Turn Out-Dated into Power-Automated: Revit Data Exchanges into Microsoft Power BI

PHILIPPE VIDEAU: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our presentation, Turn Outdated into Power Automated. My name is Felipe Videau. I'm a senior product manager on cloud data at Autodesk. I'm here with Cesar Escalante, our technical marketing manager as well. We're excited to have you today. And let's just jump right into our class.

All right, just a quick summary. Little overview about ourselves. Like I mentioned, I'm a senior product manager. I work on cloud data bringing together our cloud and desktop-based tools. Cesar got a great background in BIM management and architecture. And he works on our technical marketing team for our architecture industry.

Just a quick overview of the safe harbor statement. Probably many of you've read through this or a version of this before. I'm not going to read through the whole thing. Pause the video if you want, but the takeaway here is we are going to be making forward-looking statements in these presentations. Just don't make any purchasing decisions solely on those statements. That's the main takeaway from here. But do read this statement before moving on.

So let's just jump right in. Here's a quick agenda of what our class will be covering. We're going to talk about data exchanges. I'll give a brief intro on what those are. Why Autodesk is investing in this product. And then I'll hand it off to Cesar who's going to talk about data exchanges and our Power Automate integration. So that'll be the bulk of this class. And then I'll come back and talk a little bit about what's coming next on our roadmap with data exchanges.

All right, so we're going to jump right in. Before getting to data exchanges, I want to talk a little bit about some of the work here you're going to see here today and why Autodesk is investing in it. Many of you have probably recognized some of these trends over the past several years, which have really sped up quite a bit during the pandemic or the past two or three years.

Some of you are probably quite deep in the weeds with automation, collaboration amongst your teams. Or you're using tools from different industries looking at that kind of convergence trend right there. We've seen these, like l mentioned, really increase over the past couple of years. And data exchanges are one of the products we're using to help address some of these trends that we're seeing out in the market.

What we're hearing from customers is top of mind is automation. I need to automate different tasks to increase productivity, improve efficiency across non-differentiating tasks that my team is doing. Need to automate for better resource management or just faster time to market.

We're hearing just from to paraphrase one of our customers manually synchronizing BIM data with ERP systems. They're having to manually open files and extract that information, which takes a lot of their employee's time, leads to human errors. So those are just some of the things we're hearing from customers. They want to see more automation. They want to automate more of their business.

Now, we're also seeing industries converge. We're seeing industries-- AEC industry, the architecture engineering construction industry, the design and manufacturing industries, and then media and entertainment industries. A lot of the tools that customers that you might be using today, a lot of those tools are being blended.

For instance, we're seeing more and more customers spend time and money on workflows that might be converging the AEC and media and entertainment industries such as the use of augmented reality, high fidelity rendering, virtual reality for review and coordination workflows, or sales to customers. So we're seeing this happen across the three industries that Autodesk serves.

And then lastly, there's a burning need, as we've seen, especially over the pandemic, to really improve our collaboration tools and simplify the touchpoints of collaboration across disciplines and organizations. Many customers today, they're creating bespoke and data sharing tools that in many cases aren't differentiating for their business. They might be expensive to spin up and maintain as well.

So the movement of data between applications and tools is really becoming a critical foundation and really table stakes for effective collaboration. And this is really what we're focused on with data exchanges. One of the pieces that's critical to solving our customers' collaboration challenges is making sure that the right data ends up in the hands of the right folks and in the tools they're comfortable using.

So in the next few slides, I'm going to dig into data exchanges, how you can start to use them today if you're an architect engineer, fabricator, or really any end user of one of our design applications or design applications outside of Autodesk ecosystem. At the end, I'll touch a little bit on if you're a developer, how you can start to build integrations with data exchanges as well.

All right, so as we move more and more of our applications and as you move more and more of your data into the cloud, it's important from Autodesk standpoint that we provide collaboration tools that support managed trackable data sharing workflows in the cloud. And that's exactly what we're targeting with data exchanges. With data exchanges, customers can share the right data with the right person in the right context instead of sharing massive files with minimal control over data noise and who has access to what.

And with data exchanges, sharers can protect their IP, their designs, again, by selectively choosing what they share with consumers. And then receivers of that data can then selectively consume what they want in their application of choice all the while because we're moving smaller bits of data across applications and across the cloud versus massive gigabyte plus files, we're reducing latency in these workflows as well. So I'm going to jump into how data exchanges work today. And we're going to start with an end user perspective right here.

So let's start with a pretty common customer example we hear a lot of. And of course, there are many different flavors of this, probably hundreds of thousands of different collaborative workflows like this. Let's say we have got two individuals. They're working on the design of an office building. You've got an architect on one side who's working on the design of that office building. And you've got on the other end, a stair railing fabricator who's working on, as you might imagine, the stair railing manufacturing and design.

These two individuals in this case-- and this is pretty frequent-- are using completely different applications. The architect's using Revit. The fabricator might be using Inventor in this case, perhaps SolidWorks, perhaps another tool like ProE. There are many similar scenarios like this where the architect would want as the author of the design data might not want to share the whole building model with a downstream consumer like the fabricator here.

Maybe again, it's to protect IP. Or maybe he doesn't want to overwhelm her with too much data noise. And then on the fabricator side, she only wants to deal with the data. She needs it, might be just the stairwell. And more often than not, that is a subset of the entire building model.

So in this example, with data exchanges, what the customer can do here, what an architect can do here is select just the data that he wants to share with the fabricator with any other person downstream. And today, the architect would establish 3D views, which in turn would be converted into data exchanges. We're going to support many more filtering options in the future.

Data exchanges today, they'll work with 3D views in Revit. So the architect can go ahead and create that. That data exchange is stored in Autodesk Docs which is part of Autodesk Construction Cloud. And once that data exchange is created, it's rich data, all the objects, all the walls-- this case, the railings, the stairs-- all those objects with their associated parameters and relationships are stored granularly in the cloud in a cloud database. It's not a file, but rather granular data that's stored on Autodesk Construction Cloud. So it's a little different than a file, which is a blob-- opaque blob that's hard to get to the data that you need.

So once that exchange is created, the architect can share that data with any number of downstream consumers like I mentioned. In this scenario, the Inventor user, that fabricator's been given access. And she can pull in again just that data that she needs that exchange. And she can start to design around the context of that geometry data. And then in this case, family category data that's coming in from Revit.

Now, an important piece that we hear a ton from customers in especially in these highly collaborative workflows is the need to ensure changes are propagated downstream. So if a change happens in the model and vice versa actually, if the change happens in the model, the expectation is that downstream consumers of that data will be notified, hey, you've got a change. And those folks can pull in the changes as needed.

So that's how data exchanges work when there's an update in the source model. That change is propagated to the exchanges associated with that source model. And then downstream consumers, like our stair fabricator in Inventor, can pull in those changes when they like.

So that's just a typical data exchange workflow. Here, we're showing integrations that we have with Revit and Inventor. But we're building many more integrations. And because data exchanges are essentially neutral containers of data, we can integrate other apps pretty easily.

And one that Cesar's going to talk about in a couple of minutes here is our Power Automate integration. That's with a non-Autodesk tool and frankly, a business tool. So integrating some design applications with business tools here. We're also pulling in and pushing data from Rhino 3D, which is a conceptual design tool used oftentimes in earlier stages of design of buildings, as well as products-- consumer products as well.

So we're building out many more integrations. And I'll get to some of those in the roadmap piece at the end of this presentation. But if you're a developer, you can actually start accessing all that rich data in an exchange on the cloud through our cloud APIs and geometries-- geometry STKs. So I'll touch a little bit on what some of our partners-- developer partners have done. But today, we're going to focus on really what you can do as an end user with our Power Automate integration.

Before I pass it over to Cesar, I wanted to show the workflow that you just saw, the Revit & Inventor workflow in action. So I'm just going to run this video again. This is sharing subsets of data from Revit with a tool like Inventor. Let's just run this video here.

So these are the 3D views that the architects established here. And those are essentially going to be what you can create data exchanges from. Here we are-- we're saving the model to the cloud. And we will move over to Autodesk Docs in this next stage here, open that Revit model, take a look at all those 3D views from which we can create data exchanges. And we could go ahead and create that subset in that folder, which we'll then share with the fabricator.

So in Inventor, which we're in right now, the fabricator can load all of the exchanges she has access to, can preview that exchange before bringing it in. And then she can start to design around this context seeing some of the information from Revit coming in on the tree on the left. And then just to feature the updates, when the architect goes ahead and updates that original model, those changes get propagated to the Inventor user. She can pull in those updates when she wants.

So that's pretty much basically how that workflow works. Again, you'll see some similarities with the other workflows, including the one that I'm going to hand off to Cesar right now.

CESAR ESCALANTE: Thanks, Philippe, for the great introduction to direct changes. We're just starting to scratch the surface of the potential use of that exchanges in the industry. And in the following section, I will demonstrate to you how you can tap the information contained in that exchanges to create automated business processes using Microsoft Power Automate.

So what's Power Automate, and what can I do with it? Power Automate is a cloud-based application that you can use to connect apps, services, and processes together to create a workflow. Power Automate is all about having computers manage repetitive tasks. It allows anyone with a knowledge of business processes to create repeatable flows that when triggered, leap into action and perform process.

Common scenarios and capabilities for Power Automate are moving data from one system to another system, guiding a user through a process that they complete in different steps, and connected data from one source to external data sources using one of the 100 connectors that are available in the Power Automate interface. But I think more importantly, Power Automates provide a built-in framework available to users with low-level code skills. The automation flows can be built virtually by anyone from business users with no coding skills to professional developers.

Here is the homepage of the Power Automate interface. It's a cloud service. So you don't need to install anything on your desktop. You just have to subscribe to the service. And the tool has a built-in templates that will allow you to build an automated workflow.

Here is an example of a flow. This is a scheduled flow using one of the out-of-the-box templates. What this workflow is doing, it's every day on Friday at 8:00 in the morning. A selected user is going to receive via email a reminder to fill a timesheet. I'm sure a lot of you can relate to this request in your particular offices.

Let's review some of the basic concept of a flow. Every flow has two main parts-- a trigger and the actions. You can think of the trigger as the starting action of a flow. The trigger is something like receive a new email or when you hashtag somebody in social media, add a new item.

And the actions is what you want to happen when the trigger is invoked. For example, when a new email-- when you receive a new email, the start of the creation of a new file in OneDrive for business, for example. Or for example, send an email when the system discovered a tweet with our specific hashtag. Or when you start an approval process of a construction administration task.

Power Automate create three types of flows-- cloud flows. These are the flows that you build with a trigger that automatically result into an action. We have desktop flows. These are more like process automation workflows that allow you to use your desktop to build a task and record it.

This is quite useful for building a flow on legacy application with no exposed API. And then we have business process flow. It's a flow that guide our users to series of steps so they complete a task in different stages. Autodesk has published connectors that were designed primarily to support cloud flows. We believe the cloud is the right place to seamlessly connect and link services and enable applications that talk to each other.

The Autodesk four connector will publish as a beta at the moment supports three types of cloud flows. Automated flows. This is a flow that's triggered by a cloud event. The arrival of an email, for example, or when you mention somebody in social media.

Instant flow. It's a flow that is triggered manually with the click of a button. For example, when you initiate an approval process, or you start a change order on demand. And schedule flows. This is a flow that is scheduled as a recurring event on a pre-defined cadence. For example, a notification to fill your timesheet.

Connectors provide a way for users to connect different apps and services. And once we connect those apps, we can create wonderful and amazing time-saving workflows. And Microsoft is constantly adding more connectors. A third party develop them and publish them.

When you explore all these different connector, you will find that a lot of them have a premium tag while others don't. Premium connectors are available for users who pay a premium for third-party apps to have access to their cloud services. The standard connectors are technically free.

Most of these connectors are built by Microsoft and Microsoft products, including things like SharePoint, Office 365, and all the products, and OneDrive. Our data exchanges, the Autodesk data exchanges connector, it's a premium connector. And it will be available to you who has secure a Revit subscription and Autodesk Docs.

Within Power Automate, we find multiple templates-- hundreds of templates that are pre-populated with sequence and triggers. They are searchable. They are grouped by type. You can sort them by popularity. And a template is a ready-to-go collection of instructions perfect for anyone to get started with Power Automate.

Autodesk has published several sample flows that pull data from data exchanges. At the time of these presentations, there are three published templates that you can get started with. We are working on publish more of this in the near future. The current workflow samples include extract data from an Excel into an exchange when an exchange is published, receive a notification on MSN themes when an exchange is updated, and create and assign task in a Trello after running a parallel parameter value validation.

Now, let's explore how to build a flow using a pre-defined template. This flow will generate a notification on MS teams when a data exchange is published on Autodesk Docs. At a very high level, this is how it works. The flow will get started when a data exchange is created on a dedicated box folder. Then the flow will retrieve file information about that exchange and create an MS team's instruction to send a notification to a specific user.

Here's a video on how you can put this together. You start by creating a flow using one of the Autodesk templates. You can just click on the searchable cell for Autodesk templates and enable the team notification on exchange creation. Make sure that you have the appropriate credential to access those cloud services.

It's a good idea to rename and identify our workflow appropriately. And the template comes with a predefined set of triggers and actions ready to be pre-filled with your custom information, like, how to access your hub, your project, your folder, and the location of the exchange.

After that, the flow is going to detect and extract information about that and post a message on Teams in a certain format. You can define the destination location of the notification, the type of message, and pre-fill your message with information collected dynamically from the previous steps, like, the file name and who created, and when it was created.

Once you create this template, save it. And let's trigger an event to get it started. In this particular example, the trigger is going to be the creation of a new exchange. In Revit, I have a view that it's going to-- a view that I have designated to create a new exchange.

Create a new exchange, save it to a specific folder. And as soon as the operation is completed, Power Automate is going to trigger the flow. And you're going to see right on the right side how there is a new message notification in MS teams that a new exchange has created. And when I click on it, it has the bits of information as defined in the flow.

We could sample. But let's review another more complex example. This flow will collect information on a specific type of wall in a Revit that is relevant for a specific fabricator and export it to an Excel spreadsheet.

At a very high level, this is how the workflow is put together. You get started when a new data exchange is updated in a dedicated folder in our Autodesk Docs. The exchange consists of a view of this plane insulated panels. The flow retrieving information about this exchange and filter the data based on specific conditions. If the data belongs to the category of walls, then it will be added as a row in an Excel spreadsheet. If not, the information will be ignored.

This video illustrate the process. We start by creating a flow using the provided template. Make sure you have access to the services as needed. Here, you are presented with the trigger needed to start the flow. Make sure you add the appropriate information for the whole location, project, et cetera.

Now, we are going to move this information into an Excel spreadsheet. And I'm creating an Excel spreadsheet and populating it with parameter values associated with this panels, including element ID, the category, the name of the family, the length of the wall, and the area of the wall. All of this is relevant information for a insulated panel fabricator.

It's important to convert this information into a table and name the table appropriately in Excel because that's the only way in which the flow is going to retrieve information. The file is saved into a cloud location. In this case, I'm saving it into my SharePoint. But you can also use OneDrive either business or personal. And the reason is that the flow need a cloud location that they can tap when the software is closed.

All right, let's go back to the trigger event. Indicate what is the data exchange that will start the flow. In this case, it's a data exchange stored in the Autodesk cloud. Then we have flow operations that will extract information about that exchange, get all the properties associated with that exchange, and then apply a filter conditioner that will sort that information based on a specific condition.

If the parameter is associated with the wall, then the information will be added as a row into a table. This is an Excel connector. As a connector, I need to indicate where the information is going to be exported into. And I just add the metadata where that Excel file resides, make sure that indicate the document library, the file path, and the table name.

On automated, import automatically and display automatically all the table column headers. And you can start to populate them with dynamic information associated with the Data Exchange. Review. You can test the flow, save it. And let's see how it works.

This flow will be trigger by an event. And this event is the update of an existing data exchange. That exchange in Revit is called WallPanels. Make sure to save and synchronize the information. And the Date Exchange app allow you to update an exchange directly from the Revit application. And as soon as this exchange is updated, you're going to notice that Excel spreadsheet, it's populated with the appropriate information.

Now, there are plenty of applications dealing with Excel exports. But the difference here is that the values of this database are updated automatically by [INAUDIBLE] seamlessly, Revit and Excel. There's no need for expensive deployment. You don't need to know code, have a code in order to carry out this task as it happens automatically.

All right, let's review another interesting example. This flow will connect information about room and room finishes from a data exchange and export all this as metadata into an Excel spreadsheet that will be connected to a Power BI Report.

At a very, very high level, this flow is triggered by the update of a data exchange. This clear the content of an existing Excel file hosted on a cloud repository. And a series of operator apply conditional values that identify which part of the data is associated with this particular-- the category of rooms. And if we meet that condition, that information is brought into Revit into an Excel spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet is updated. And then this triggers a refresh of a data set embedded into our BI. And when the data set is refreshed, the report is automated. It's refreshed as well. And you can send an email directly to anyone who be interested in reviewing the new contents of the report.

Let's see it in action. When you make a change in Revit, this is going to trigger an event. In this case, the change is adding a couple of rooms. These rooms will have and will report new metadata, including the room name and number and finishes associated with those rooms. The information needs to be saved, synchronized with central in the case of our work share file. And as soon as these exchange is updated in Autodesk Docs, that's going to trigger the flow to get started.

The update can happen directly from the Data Exchange connector. And that makes this little piece of app very useful for streaming the exchange of information. Here, you can see the exchange getting processed on the cloud.

All right, the trigger was executed. And you can actually tap the history panel of the flow in order to understand the different steps process by the flow. This is a snapshot of where the flow stands. And a few seconds afterwards if you would refresh the flow, the flow is going to report whether it was successful or whether it failed.

I mean, if the workflow failed and there's something that prevented this from happening, you can troubleshoot directly from the Power Automate interface. In this case, the workflow succeeded. And you can see how the-- by refreshing the Power BI Report, the number of rooms, and the additional information, it's automatically added to the report.

Power BI. Its business intelligence tools that give us the ability to analyze and visualize raw data and using the power of Power BI to create this visually-rich report to make business decision. It's a big value proposition for businesses who are attempting to automatize and expedite the flow of information in decision making.

All right, let's-- the flow finished with a recipient receiving an email-- in this case, is myself-- with metadata about that new exchange, the new report.

All right, let's discuss how you can get started. To tap into the address connectors in Microsoft Power Automate, you need an active subscription of Revit along with an active description of Revit Docs. This will give you access to the premium data. Connectors available in Power Automate. You will also need a Power Automate premium subscription and an Office 365 subscription. A lot of companies already have at least Office 365 services in place. So you might as well have this security within your organization.

And finally depending on what you intend to do, you need to secure third-party cloud services subscriptions. A lot of these are free, like, YouTube or Twitter or Trello. And for others, you need a-- it will be included in the fee for this description of the software. For example, Power BI. Something you need to pay a premium to get access to those services. And there's a plethora of private custom connector developed by private third parties that will extend the power of automation in the cloud.

Let's see what's coming. We're just starting to understand the potential of automation assisted by data exchanges. And Philippe is going to close the session by highlighting what's coming.

PHILIPPE VIDEAU: Great. Thanks, Cesar. And just one thing to add here. You can always start with a trial. I think there are 60 to 90-day trials for the premium subscription. So you can go ahead and do that to get started and play around with the connector.

All right, let's talk about what is coming next with data exchanges. Like we mentioned, we have a set of connectors that we've built out, including for Revit, for Inventor on the receiver consumer side. We've done the same with Power Automate. And at the time of this recording, we're working on it. We're going to be soon releasing connector for Rhino-- Rhino 3D. I'll show you a video in just a sec on that.

But what's coming down on the pipe for other connectors? So we're going to be looking into some of the low-code tools that they're used quite a bit in the AEC industry-- Dynamo, grasshopper. We're going to get into some of the infrastructure tools that many customers use, like Civil 3D

We've heard customers really interested in non-Autodesk application connectors. So those include things, like, Tekla Structures, Bentley MicroStation. And then on the manufacturing side, integrations with tools like SolidWorks. And then looking later out next year, as well, we'll be looking at connecting to some of our media and entertainment tools, like, animation software, like, Maya 3ds Max, as connecting into some of those game engines, especially for those AR/VR workflows. And then a plethora of other tools.

So let us know-- this-- I haven't shown all the connectors that we're looking at. But certainly let us know if you have ideas around connectors if you're not seeing them come out in the next several months.

Just a quick sneak peek at the Rhino connector that we're building out. This will show one part of the workflow reading data into Rhino from a data exchange. In this case, like Cesar showed, we're creating a data exchange in Revit from the Data Exchange connector. This is just an ad that you can download.

And then we can move over to Rhino. And we also have a connector in Rhino. So you could bring in-- again, take a look at all the data exchanges you have access to in Docs. You can preview a data exchange before bringing it in. And then once you figure out which data exchange you want to bring into Rhino, you can load that in, bring in the geometry data, as well as some of the ridge parameter property data from Revit.

You can also do some mapping with Revit parameter groups. You can select which ones to map to. For instance, layers in Rhino. So we're going to be building out some more filtering capabilities both on the consumer and the authoring side. So you can start to selectively bring in-- let's say Cesar shared with me this entire exchange, and I just want to bring in the walls, I can do that. So we'll be building out some of those filtering capabilities as we release these.

Now, lastly, just for you developers out there or for folks who have teams of developers, we have a few early partners who have been already building connectors to their own applications or to applications out there that they want to essentially build an integration to data exchanges with. So we have customers looking at PowerPoint, Tekla Structures. We even have a customer or a partner who's expanded the Inventor connector we built that using our API. So you can go and access that API, which is a Cloud API on forge.autodesk.com.

And lastly, just want to close this out with a few learning resources and links. So you can take a look at what's new in Revit 2023. We have Help Docs and explanatory information there on data exchanges in that link. The same goes for Inventor as well as Power Automate. So we have documentation on the Microsoft Power Automate site where you can find some of the templates Cesar talked through, as well as our own help pages where you can find some step by step tutorials on how to use those templates or on how to build your own flow.

If you have any questions about data exchanges, feel free to contact us at data.exchange.support@autodesk.com. You can, of course, reach out to me and Cesar as well.

And then lastly, I'll do a little plug for our early access and research program. This is our Vanguard program. We started this up earlier-- or sorry, later last year, bringing in a bunch of different partners and customers who want to help influence how we build out this ecosystem all the way from the developer side. So from the API side to end users.

So we have a number of different customers again, both small and large, who are working with us. And it's been super helpful working with them on building out this ecosystem. So definitely let us know, reach out. We're happy to chat about how to get you involved in that program.

So both Cesar and I want to thank you for listening to our class. Again, we're going to be live at AU. I think we have two classes registered at AU. And if you're going to make it out there, we're happy to see you. If you're just able to watch the recording, again, feel free to reach out to us and thanks a bunch for spending time with us today.

CESAR ESCALANTE: Thanks, everyone.