Workflows in BIM 360 and Collaboration for Revit—a Central Source Of Truth for Contractors

JOSHUA BENOIST: I'm Joshua Benoist. I work at Autodesk. I'm an Enterprise Priority Services. Today we're going to talk about BIM 360. And note I don't say BIM 360 Glue, Docs, Field. We're talking to BIM 360, which is the next generation of Docs and Field and Glue. We're going to talk about collaboration for Revit. And we're going to talk about, what does life look like without these products? And what can life look like with these products?

But I'd like to start out my classes with a little bit of humor. So if you would humor me, everybody please stand up. All right. So this is interactive. Everybody who was born on an even year, I want you to put your hands together like this. All right. Everybody who was born on an odd year, I want you to put your hands like this. Stay right there. I told my family that by the end of this, I would have a standing ovation.

[LAUGHTER]

All right. Other things to note, I want this to be a discussion. It's not just Josh up here talking. We have an awesome audience in here. All of you have great experiences, and so when we talk about what life looks like as a contractor, I'll share with you my personal story, a little bit my experience working in the design build industry.

So before Autodesk, I worked for a design build firm for about four years. I was the young guy that everybody sent out in the field and worked with the general contractor, the supervisors. I was out there in the field with the hard hats and kind of living the life there for a little while. That's my personal experience. I'm a professional engineer, a mechanical engineer.

So I'm not a general contractor, but I saw what they did every day. The experience that's in this room, I'm sure every one of you have some good stories to tell, too. So as we talk about what does life look like a little bit without the software, I'd like to hear from you.

So Safe Harbor. The timing of this class was really interesting. We pitch our classes way back in May. And they get accepted in June. And we work away at the handouts and the presentation. And for classes like this, where we're talking about the next generation of our products, there's a lot of uncertainty there. Will our developers get it finished before AU? Will the embargo be lifted where I can actually talk about it?

It was lifted last Monday. And the update to our products was last Monday that made the public preview available to the public, to everyone. And so I mean, the timing of this class was really interesting that it was really right down to the wire Monday. So we have the Safe Harbor here, which allows us to talk about future stuff a little bit.

There are some features that are not yet out, but we're now allowed to talk about it. Your phones. This will be recorded. So if I move very quickly on our slides, it will be recorded. We'll come back. I have like 50 slides, but I want to get to a point where I can demo a little bit, too. And we've got 50 minutes here to do the 50 slides.

Jump in at any point. Raise your hand. Let's make it a discussion. So BIM 360. BIM 360-- the whole BIM concept-- from design, to preconstruction, construction, and eventually the whole building lifecycle into building ops and maintenance. So with our software, we're trying to get there to where we're eliminating silos.

So let's talk a little bit about what does a day in the life of the contract contractor look like without BIM 360 products. So your general contractors, they're concerned about costs and cash flows and project management and working with the client. And your project manager is trying to work with the crew, managing their time, delivering your field execution guy, your supervisor, RFIs, issues, checklists, safety, and so on.

These guys go out, they live in the job trailer, and their job trailers now can be a mess in papers, construction blueprints, notes plastered everywhere, post-it notes up on the wall. And it's a silo. The information might be in the trailer, but you've got to walk from the trailer out to the project site, and carry whatever notes you need with you. What else do they carry with them? Anybody? Jim?

JIM: Blueprints.

JOSHUA BENOIST: Blueprints. I heard one. Nope.

AUDIENCE: Anymore we carry our iPads.

JOSHUA BENOIST: More and more, we're carrying our iPads. How about a notebook? A tablet? Camera? They're always carrying their hardhats out there, too. But each of those things-- your cell phone, your camera, your notepad your hand chicken scratch notes, whatever you're carrying back and forth-- each one of those is a silo. You've got to eventually, at the end of the day, take that data back from the site, walk it back to the trailer, enter it into the system.

What systems are you using? Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, other project management software, Dropbox, every one of those is a silo. And with any of these silos, you've got to interact with it. It's inefficient. You've got a management. Maybe the latest and greatest version of the CAD file is in Dropbox, but it's not in the project management folders on the local desktop.

And there's an email sitting there in their inbox saying, hey, I just dropped you the latest and greatest on Dropbox. Guy doesn't see it for two, three days. They're constructing away at the project site. So there's inefficiencies there-- mistakes get made.

There's technologies in use today. And these technologies are silos too. Our products are silos. And so we'll talk about that. We mentioned cloud storage. And PDFs are silos. Is it the latest and greatest version of your PDF? How about offline access to these files?

So just talking about silos, maybe the only way to access these files is from the trailer that walking it over to the site, which may not have Wi-Fi yet, that's a silo. Your information's stuck there in the trailer.

So silos are bad-- general gist of this. Even Autodesk products prior to Monday were silos. Look at all the BIM 360 products that Autodesk has. BIM 360 Team, which is currently the back end of collaboration for Revit. There's docs. There's HQ. There's Glue, Field, Point Layout, Plan, IQ, Ops.

These products-- a lot of them-- they got to be Autodesk products. We acquired those companies. And so those products were renamed-- Glue, Field. But they didn't talk to each other. If you wanted to use Glue and do clash coordination, do collaboration and Glue or just use it as a viewer.

You uploaded your files directly to Glue. But then when you wanted to use Field, you can't transfer your files from Glue to Field. You had to re-upload it to Field or Point Layout or Plan. So these were silos. The cool thing is as of Monday, these products are not versions.

So this slide, version control, is also another example of a silo. Maybe the information was stuck in one version and not the other. These kinds of things lead to cost overruns and delays, rework and just because project teams don't have access to the most current set of documents.

So put another way-- and here's those same BIM 360 silos. You've got Team, Docs, Glue, Layout, Plan. And this is just where it falls on a spectrum when and where you would use each product. So eliminating those really gets us to a central source of truth.

Instead of break down those silos, when you have all your files in one central location, and then you enable access out to-- here's my group of field users. Here's my group of blue users or Point Layout. But at the heart of it, it's one documentation set-- one location where you store your files and all your data.

That data becomes a central source of truth not limited by the application. With all your files at the heart, it enables you to do mobile-- the iPhone, get reports wherever you are. Even the Apple Watch has a little applet that you can put on there. When you get back to Home, and you pull up the PowerPoint, dial in on the watch. It's really kind of cool.

It's talking about activities today, so scheduling. And it keeps your schedule in tune with the project plan or the schedule BIM 360 plan-- your activities, your to do for the day. So by eliminating paper, not having to carry your notes, your checklists back and forth to the job site, guys not having to walk back and forth through the trailer.

Oops, I left something back in the trailer. And, now, I got to spend 5 minutes-- 5, 10 minutes walking back and forth. When you have things mobile, you can take your documents off line, so if no internet, no problem. You're always current with that central source of truth-- no silos.

So as of Monday, here's what the BIM 360 product family looks like. It's just BIM 360. Let that sink in a moment. We're not going to be using words like Glue anymore or Field. Inside of BIM 360, you've got your document management. That's where your files are stored. It's like Dropbox.

It syncs your files locally on your computer. It syncs your files up in the cloud. You're always current. And that's document management. And there's also project management. So BIM 360's designed for general contractors, engineers-- whoever wants to use it.

It's very flexible. But realizing that you have a very diverse group of people using it, you need to be able to manage that easily and say, all right, this subcontractor has access to this set of files and folders. Or they can generate RFIs, but they don't get to approve them. All that different kind of project management, you can do that, now, in one location, one app, BIM 360.

AUDIENCE: So normally, [INAUDIBLE].

JOSHUA BENOIST: One application that you can entitle your users to model coordination, which is Glue.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSHUA BENOIST: Yeah, here's my Glue users. Here's my Field users.

AUDIENCE: One big shell--

JOSHUA BENOIST: One big shell. Yeah. So the public preview that was made available last Monday, it looks a bit like this. When you log into BIM 360 through your web browser or your iPad, I'll show you-- there's a thing that you can click on in the upper-left corner that pops out a little window.

Do you want to go to your field module? Do you want to go to the model coordination, Glue? Do you want to do reporting inside of inside or document or project management? So you can click on these. But a lot of them are in beta. That's public preview.

And what does that mean if you have existing projects? On existing Glue, they stay there. Glue, a classic Glue and classic Field are going to be there. They're sticking around for a long time. You don't have to move your projects over.

Imagine that a construction site-- that's a lot of people to move over to a new platform. So we realize that. And so existing projects can stay exactly where they are. And when a new project comes along, you can click on the New Project button.

And it's going to ask you, do you want to start your new project on classic Glue, the silo, or BIM 360? And now, is your choice. But for a little while, it's in public beta. And then eventually they come out of beta. So this slide really just emphasizes what project data at the center means.

Half of building lifecycle is designing it-- months, years, whatever-- however long it takes to design it amongst all the different disciplines. And then you construct it. You get into the build phase or the pre-construction phase. And with data at the heart, all these products-- Revit, C4r, documenting, detailing-- it's all specific workflows as a project moves through the lifecycle.

And when you've eliminated those silos, it allows the project design team to design a way, save the files into the cloud, coordinate amongst the entire design team, whether they're in East coast, West coast, around the world. And when they're ready, that data is made available to the general contractor.

The whole project management features in BIM 360 allows them to-- and design team can work away-- do what they got to do. And when that dividing line comes, and you're ready for it to be consumed by the construction team, then, there's a workflow there, and it's made available. I'll show you guys that.

I want to keep going through the slides, though, before we get the demo. So this kind of just puts a name to each of those different spokes of this wheel here. BIM 360 is really undergoing a complete re-engineering. It's the integration and automation of workflows.

And moving away from the standalone applications towards a unified solution, it puts the project at the center. The guided handover that I just described between design phases to construction or pre-construction phases, BIM 360 is built on top of Autodesk Forge.

So I guess that's a really good point to make is that the silo products, the classic products, Autodesk acquired those companies. And they were existing products. They didn't talk to each other. This BIM 360, we took feature-for-feature, Glue classic for document coordination and stuff and feature-for-feature brought them over.

But we built it from the ground up on Forge. So the nice thing about Forge-- just in a nutshell-- Forge is a developer's API. Here's some building blocks for anyone who has access to a developer to tie in their third-party products. The commands and codes needed to make those connections.

So you want BIM 360 to connect into Dropbox or Box, SharePoint, Power BI or more project construction-specific construction management software. Whatever that software is that you're using today, you're able to tie it in here and keep that central source of truth at the heart and get your data in and out. So yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] as an example, we can take to a login. Do you tell me that you can use API and push that [INAUDIBLE] right?

JOSHUA BENOIST: Yes, so prolog, use the API, push it to Forge or get data out.

AUDIENCE: So listen so you have probably enough there, draw this. But can we also look through [INAUDIBLE]?

JOSHUA BENOIST: Mm-hmm. And I think on Monday, they announced that there is something like 50 third-party apps that now plug in to the BIM 360. BIM 360 now has its own internal app store, so the project administrator can get access to it and go on the store.

Here's my [INAUDIBLE]. Maybe we used Dropbox, download the app. Now, Dropbox is in sync with BIM 360. So it's connected. It's collaborative, and it's integrated. I know it does over 50 file types. I think it does over 100 file types.

So it's got the large model viewer built into it. And what is the large model viewer? Probably, a lot of you might remember AutoCAD back in the days. AutoCAD, when it gets too many objects in it, it got slow.

The performance was terrible. And over time, that performance increased, but, still, it was limited. Revit in the early days had the same performance problems. Along came Navisworks. And Navisworks allowed many different file formats, including Revit, to append them into one giant construction set.

Your structural guy might be using a Bentley product. Architects using Revit-- bring it together in a single model for coordination. And Navisworks made it look easy. It performed well. There wasn't a lot of lag.

We took our Navisworks developers and asked them, build us a new Navisworks from the ground up that's in the cloud that allows you to have a very, very large construction model from all these different file types. AutoCAD used to have the-- we in support used to call the large coordinate issue.

If you imported civil survey data into AutoCAD, and the architect went and built their model a million miles from the origin, it broke things. This large model viewer doesn't have those problems. Your model can be anywhere you want.

And it does both 2D and 3D BIM with over around 100 file formats-- open up your office documents-- open up your Navisworks files. It handles it. So that's built into Docs, that large model bureau. It's secure. We've got [INAUDIBLE].

Every single year, we go through SOC 2 audit, which is the security measure to keep stuff secure. And it's extensible with Forge. So, essentially, you're connecting your office, whether it's the supervisor's trailer, the design team, you're connecting all that to the job site.

So your construction crew, arm them with an iPad. They're out there. They got access to all the plans and documents. They can do whatever they need to do, get access to whatever information they need without having to go back and forth to the trailer and worry about versioning and silos, and all those other things.

That frees up time and increases productivity-- ensures everyone's working from the latest plan and so on. So there's a lot of good benefit to that. It's a single source of truth-- allows you to manage and control the whole project from one location-- publish and share your documents-- built right in-- allows you to view and collaborate wherever you are.

And it's all connected. Link files-- it understands all the linked files, whether it's CAD DWG, XRefs, or Revit links. So what does that project and account administration look like? If you're familiar right now with field, it's the same kind of project administration from field with new features built in.

So if you've got a whole bunch of subcontractors-- company A, company B-- maybe you want to give company A access to certain folders or workflows. And so you set that permission at a company level-- let it propagate down through the employees-- makes it very easy or roll-based.

So company A, B, and C, they've all got supervisors. And you want to give anybody that's a supervisor role access to certain key workflows or file folders. You do it right through here.

And as we add in these public previews, as projects are still out on existing classic Field and Glue-- and maybe you have a mix of new projects on the new platform, you can manage right from here that transition. You can now remove project members. I know that was a big one. We were getting support cases on that quite a bit.

So, here, you can start to see at a glance. You've got your users on the left. The company, what role are they? This matrix here on the right says, all right, are they on old Field, classic Field, classic Glue, or NextGen?

And we have activity log. So every time someone makes a change in there, there's a log. You can go and print it out-- see what changes were made that day. Maybe something broke. You can very easily go in and see what changed.

So let's talk about these here next. Access control-- these are roles. So you got your superintendent role, your supervisor role, your engineers and so on. And you can dial up or down the permission level. And do they get to view it? Do they get to view and upload? Do they get to edit it? Do they get to control it?

And it's all very customizable too. Version control, it automatically versions things. So imagine that whole Revit C4r to BIM 360 workflow. Engineers may be working away. I mean, especially, if it's a design-build kind of project. Engineers and architects might still be designing as you're constructing.

Version control becomes very important. As they sink to central, there's a work-in-progress folder. But then maybe they went out to the AHJ and said, all right, they bless it. And we're ready to make a submittal, 90% submittal set.

Then it goes into the general contractor folder. He's got the latest and greatest version. As each file gets updated, it tracks the versioning for you. And what's kind of cool is it has built-in compare. I want to compare version 8 with version 6-- version 7 just to see what changed.

You can literally dial into sheets and files in 3D or 2D and see what changed. File locking-- so kind of that whole check in, check out, lock the file. I'm editing it now. No one else get in there. That's in there-- prevents errors. There's an audit trail. Admins have the ability to unlock things when things go wrong.

We've mentioned the activity log. You can export it. I think that's takeaway there. You can build your own custom attributes in the file. So maybe a custom attribute is discipline. So you say, here's all the architectural files. This file's architectural. That's architectural. Here's mechanical. Here's steel.

And then it allows you to sort by that if you're not already managing that by folder. So there's a lot of flexibility there-- generate PDFs-- multi-page PDFs in there. It recognizes 3D models versus 2D models [INAUDIBLE] sheets.

When your Revit C4r guys upload it to the cloud, it recognizes, here's my design team. I don't need to do anything with their files. But when you'd make a submittal, and it moves from the design phase into the construction phase, then it's going to take that Revit file and say, all right, here's my plan and sheets-- put those in a folder.

Here's my 3D model and views-- put that in a different folder. So your general contractor can go, OK, I just need to look at my sheets today. Let's go to the architectural sheets. Or maybe they want to see the 3D model. So it's a beautiful viewer. Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSHUA BENOIST: And it's not annoying to where it just automatically sends out notifications. You can subscribe to it and say, hey, this is the one folder I care about or the one file I care about. I'm going to subscribe to that. And then you'll get notifications on just what you subscribe to. Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] got to work out on drill hocs work out on [INAUDIBLE].

JOSHUA BENOIST: It's already there. So when you log into the NextGen, it's going to allow you to download this thing called connector. And I'll show you the connector here. I've got it on my computer. But it's like Dropbox. But it's smarter than that.

It doesn't just add like Dropbox a drive folder. It knows this folder comes from Field or Glue or work in progress, C4r kind of stuff. And it will create a BIM 360 model managed, model compare folder for each different entitlement within there.

So a lot of the time you're looking at a Revit file. And I want a PDF of that. So you can publish that from here.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSHUA BENOIST: Download it, email it. Oop.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSHUA BENOIST: Yes.

AUDIENCE: Hyperlink.

AUDIENCE: Hyperlinked.

JOSHUA BENOIST: Hyperlink and everything, mm-hmm. I think there was a video here.

AUDIENCE: Can you schedule tasks, whatever, it's updated to publish the [INAUDIBLE].

JOSHUA BENOIST: I believe so. I know that they were talking about having that ability. I think that ability is in there, but don't quote me on that.

AUDIENCE: And the NextGen is south of that.

JOSHUA BENOIST: As a public preview. So the NextGen is out there right now as of Monday, as a public preview, go login through your web browser to find it. All right, why is it not updating?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSHUA BENOIST: All right, I'm just going to move on.

AUDIENCE: Woudn't that be a [INAUDIBLE]?

JOSHUA BENOIST: Yeah, really. Where's my support?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] just try access on [INAUDIBLE].

JOSHUA BENOIST: No, I'm just trying to get the video to play. Some of these have a video on them and some don't. So here's 2D drawing compare.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSHUA BENOIST: I'll be able to demo this. If it's the video is not going to play, it's not going to play. And I'll demo it. But, basically, here, in this slide, you can see how you'll have 2D drawing compare. And you can color code before and after with blue and red-- take your slider, your mouse here and slide this left or right to see what differences show up in there.

3D models. So you can have your 3D models side by side with your 2D models and see in plan or 3D what you're looking at and jump back and forth. I mentioned already that it knows link files and XRefs in the different file formats. Here's a good video. Is it going to play?

I'm going to step out of this, because that's a video I want to play. There we go.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSHUA BENOIST: It was working.

AUDIENCE: Oh, [INAUDIBLE] if someone else is having the problem yesterday, it split the screen [INAUDIBLE].

JOSHUA BENOIST: Split the screen?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, so if you're just getting the screen, projector split it so your laptop or the video or projector only [INAUDIBLE].

JOSHUA BENOIST: OK. There we go. Now I can see it and click on the Play button. And I can click on it, and it doesn't want to play. All right. I can demo this, though. So I'm going to move on, so we can get the demo.

Here's 3D model comparison, not just comparing versions and 2D sheets. You can pull up your 3D model and look at before and after side by side. Look, it automatically culls from your Revit model all the different changes and presents it to you on the right-- kind of a summary of those changes-- what was added, what was removed, what was just modified.

You can click on that-- just dial down down into the model and see exactly what you need to see. I mentioned a great question over here about notifications and sharing. So you can subscribe to folders or files and have it email you or email a friend.

Review and markup-- so built into here is the ability to review and mark up your files. So BIM 360 Team had a review and markup. Glue had a markup. Docs had a markup with the NextGen. There's just one set of review and markup features, and it's consistent. So it's a single platform.

You can do measuring. And the measuring has recently been improved so that it gives you the XYZ, the hypotenuse, the elevation all in one shot between two points. And that way, it takes the guesswork-- which point was he really trying to grab? Was it an intersection or a corner? And it just works.

Issues-- so getting into construction on the construction side of things, what do we care about? Checklists, safety checklists, issues, RFIs, submittals. We have all that in from field in here now.

And so being able to manage all those issues, manage the workflow, this person gets to approve. That person is a inspector. Who gets to create the issues? Where does it go from there? You can literally craft that workflow in here.

So this is on the RFI side of things-- does your project have a construction manager on it? Not every project does. So you can come in here, and this is my kind of project.

All your RFI is in one location-- being able to see location-based RFIs-- drop a pin on a map. Here's where the problem is, or here's where my question is. And what's the status? What's the question?

You can literally go into the administration side of things and RFIs and say, all right, here's the kind of questions I want-- true/false statements, plus or minus kind of statements, add a comment field in there-- just craft your own form and do that with RFIs, checklists, submittals. It's all customizable.

Now, you can do RFIs and checklists and all that and 3D too. So it doesn't just have to be a pin on a flat sheet. It can be on your 3D model. So when you think of BIM 360, realize with around 100 file formats, it's not just 2D, it's 2D and 3D and all your other project management.

Like Dropbox, you might store your Excel files, your Word documents, your communications, your emails photos. Single source of truth here. Submittals is fairly new to BIM 360. And so we can now do submittals.

Field management-- So this just goes to show checklists and the ability to craft your checklist. Here's an example of a plus and minus versus true or false. You ask a question. Do I want them to answer with a plus or minus, a true or false, or a more detailed? Is it complete, not complete, inspect it or not, inspect and so on? Craft all that.

Safety issues are in there. Template Builder. So Template Builder is where you go to build a template for your RFIs, your checklists, your issues, and so on. And what good is all that if you can't do reporting? Daily logs is another new feature.

Your supervisors at the end of the day-- they come back at the end of the day, and they do their daily logs. And what was the weather today? Did it rain? And so it's just another putting data at the center. Yes.

AUDIENCE: Does that mean for drawing from the classic behavioral always [INAUDIBLE] updated drawing tool? In that case when the [INAUDIBLE] uploads to drawing instead of drawing, but [INAUDIBLE] seems to me that [INAUDIBLE] going to be synced with field, right? Is that true?

JOSHUA BENOIST: There's a workflow. So let me echo that back to you, partly for the recording. You're asking me, the design team is checking in C4r, their files. Does it go directly to field in the classic field?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] so what I'm asking you is that that environment, post [INAUDIBLE]--

JOSHUA BENOIST: Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] right?

JOSHUA BENOIST: Mm-hm.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] or you can [INAUDIBLE].

JOSHUA BENOIST: Mm-hm.

AUDIENCE: OK? Because we're gonna do scale down the road, so it seems to be that everything is synced here?

JOSHUA BENOIST: Uh-huh.

AUDIENCE: Is that correct?

JOSHUA BENOIST: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: This is what I understand.

JOSHUA BENOIST: Yes, everything will be synced, but you were-- you mentioned classic field.

AUDIENCE: Right. The classic [INAUDIBLE] we really [INAUDIBLE] some people, they have--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

--project on the field right now where we have to work pretty much standalone to get our--

JOSHUA BENOIST: Classic field is just gonna continue to function like it does currently. So you won't have to learn new things. All the Central Source of Truth, the syncing is purely in the new BIM 360.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSHUA BENOIST: Yeah. How we doing on time? All right, we got 15 minutes. Extensibility, I mentioned that this was built on Forge, and here's a couple examples of-- there's something like 50 of these apps that you can kind of-- they tie in BIM 360 through Forge to your favorite third-party app, Box, Dropbox, SharePoint, Docusign, Ignite, so on, so I mean, it's great. And if you don't have an existing app, Forge is there so, you know, the potential is there to sync those up.

Insight, reporting. Insight, in my mind, is one of the coolest features of BIM 360. It is an artificial intelligence. It is machine learning at the heart. It takes this awesome pool of data with data at the center and says, OK, general contractor probably doesn't just have one project, he's probably got a whole bunch of projects out there, right? And across a hundred-some projects he might be using one subcontractor amongst many different projects there, and this artificial intelligence is looking through the data for patterns and trends.

And it's-- maybe this Subcontractor A is great at what they do, they're always on time, very few RFIs or issues, and you don't-- the project manager is not really spending a lot of time with them, they just get it done. And you might have Subcontractor B who, you know, there's always an issue, there's always an RFI, they're always late, and maybe that leads to other-- it cascades and leads to other problems throughout the project. So being able to zero in and say, all right, here's where you need to focus your time, here's where the most quality issues are or safety issues, you know. Observe-- it really goes into a lot of detail. You can see just from the heat map here at a glance what you need to know, and it's customizable.

So I talked about Drive, with this new BIM 360 comes Drive, so when you entitle your users to the field features, it creates a BIM 360 Field Drive on your local computer and keeps those files synced up. You know, you're already synced up with iPads, so I actually forgot to mention, these are my personal iPads, I have it open to BIM 360 and I wanted to let you guys pass them around. Please don't drop, but I'll let you guys play with it a little bit. Frisbee. I heard that.

And those are live projects that other people here at Autodesk are also demonstrating so if you create an RFI or an issue on there don't say anything bad. So anyway, let's move on to some quick demo, Revit.

So starting in Revit, you've got a design team, architects, engineers, structural electrical, mechanical and so on. They're all collaborating together with the Revit model. Revit users sync to Central, you know, there's a central model that they're all-- it's kind of a live environment where architect moves a wall, it updates on the engineer's computer, mechanical engineer, for example, and he can see those changes in there as he syncs to Central, you know, the central model.

Well, with Collaboration for Revit, that central model can live up in the cloud. Currently right now that's BIM 360 Team on the back end, so they're syncing it to the cloud but it's not public, you can't log into Team and see those files. It's just kind of the resource we're using on the back end to store the central model. If I'm in-- if I'm a Revit user, I don't really care where my model is stored as long as it just works. It takes a publish operation to publish this to BIM 360 Team. You know, the files are already there, they're just hidden, allows the Revit guy to operate, and when I'm ready for it to be publicly available on Team, you know, they publish it and there's their file.

And that file is just a snapshot in time, which is great for submittals, for when you're ready to pass that file off to your general contractor, there's a line in the sand there, you know, you've got your work-in-progress design files that your engineering team's working on and I want to keep those separate until I'm ready for the general contractor to do something with it. As a submittal, it's been blessed, AHJ. It's been stamped by the engineers, now it's ready for the general contractor and they can run with it. So there needs to be kind of that line in the sand.

Currently that's Team and that publish operation. In the future, and this is where the safe harbor kind of comes into play, it's not in public preview yet but I think as we speak in the keynote speech, they're announcing it right now that C4R is coming out with the ability to sync to Docs, or BIM 360 on the back end. So you get a choice now, do I want it on Team or do I want it-- which is a silo, or do I want it on Docs? And so that will be in public previews soon, but it's kind of where we are and where we're going.

When you look at the iPad, those of you who have the iPad, you'll notice the folder structure in there. It says Folder 1, Design Team WIP, Work In Progress. So in this future state, when your Revit users come right here, you know, they make a change in the model and they go to synchronize with central, it's gonna synchronize with that Work In Progress folder. Well, the project management, the account management allows them to say, all right, here's my design team members for companies, architect, structural engineering, whatever, they have access to the WIP folder. My general contractor has access to the Submittals folder, which is kind of where it goes from there, and maybe we're doing some Glue kind of operations where we're collaborating, clash detection and stuff, you know, here's my group who have access to those folders.

And so there's this kind of built-in process where Work In Progress team can work away designing, sync it to Central Source of Truth, and then, with the publish operation, move it down that chain into the collaboration pre-construction phase, from there into the general-- the construction phase, those folders, and maintain that Central Source of Truth, maintain those version controls. You're always up to date.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] you said a file but it's still on the cloud.

JOSHUA BENOIST: Yeah but Team is not Docs or BIM 360 at the moment and-- yeah, so that's what they're announcing at the keynote is that we-- last Monday we announced, hey, we took Glue field plan, all these BIM 360 products, made it BIM 360. Team's just kind of the laggard, and they're announcing today that it's next.

So basically this is what Revit looks like, and I make a change and I synchronize my file to Central. That file is-- let me get rid of my presentation. So I mentioned that there is this connector now, and so I'm gonna go to my Windows Explorer and-- you won't see anything on here that says "connector." Right now there's Team and Fusion 360, and if I were entitled to Glue collaboration, there would be a BIM 360 Glue folder here, a field folder keeps those entitlements separate and syncs it just like Dropbox.

And my Revit, my-- so Revit right now, we'll call it classic Revit for lack of a better word. The local file, when you sync to Central, you know, there's a local file. It's in a cache folder. The user has to kind of dig into the file tree to find it, but it's there, and that local file is kinda what they operate on locally. It allows them to move very quickly, and just the changes get synced up to the cloud. With this connector, it allows that, instead of being in a local cache, it's now in connector like a Dropbox, and that-- those changes get synced up.

So let me jump into this is the web browser of BIM 360, and you can see here, you know, I've got-- let me minimize that. So you've got plans versus project files. Project files for a construction project, you know, your bid files, your specs, your-- yeah, that's kinda where your office documents might be stored, and plans are for the Revit, AutoCAD, DWG, Navisworks, all those files. So here's your design team Work In Progress folder. This is where C4R will, in time, sync to, and allows the design team to work away, and when it gets handed off to the general contractor or collaboration is.

So in here we've got a coordination folder for kind of the Glue kind of functions where your clash detection and red lines markups. So here's your working files, you move them down into the coordination folder, you do your coordination, maybe you're creating views and issues and all that from here. You know, when you go to have submittals, you've got your general contractor folders, and so your submittals go into here. You get the idea with the rest of the folder structure, but that's kind of the concept here of breaking down those silos, taking into account existing workflows and processes, you know, from the design team through the pre-construction, construction phases, and not skipping a beat. Yes, sir.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] global [INAUDIBLE] persistence [INAUDIBLE] or will--

JOSHUA BENOIST: Just like the classic products, yeah, so it will--

AUDIENCE: So then the second part of that is then do you have [INAUDIBLE] if you want all these published models to [INAUDIBLE] so you're [INAUDIBLE] or that design team [INAUDIBLE] will always have that option--

JOSHUA BENOIST: So I want to capture that question for the recording. You asked if BIM 360 Team will persist for existing projects like the other classic products. Yes, and so you will, when that goes into public preview, you will also get to-- get that option to stay in classic or publish them to the new BIM 360. Yes, sir? So does that stop [INAUDIBLE] if they do that do you have the option, or do you [INAUDIBLE]?

JOSHUA BENOIST: Depends on who creates the project, I would think.

AUDIENCE: It depends on whoever set it up?

JOSHUA BENOIST: Yeah, it's the project administrator who ultimately gets to set all the entitlements, permissions, and basically--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSHUA BENOIST: Whose project as it? Is the GC creating the project? You know, I guess who's got the contract. Typically it's the GC, so they would probably have to set you up for that. You might have to work with them. But if it's yours and you're the project administrator or the contract administrator, you can set that up.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSHUA BENOIST: This folder structure?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

JOSHUA BENOIST: I know that plans versus project files is until that C4R goes into public preview down the road, I don't think this is there but we're kind of mocking it up, it's a mock-up right here, and folder structure is up to you, the rest of it.

AUDIENCE: Then it's editable?

JOSHUA BENOIST: Yeah, yeah. You can right-click in here and add sub-folders, rename it, delete them, upload files, share it, customize the attributes on the files, sort them, permissions, and here's where you subscribe so you can get updates when it's updated.

So anyway, here's Folders. Let's open up a file real quick and just show you what the viewer looks like. So here's a viewer, you know, you can pan around, do all your basic stuff, add mark-ups, measure, hyperlink to things, look at properties, so click on objects, look at properties, and this is just a sheet plan. Over here you can create issues, RFIs, mark-ups, you can control all this stuff.

Let's back up a space. I want to show you versioning. So like, this floor plan already has-- is on V3. If I click on this I can come down here and say, Compare Versions, and which ones am I gonna compare?

AUDIENCE: 1 and 3.

JOSHUA BENOIST: All right. You want 1 and 3? All right. Just a lag. I'm gonna go ahead and compare. So here's 1 and 2, and if I click on this, I can slide this back and forth and see the differences between the two versions.

[APPLAUSE]

So there's some pretty stark differences there. I can come over here and say, all right, I want to add color, I want this to really pop out there so I can see what those differences are. And then you can email this to yourself and mark it up and stuff.

AUDIENCE: Can you make that transparent? Like overlay [INAUDIBLE].

JOSHUA BENOIST: I don't know that you can make it transparent.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] wanted to compare version 1, version 2 [INAUDIBLE] have some sort of variance report?

JOSHUA BENOIST: Yeah, you can do variance reporting and stuff, I believe. But I can also come in here and say, I want to compare my second floor plan with my first floor plan and do compares that way as well instead of version compare. And this is just folders, so let's drop down here and look at an actual Revit model.