs, either ACC or BIM 360, you can search across hubs to find those projects that you might be looking for. So as you can see here, I'm looking in three different hubs for anything that says C4C3D. So just a pro tip here.

And so what you're seeing on my screen here is that this is the file structure that is located in BIM 360 for this project. If I come over here and select any of these drawings, I can open them up. So let's open up something that's not too terribly large. As you can see here, we've got a stale scenario. So here's our status bar. We're not getting the icons inside the home screen. We're actually getting the verbiage. But let's go ahead and open up something that's relatively small. We'll open up our alignments.

Now, the important part to understand inside when you're working with files in the cloud is how we're consuming our dependencies. With cloud-based drawings, you're either all in or all out. The hybrid environment does not work. It causes more problems for your team members than it helps. And so we really, really strongly insist-- strongly recommend, strongly insist-- that you only work in the cloud environment if you have your files in the cloud.

One thing that you'll see here is that with the data shortcuts, if your file is in the cloud, you can only attach to data shortcuts that are in the cloud. So we've already set that expectation. x references do allow you a little more flexibility right now, so that's why I like to make sure that you understand that, while you do have the flexibility to store it locally, you will cause yourself and your team members more heartache than help.

So the other thing that I want to point out to you here is that we've got a new tool. On our Collaborate tab in the ribbon, we have Check Reference Status. What that's going to do for us is it's going to kick off Desktop Connector and go out and look in the cloud and say, hey, you know what? I've been working on this file for quite a while. Have any of my team members made changes in drawings that I'm using as dependencies that I need to be aware of?

Now, this does what it says it does. It checks those references. If an update is occurring, you'll get your notifications down here, as you would normally get your notifications. The check reference status does not update your status. It just checks it for you. We want you to be in control on when that update happens. So you may check it and say, you know what? I don't want to consume that new surface right now. I'll go ahead and finish my day, and then when I open up tomorrow, everything will be updated, and I won't have to worry about it. So just know that.

Another thing I had failed to mention is we still can use our File Open dialog. I strongly recommend against using this command here. I've seen it do some very irregular things. I don't like to use the Open command. I don't like to double click on drawings. But you can navigate to your project here. As you could see, it's on my D drive now. I go to My Docs. My name is My Project Hub. Here's our project. And then all the way down here is our Civil 3D drawings.

So let's talk about, how will we set up a drawing inside the cloud? How are we going to begin the process? So I'm going to come over and do my due diligence. I'm going to start my new drawing with my template. Now, that's not the template from this project, so I need to check my coordinate system here. I like to use MAPCSASSIGN. And I know that Colorado83-CentralFoot.

So now I've got my coordinate system set up. Now I want to make sure that I associate this drawing to this project. So I'm going to Save As. I'm in my BIM 360 project because that's where I open it up. If I'm not, then I can just navigate like I normally would. And we'll call this Sheets. Now I want to come down here, and I want to associate my project.

And just like I would with any other Civil 3D project, I'm going to start consuming data. I'm going to create my reference for my surfaces. I'm going to create my references for my alignments. I'm going to go in, and I'm going to start to bring in some x references. Now, remember, when we bring in x references-- bring in Light Poles here-- we want to make sure that we're bringing the x references in Overlay if possible and always Relative Path. If we don't use Relative Path, BIM 360 will still move the file, but it will move it into what we call a related data folder. Related data folders can actually create some problems because those are files that are not in the location that users would expect.

So now we've got our reference. Here come the 0. Oops. Surface is in our drawing. The Light Poles are in our drawing. I'm going to go ahead and close my drawing and come down here to Desktop Connector and watch our pending actions. So again, Desktop Connector-- if you'd like it to show up here, it's quick and easy. You can drag it from where it belonged on the clock. Oops.

So it generally stays up here hidden. I can drag it right down. And that way, I can keep an eye on it. Right now, you see that I've got the green light rolling. That means things are pushing up into the cloud like I would expect them to. So let's go take a peek at what happens in the cloud. So I've moved my files over. I've worked on my files today.

I'd like to take a peek-- or I have somebody asking for some information on the files that I'm working on. I have my-- one of my team members has come over and said, Sean, have you finished the sheets showing the light poles? I can say, absolutely. I've got my sheets up here. And look at here. Why did this happen? Well, that happened because I have a related data folder.

And in that related data folder, I had actually connected my surface. No, that's light poles. My bad. So I pulled that from the wrong location. I made a common mistake. That was not built into my class. I promise you. That was a mistake. But an unintended positive here-- I can show you why the related data folders can create problems.

Number one, nobody's going to go into that drawing under Sheets to make modifications if this is the master x reference. Number two, you can see quick and easy that I'm going to hit my character limitation almost immediately. So unintended demonstration there. What you're seeing now is the file is being extracted. And because it's got some broken references, it may not extract. But it did. So now what can I do with this information that's up in the cloud?

I can open up my drawing, and now I can actually start to redline this particular drawing. Let's go back to the alignment drawing and see one that actually has some versions. This was always in practice one of the things that I would have to say was extraordinarily frustrating, is that when we make a change to a drawing, the bak file had been overwritten, and then somebody said, go back to the previous drawing. OK, now we have to go pull those off of snapshots or even, back in the day, pull them off tapes.

Well, with BIM 360, we have the ability to compare those drawings and see, which one do we want? We have all of the versions. As we're saving our drawings, all the versions are being saved up in the cloud for us. And so if we come down to our-- my Compare button, the Compare button and the Issues are located in different places in BIM 360 than they are inside ACC. So just be aware of that.

So if I were to come over into a BIM 360 project, you would see that the Issues icon is in a different location. Come down here to my Markups and Issues. And then the Issues would be over here. That's not Issues. This is Issues. And so let's say I was going-- I got off a little bit of tangent here. But I did want to let you know about that little bit of difference. Things are located in a little bit different location. And then our compare is actually up here. Where you saw me looking down here is where it normally is BIM 360. So slightly different user interface, but everything is very analogous.

If you're starting a new project, I'm recommending users use ACC if possible because that's where all the new functionality is going to occur as the tool is improved. So as you can see here, I can compare version 1 to version-- that one doesn't want to compare for us for some reason-- to version 3. Oops. Oh, 3D View. That was my fault. Sorry. Pay attention to where I'm at, Sean. Oh, there is no 2D views in there. So this drawing at that stage was not real happy. 2D views. There we go. Now I can compare my drawings.

And when you compare the drawings, you have the ability to either compare directly, one on top of the other, or we can change it to our slider mode. Now, you can see that my drawings aren't aligned right here, so I want to use my Align tool to get them lined up. But as the differences occur, you would see them by moving the slider bar back and forth or, again, using the color overlay.

So back it-- I didn't mean to close that. Back into our drawing here, we did talk a little bit about issues. So we come over into our issues. We have all the issues that are set up by our project administrators and our account administrators. And so we'll come over, and if we have an issue in the drawing, we can assign that issue to a person. Oops. There we go. We can tell them when that issue needs to be resolved.

We also have the ability to come up and do some markups. So one of the things we can do here is we can come in and put some clouds. Now, the reason this cloud is so large is because of my-- if I were to zoom extents, you will see that I-- if I zoom extents in the drawing, you'll probably see that I have a broken reference. And in the cloud, it doesn't extract very well if we have 00 and real-world coordinates.

So we talked about our issues. We've done a little bit with our markups here. And this is just the high level of functionality what we can do inside our BIM 360 Docs environment. The other thing that we can do is we can restore those older versions. As you heard me say, going back onto a tape to get something-- again, I'm dating myself here-- or to a snapshot on the server sometimes can take quite a bit of time.