Collins Park WTP—a Collaboration for Revit Case Study

JULIE NICHOLSON: OK, before we get started, I gave you all a raffle ticket. Be sure you grab a raffle ticket, and then put the other half in the box. And then as a gift, this is one of them. Of course, I had to buy myself one. So we're just going to put it to the test here. I want to know who had a good time at the black party last night? So I want you to stand up. Hold on. I want you to stand up and go, yay, and I'm going to take a picture. So look, it's even got a remote. Hold on, we've got to switch it. So here we go. All right, at the count of three. 1, 2, 3, yay. There we go. OK. So there we go.

So that's just to get you all up and going because it's 8:00 o'clock, and of course, this is the first session. So we want to get you ready to go. So this is for the Collins Park water treatment plant. I do want to take a poll first. Who has used Collaboration for Revit? OK.

So now, who has not used Collaboration for Revit? OK, so we've got maybe-- yeah, about a quarter. Yeah. So hang in there if you've already done a project, because we do have Adam, who's going to be talk about troubleshooting. So this should fit both people, both sets. Now, I have another survey I want to ask. Who's in '15, '16, and '17 of Revit? OK, that's [? pay ?] me, too. OK, who's in '18 and above? OK.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

OK. All right, well let's get started. So here we go. This is Collin's Park water treatment plant. It's a Collaboration for Revit case study. Presenter is myself. I'm Julie Nicholson. I work for Arcadis. I'm a BIM Manager. We also have Adam Peter. Honored to have him. He's with Autodesk. He's the Customer Success Engineer for Collaboration for Revit. And then we also have Michael Avanzini, who's my co-partner, works with me at Arcadis-- I was about to say Autodesk-- as Content Manager. So let's get started.

So here's the class summary, so we won't go through that. But you've already read that when you signed up for the session. And learning objectives. Hold on. And he's going to run that little video. And what we have here is where we did some 3D scanning, but we want to learn how to set up a Revit project using Collaboration for Revit. And then 360 team, we're going to share our best practices and workflow. We're going to learn our track issues and troubleshooting, and then we're going to do discover lessons learned.

So I just added this little image in here because we had to do a 3D scan of the existing basins, so I just wanted to share that with you all as well. And that was done by True Point. So Collin's Park water treatment plant. We started this project around September 2015 to set it up. We had our kickoff in January of 2016. We even had Autodesk come with us at the kickoff, which was really exciting. We had seven subconsultants. And then we had Arcadius as lead. We were going to design for this basin 7 and 8. And then, of course, the bid went out in June of 2017. Construction will be ended in 2020.

So now, what I want to do is I'm going to switch over. I spend a lot of time, so I hope you enjoy this. But it's actually a video, because what I found interesting when I started on this project is the history. So we're going to through this. And this basically tells you what we did for the environment, because we are an environmental firm. This is the intake structure on Lake Erie. Like the beat? Come on. I thought this would be the best way to tell you about the history of this project, just to show you a video, because it's very interesting.

So here's the algae bloom that was going into the intake structure. And from the intake structure, it goes into the pump station. and then there's an eight mile transmission main over to the plant. This is the existing water treatment plant, Process Flow. And of course, they had the harmful algae bloom, and they could not drink the water. They actually had to ship in water so that the people could drink.

TERRI SULLIVAN: We're following a developing story out of Toledo. We're now learning the Ohio EPA for that city, that their water was in danger. And as Adam Slinger reports, that warning came two months ago.

ADAM SLINGER: This gross green algae bloom in Lake Erie shut down Toledo's drinking water for more than 48 hours. Now, new details that the Ohio EPA feared something like this would happen.

NARRATOR (ON TV): From Cleveland's doorstep, Lake Erie stretches out and covers 10,000 square miles. It's estimated that 3 million tons of assorted debris are dumped into Lake Erie each day. Experts say that if something isn't done, the lake could die in 10 to 15 years.

REPORTER (ON TV): In 1970, Lake Erie was, in fact, declared dead. Algal blooms, generated by sewage and pollution from industrial waste that killed much of the lake's aquatic life. That same year, when the adjoining Cuyahoga River infamously caught fire, the so-called dead lake and the burning river became poster children for the environmental movement that established the EPA and the Clean Water Act.

JEFF REUTTER: Problems started coming back about 2000, 2002. It has accelerated. In the bloom that we saw in 2011 was 2 and 1/2 times worse than any of the blooms that we saw back in the 1960s and the '70s.

REPORTER (ON TV): Dr. Jeff Reutter has been researching harmful algal blooms on Lake Erie for over 40 years.

JEFF REUTTER: Lake Erie is the southernmost, the shallowest, the warmest of the Great Lakes. It receives the most nutrients, so biologically, it's the most productive of the Great Lakes. But it's possible to have too much of a good thing.

REPORTER (ON TV): Nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorous found in sewage and fertilizer overfeed the algae, and the lake, made warmer from climate change, provides a comfortable environment for the algae to thrive.

JULIE NICHOLSON: So the challenges were to clean up the algae and that was phase 1. The key was meeting the health advisory level. And then, of course, phase 2 was to build out of 7 and 8. So now, here is an info works. I created the model, brought in Revit. This is the existing phases. This shows the buildout of basin 7, basin 8, and then we show a cross-sectional show on the sedimentation and filter. So that kind of fills you in real quickly about the history of the project. So I thought you would like that.

So next, what we're going to do is now learn how to set up a project using Collaboration for Revit on the BIM 360. So the first thing you want to know, if you're working in '15 or '16, you will have to install the Collaboration for Revit to utilize it. If you're in 2017 and above, it comes installed with the software. So you want to check with your IT team to make sure that they have you set up to run your Collaboration for Revit within your office.

Now, these are some reliability and security links. I thought this was good to add in here. And that's also in the handout, is that the Dashboard is a good thing to keep an eye on. It actually lists all the Autodesk products, and you can see if they're going to have any services that you need to be aware of so you can plan. And then the form is another good one to go to. And then of course, your PMs are probably going to ask you, what's the security of C4R? So here you go. Here's the link. It's very secure. They have documents and they update them, so the link is good to have current so that you can always stay up-to-date.

So this just shows the health board dashboard with all the products that they have. And it basically tells you when it's in service and what's soon to come, so that's good to have on your desktop. So the first thing we want to talk about is the Hub roles, because before you can even access Collaboration for Revit, you have to have a hub. And you have three members. So you have the team administrator, team member, and project contributor.

Your team administrator would be like your IT people that are in charge of the set up. Team member is someone like myself that has the rights-- they allow me rights now-- to set up a project. So project contributor, they cannot create projects, but they can view the projects. So now, when you want to sign in to BIM 360, you have to be sure that you have an Autodesk subscription account. That could come from your IT, and that's with your company email address. And then, of course, you would sign in using your BIM 360 hub. So typically, it's a company [? dominion ?] name, Autodesk 360, then you go to the link and you're going to sign in.

So now we're going to go live and we're going to set up the projects. So we're actually going to open up Chrome, and that's what Autodesk recommends you using. We actually have a link here to BIM 360, and Mike is kind enough to help me with some of the computer stuff so that I can stay up here with you all. Here, we're going to sign in, so you see I've already logged in.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JULIE NICHOLSON: No, I didn't tell him that. So then the first thing you're going to do, so here is the interface when you log in. Now, it does say A 360, but just to know, they have changed the name to BIM 360 Team. But if you go over here to the far right, which you either have your picture in your profile, or you either have your initials. But what you'll see here is all the hubs that you're a member of. And as you can see, I'm working with [? Heyes ?] and [? Sawyer ?] one of my projects. And then I also have the Arcadis one.

And with those hubs, you can be a different role. Like I'm not an administrator on all of those, so there can be different roles on the hub. So once you go here, then the first thing we're going to do is go to Create Project. So we're going to go to the Create Project, and then Mike's going to type in sample, our class sample. And then you can either upload your own image or you can click on one of the avatars here, and then you say Create Project.

And then you can see we're already in the project, so this is the project. And that's been set up, so it's that quick. Now, the one thing I want you to make aware of, if you hit on this Settings button over here-- so Mike's going to go over there to that button. And the default is set to Close, and that's what you typically would want. But I want you to be aware there are other settings that you can do, and where this is located. So that, we'll just cancel out of here.

And then the next thing is we're going to talk about the team members, because the next thing I'm going to have to do is I have a project, but it's no good if I don't have any members, right? So I'm going to have to add some members. So that's the next step. So we want to talk about those roles. So we have hub roles and we have team roles. So under the team, you have project administrator, which is myself. We have editor.

The editors are the people that are going to be working in Revit, so they're the ones that are going to be modeling. So they want to have edit right. And then you have viewers, like could be your PM. It could be maybe an engineer that wants to be able to view the model, but they don't have Revit installed. So there is a viewer on BIM 360 Team that you can use, and it even has markup capabilities.

So now, all members can invite other users, but the good news is is that the project administrator has to approve them. So even if you try to invite somebody, it does have to go through the administrator. So there's some security setting.

AUDIENCE: Can the viewer also download the file from hub?

JULIE NICHOLSON: The viewer? Yes. I think-- no, no they can't. That's right, that's right. You have to be an editor. Yeah, the viewer can just view.

So now, to invite team members, you would just click on the Invite button over here. And then once you invite the members, you put in their email information. You either add them as an editor or a viewer, and then they will receive an email that comes like this. And then they will click on this hyperlink right here to get to the site.

So the BIM 360 Team hubs. I went over that a little bit when we were on the site. But when you set this up, you're going to get a myhub, which you can actually save files there, but you can not use Collaboration for Revit on that site. So just wanted you to be aware of that myhub. When you have some notifications, you'll get an alert up here, and you can access it by clicking on that little bell.

So now, what we want to do, so that setting up a project. So you can see it's that simple. And then the next thing we want to do is talk about sharing best practices and workflow. Just some history. Arcadis, basically, piloted four different collaboration tools. We did Bently, Volt, [? Quanta ?] Server, and then Collaboration for Revit. And we did a survey with people and we did a whole bunch of studies. But basically, the outcome is, because, well, it's kind of going away, that we basically chose Collaboration for Revit. And as things develop, we'll probably go into BIM 360 Team, but as it stands now, we are in the Collaboration for Revit because of the options we have to work with Revit. We also had the pleasure to team up with Autodesk.

And here are the recommended best practices. So we're going to go over those. We go in more detail in the handout, but we're going to cover these as we move forward. So basically, one of the best practices is have a BIM manager and a support team. So I'm sure you all have heard this before, but a lot of times it's getting the PMs to understand that you definitely want to have a BIM manager on every BIM project to work directly with the PM and also with the client.

They want to develop the execution plan. The execution plan is important because you need to define the owners of who's going to be working on what drawings, and how we're going to organize everything. So there's a lot to do, and there are sessions on the execution that you can attend to for that. You also want a support team. You should get with your corporate leaders if you don't have that intact now. But you basically want somebody that you could go to for standards, templates, and then, of course, also for troubleshooting.

So now, the first thing, when you saw when I set up the project, we didn't have anything. It was kind of blank, right? So the first thing you want to do is set up some project folders, so you'll need to discuss with your project, your company, what would be the standard and best for you all. But basically, what you do on BIM 360 Team is you house all your whole projects. So you've got to be sure that you have a location for your data source files. You've got to have AutoCAD Civil 3D.

Now, there is no check in, check out at the moment on Collaboration for Revit, so you want to be sure that you know-- that's where you would talk about in the execution plan on who owns which files and how you're going to organize the hosting, basically, cloud server. So that's important. And one more point I want to make. If you upload a file just directly to BIM 360 Team, you are not able to access through C4R. So that's where I'm going to go over in Revit, how you actually upload to utilize the Collaboration for Revit.

So now, we're going to go live to BIM 360 Team. I'm going to show you the folder structure on Collins Park, and then go through the Revit of how this set up a project and upload it to the Collaboration for Revit. So here, you see, if you go down to Drawings, so this is the folder structure that we have. So we have, for X RESTS, we have [? blots. ?] We have PDFs and reference files. So if we click on the BIM, that's where we keep our models here.

So as you can see here, we're going to be going over the publishing, but this is where you publish to, and you can see the versions that we have. This is where you would download to your file, so this is a share. This is where you can download. And this has some other additional options that we'll go over in a little bit. But the key is at each, so middle, you would want to archive your project, and this is where you can access that information. And you can see these all say Cloud Revit, so they're on the Collaboration for Revit.

So now we're going to switch over to Revit, and Mike's going to open up a new template. So you would just browse to your template for your project, for your company. Or if you're not lead on the project, they may have uploaded one, whatever the case may be. So here, he's going to click on a template. He's going to open the file. It's going to be saved as a project, and he's first going to save it locally, and then we're going to set up to sync it up to Collaboration for Revit.

So then you would just save the file. So you can save it as class, sample. Save. And then once he saves, he's going to go to the Collaborate tab up here. And then in here, you would hit Collaborate, and then you're going to hit Collaborate Using the Cloud, and then hit OK. And basically, at that point, you would pick the name, if you were going to change it, but I doubt that. And then you're going to pick the project, so here's all your projects that you may be a member of, but the one that you wanted to go to, and then go ahead and initiate.

Now once you do that, you would have to be signed in, so be sure that before you even go through those steps, which Mike was already signed in. But you would have to be signed in to your Autodesk account before you could do Collaborate. The Collaborate is under the Collaboration tab. And then, of course, you'll get this information here. And it's like magic, you're there. So then you're on the BIM 360 Team Collaboration for Revit.

So that's how you upload your file. And once you upload, the one key thing to note is that it goes to the root. So even if you've already set up your folder structures for your project, just know that it's going to go to the root of the directory. So then what you're going to need to do is go to your BIM 360 Team, like it's at the root, and then at this icon here, this is where you can move or delete. And you would want to move it to the directory folder that suits your company, if you're using a folder structure, which we recommend.

And then to open the file on Collaboration for Revit, you would have, of course, close the file. You would reopen it using this icon here, the 360 BIM Team. When you say File Open, and what that does is it actually takes you to all your projects. You would click on your project. Like I say, we go to Sample. Click on that file that he just saved, and then you could open it. At that time, it's cached into your local. Yep, cached into your local, and then you're also on the cloud. And then you will save, and then you can seek it back up to central.

Now, another nice tool is that you have the communicator. So what was nice for us is we had subs. We had seven subs. So as you know, it's kind of like the Skype. So what's good is that I could communicate with all of my subs very easily. This tells you the active project. It also tells you the current user. It also tells you the active team members, who's current, and which model. Because you can see here, I was in this model and they were in the other. And then, of course, this just tells you the team members that are not logged in at the time.

And you also have the chance to communicate. So what's good is, let's say I needed my subconsultant to move the structure wall, maybe a foot, or whatever it may be. I can just message them. You also have some additional options here, where you could copy, cut, like we were doing here to talk. And then they can make that change and then they would sync to central. And before, where you were using maybe SharePoint or STP, you'd have to save it and then upload it and download it. But here, you're just going to be able to refresh and then get the changes instantly. So it makes production go a lot better. You also, if don't have that opened, you'll get this chat notification will light up, and then you know to open it because someone's trying to communicate with you.

So now, the next thing I'm going to talk about is linking files into Revit. You basically have two cloud services. That's the two colors here so you can understand how it works. You have your BIM 360 Team project and you have your Collaboration for Revit. So as you see, all your Revit modeler users, as we were taking our model and moving it up to C4R. You're also going to have your AutoCAD drawings, like we said, in the Folder structure on BIM 360 Team.

Now, the one thing you have to note is if you are working in versions lower than 2018, you'll have to, in your execution plan, identify a common path that everybody would set up on their C drive, BIM 360 Team. We did projects, and the project number, for where you're going to-- let's say you want to link an AutoCAD drawing that's on the project, or you may want to link a PDF. Well, that file that's on your BIM 360 Team would have to be copied to this local.

And then, of course, you would just have to update it as it changes, but that's so you can link it in. Now, Autodesk's always making great changes, so in 2018, you have this new tool called Autodesk Desktop Connector. So the good thing about that is you won't have to do that in 2018 and above. So that's a nice new enhancement.

So now, how do you publish? So I was showing you where they were publishing to BIM 360 Team. And before you publish-- we'll just go over this real quick-- here's the icon here to sync with central. So when you're working on your file and you save it, you first would save it locally, and then you would hit the sync with central, and that's when it caches it back up to the cloud, C4R. And then, of course, if someone did a change and they said, hey, if you want to see my change, this is how you would reload that down. Michael was talking about communicating with your team, that's how you would reload that down.

So now, to publish it, which is going, remember, to the cloud server on BIM 360 Team, because it's two servers, cloud services, you would go to the Manage Cloud Model. When you click on that, it brings up all your projects, so then you would click on the one that you want to access, which ours would be Sample. And then you would click on the file. And then once you clicked on the file, you see you have these buttons here, and this is the Publish. So that's where you would publish the BIM 360 Team.

When you hit that button, it kind of pulsates right here, and then it'll stop and have a checkpoint once it's complete. And then, of course, this is the Actions item that you can either rename, relinquish, review, and then delete. Now the review, that's when you save your file and send to C4R. You can get versions back here. So if you ever had a problem, you can actually go here to get your backups. But just be mindful, you might want to do some of your troubleshooting first, which Adam will be going over, so we'll talk about that. But those are where those items are there for additional changes.

You also have a Publish Settings, where you can actually save your set. So like we had basins 7 and 8, so we wanted to save a set for basin 7. We wanted to save a set for basin 8, and then for both. And then that would include all your PDFs. You could check what you want. Our best practices was to use all the sheets, and at minimum, one of the overall 3D views so that the people can view the model as the viewers, like we were talking about.

So here, this is, basically, just an image of the review that you have on BIM 360 Team. And the viewers get this view of the sheets, and also of the 3D model if you publish it. And you have options to actually mark it up. And then what's really cool is you have BIM 360 Team app you can install on your iPhone. You can even install it on your iPad. So let's say you wanted to-- I have someone, I need them to make a change to a model. Well, I didn't want to spend the time to open up my computer, log in. I can just take my phone app, and then you review the model, as long as they publish. And you can also compare different versions that they've done, so that's kind of nice, too.

Now, hey, it's not a perfect world, right? We know we had some crashes. So I'm not going to say we didn't have any crashes, because we did. But the good news is they weren't contributed to Collaboration for Revit. Some of them were ours. We did tracked problems with the Excel spreadsheet. We had some unknowns. We had some corrupt content. And then there were two. That was where C4R was down, but it was just a few hours. And this is where you would use that health check.

So you would want to make sure you check the health check, because what you can do is just save locally, and then once it's cleared up, then you can send it and sync it to central. So that's just good to know. Now, I'm going to turn it over to Adam and he's going to talk about some good stuff about how you can track some of your issues and troubleshooting.

ADAM PETER: All right, thank you, Julie.

JULIE NICHOLSON: OK, I'm sorry.

ADAM PETER: Yup, that's fine. All right, so that was really awesome. Thanks for walking us through so much stuff.

JULIE NICHOLSON: Yeah.

ADAM PETER: So I get to geek out with you guys for a few minutes, so hopefully some of this stuff will be useful. What I want to talk about first, actually, is a little bit on the Collaboration for Revit side, but it also applies to anytime you're doing work sharing in Revit. Just with a quick raise of hands, how many of you guys know where the journal file is for Revit? OK, excellent. So that's a pretty good handful. We'll be walking through-- I'll show you where the journal file is, because some of what I want to talk about today is performance and how to tell if something's working or not working. specific to Collaboration for Revit, but not in all cases.

So for example, starting with sync with central, I just thought it might be a good idea to walk through what the processes are that happen when you do a sync with central, and then talk about-- one of the main contributors to slow sync times, for example, is when you have multiple people doing syncs at the same time, right? So what is it, exactly, that's happening there that causes that to take forever? So we'll talk through that.

So any time you do a sync with central, there is a number of different things that happen. So the first thing that happens is we save that local copy that you happen to have open. So that gets saved, and then the next step here is the read. So what we're doing there is we're checking with a central model in Collaboration for Revit, for instance. That means we're going up to the C4R service, and we're downloading any changes that anybody has committed since the last time we did a sync to central.

Now, the one other thing that I will say in that regard is that, if you're familiar with Revit server, you may also be aware of the Revit accelerators. And I will say that when you install Collaboration for Revit, there is a small footprint of a Revit accelerator, or a version of Revit accelerator, that runs on the client machine. So when you're doing things like open and sync with central, that service on your client machine is likely prefetching a lot of that data for you, and that's why we get pretty good performance, even when you're working in C4R. So just to be aware of that.

So then once we have all of the information downloaded, we do a regen of the model and any open views that you have, and then we save it, and then we upload any changes, any local changes, that you've made. We send those back up to the service. We compare, then, what you have locally with what we've updated on the service. And if that all looks good, we commit those things to the service, and then we relinquish. So when you do a sync with central, you know there's that check back to relinquish any of your stuff. So that happens right at the end. And then we do one last save locally, just to make sure everything is happy and content, and then you can move on from there.

So this process is really the same anytime we're doing work sharing at all, so whether you have a central file on your network someplace, you're using Revit server, or Collaboration for Revit, this process is basically the same. The only difference is whether it's talking to Revit server or to the cloud, or whatever. So I want to go back to that instance and just go back here to the non-overlapping sync with central.

So in a perfect world scenario, your team's communicating well. That first person-- whoops, hang on-- that first person has made their change. They start their sync with central. It reads off the server and says, yep there's nothing new, so we can take our changes, upload them, and commit them. After that's done, this other person, they start their sync with central. It goes and grabs everything from the service, regens it. Everything looks good, we upload it. Everything is the same in both cases, so we make those commitments. We relinquish all the ownership things, and then we're done. OK, so that's how a normal sync to central operation would work.

What can often happen, and I actually have a journal file that I'll show you that we can actually see this happen in a real journal file. But what happens is the first person starts with sync with central, they pull down no changes because the other person hasn't started quite yet. So they pull down their changes, which are nothing. It looks at it and starts the upload process, right? But before it gets to that, the second person has started their sync with central.

And at that point, because the first person hasn't finished committing yet, it looks like there's no change there. So this side thinks, OK, that's great. No changes. I'm going to go upload my stuff. And then all of a sudden, it says, whoops, there's something there. I have to abort because this isn't what I was expecting to see, right? So then what happens is it has to go through the whole read again for the service. It says, OK, there's something new there, so I'm going to re-download that, redo the whole regen, make my changes, and then come back up. And as long as nobody else has started a sync with central, or anything like, then the service's happy and it can go ahead and finish.

So from the sense of, it's not like you're ever going to see an error, because what will happen is that second user, it will just keep looping through that download regen. I'll try to upload again, and as long as it gets to a point where that's the same stuff on the service is what he has local, it will finish. It will finish that process, but you can add minutes to the whole process, right? So what might be a 30 second or a minute long process could all of a sudden be a five minute process, depending on where everybody's at, and all of that sort of thing, right? So it does make a big difference? Yeah?

AUDIENCE: Does the delay only occur when user 1 is synchronizing, or would it also occur if user 1 was opening the [INAUDIBLE]

JEFF REUTTER: No, opening wouldn't change it, because that's pretty much a read download, right? So as long as they're not making commits back to the central file, it wouldn't make a change. So the question was, is the same instance happening if somebody else is opening the model? No, it's only for commit.

AUDIENCE: Same sort of question, if somebody [? is going ?] to check that entire worksite [INAUDIBLE] monitor [INAUDIBLE]

JEFF REUTTER: It just depends. I mean, it's working the way Revit is normally going to work, right? So if somebody has ownership of all of those elements-- I mean, you shouldn't ever be in a situation where two people own the same elements at the same time. So the ownership part of it doesn't really matter so much, as much as when the local copy is looking up at the service, at the server.

It's really looking to see is, are the changes still what I expect to see when I looked at it the first time? And if they are, it will finish the process. If it isn't, then it has to go through that whole cycle again of pull the data down, regen everything, and then check again to see, is this how I left it the last time I started? So this can take a lot of time. And as Julia was pointing out with the communicator, that's a super helpful tool to use on a number of different levels, right?

So one is just the instant messaging aspect of it. So you can do instant messages for the whole team. You can set up groups so that just the people that are working on your discipline model, or set of models, are in a group together. So I see a lot of customers who are just strictly using the IM Communicator to say, hey, I'm syncing, and then they do their sync, right? And then the next person says, I'm going to sync, and then they do their sync.

But there's also a timeline on the communicator. So that's a separate part of that panel that should show every time somebody is actively doing a sync with central. The icon like flashes and shows that there's activity. So you can also self-monitor how you're doing the sync with central there as well. So this-- like [? fire ?] [? and ?] [? away ?] is one of the biggest contributors to long sync with central times. So I just felt like this was probably a good thing to walk through for everybody. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: So I've seen, from the communicator's standpoint, I've seen cases where the timeline, it would say that sync with central, it will give the spinning wheel, but then we would have users reporting that it was completed--

JEFF REUTTER: Yeah, the wheel still spins, or something like that. So the comment over here is that the communicator isn't always 100% accurate, as far as if somebody is still syncing or not. So that's valid. That does happen from time to time, so I would certainly not discount that. So the instant messaging might also be a good way to handle that. So yeah, I'm just saying it's a tool that could be useful. It has its glitches, I'll admit that, yeah.

All right, so before we get into the journal files, are any of you guys using Notepad++, or something like that? So I just want to say, if you're just using Notepad to open stuff, this is a really handy tool when you're going to start doing troubleshooting stuff and analytics, and things like that. It's a free tool. It doesn't cost anything. So that's one of the reasons I like it. The other reason is because it has a number of different plug-ins that you can use that are pretty effective.

The one plug-in that I'll be showing today is called an analyzed plug-in, and I believe this PowerPoint is posted to the class thing, so these are all hyperlinks. Once you guys download the PowerPoint, you'll be able to access these here, as well, so just be aware of that. So I like to use that tool, the analyze part, specifically, because you can do multi-text searches, and you can color code things, and stuff like that. So for example here, I have a bunch of search criteria, so I can see like all the sync to central activity. So I can pull that down [INAUDIBLE] and just see it clearly. It consolidates it all into one thing

So for sync to central specifically, the big things we're looking for-- I know it's a little hard to see on here-- is it's an open chevron with STC. I know a lot of times we say SWC for sync with central, but in the journal file, it's actually STC. So if you're looking for the open chevron and the closed chevron, that will give you the start of the operation and the end of the operation. And there's always a time stamp right with that, too.

And what's great about this, and we'll go through this and you'll see, is that it shows you, basically, every step that I showed you in that graph earlier is captured in a journal file. So you can see exactly where those hang-ups are happening, if you happen to have them. So if you have somebody who says, my sync to central is taking a long time, you can start looking in the journal and say, OK well, where is that? Is that in the download of data part of it? Is it during the regen part of it? Did we get stuck in a loop because you synced with central with somebody else at the same time? That's where it really becomes helpful.

Oh, yeah, and it's also really helpful for large text file. So here, just as an example, I have some journal files here in a folder, and the largest journal file is like 971 meg. That's somebody who's left Revit open for like, a week, because every time you open Revit, it creates a journal file. When you close Revit, it closes that journal file. So you might have multiple journal files for the same day, depending on if somebody opened Revit multiple times during the day. So you just have to look at the time stamps, ask that person what time of day they were experiencing the issue, and then you can go find the journal from there.

All right, so like I said, I have a journal file I'll pull up here in a second, but just to walk you through the operations. And I know this is probably a little small for you guys in the back. But basically, the save to local. Again, it starts with this STC in the open chevron, then it does the reed stuff. So it's STC, and then it starts RL for reload [INAUDIBLE] and then it does the read. Why regen is DP and not like, REG, or something like that, I have no idea, but that's what is going to be there. Again, this is on the PowerPoint. If you guys download it, you'll see this here, too. So that's there.

The save. So this is that commit back up to the central file on the C4R service, and then relinquish. So again, if you have that box to check to relinquish elements, when you're done with the sync to central operation, that will show up in the journal file as well. And then the one last save. So the big things to look for here, especially if you have users saying, my sync with central is taking x amount of minutes, and that seems really slow. You can go into their journal file, and the big thing is look for the STC with the opened chevron and the closed chevron, and you can look at the minutes.

So this was at 749 and 26 seconds, 752 and seven seconds. So this was a fairly long sync with central. But what was the cause for it? Well, there's a minute and a half of regen time. So the other thing I just wanted to bring your attention is that every time you do a sync with central, if you have elements that came from somebody else that are changes that they've made, and they affect any view that you have open, it's going to regen all of those views. So if you have Revit open and you've got 10 or more, or whatever, views open, and you do a sync with central, depending on what changes you're actually downloading you, might have a long period of time during that sync with central where it's just regening views.

So from my standpoint, it's always a good idea to close any views you're not actively working in at the moment before you do a sync with central so that you can save quite a bit of time on those sync with centrals. I've seen sync with central that take 10, 15, 20 minutes, and there because there's a lot of changes happening. So some of that could actually be the download time of new data that's coming, depending on the amount of data that other people are making changes in. But again, if it's affecting all the views that you have open, then that can take a significant chunk of time. So just be aware of that.