Danny Polkinhorn
Many of you will have some experience with the new online deployment configuration that became available with Revit 2021.1. For those that haven’t tried it yet, see this post for information about the new end-to-end deployment workflows, and give it a try here. For this post, I wanted to highlight some key learnings from customers who used the new process in the last year, as well as some changes made in Revit 2022.
Lessons Learned
Often, Revit content is shared within your company on a network location. You would put your company’s Templates, Families, Lookup Tables, etc. in that location and specify in your user’s Revit.ini files to look to the shared location for them. When creating your deployment in the online configuration, you will see options for specifying the location of that content. By default, the location is on the local computer’s C drive. We recommend not changing this to your network location, as it will attempt to install there with every deployment installation you run. Instead, leave it on the C drive so your users to have a local copy, and just include a custom Revit.ini that points to the shared location.
If you want to remove the Autodesk Desktop Application from your deployment image, we will soon be adding an option to do this in the online configuration tool. However, you can also use the brute-force method described in the online help documentation here.
New capabilities
Over the last year, we’ve made some improvements to the online configuration capabilities. You can now create deployments with multiple products, which is particularly useful for those of you with AEC Collection. If you have teams of users with the same product needs, you can create a deployment with their specific products and customization in mind. Recently, Deployments in the left-navigation was changed to Custom Install, and we added the ability to create an installer for your own computer using the same options that are available for deployments. Custom Install is available for all users, so non-admins can now create their own custom installers. We made other improvements in reliability and installation success to make installs more seamless. With 2021, you still had the option to download Revit 2021.0 and use the older Deployment Wizard to create your deployments. This method is no longer available with Revit 2022.
While configuring Revit specifically, there are new options for optional Extensions and Content exclusive to Custom Installs. You have the option to remove Batch Print, eTransmit, Worksharing Monitor, and other extensions from your installation. This can reduce the installation time of your deployment installs and gives you more choice. In addition, all of the Essential content for different regions is now selectable, so you can remove content from your installations where you don’t need them.
We hope these changes further improve your experience creating deployments for your users, giving you more options and faster installs. We have many new features we’re working on and will be releasing over time, so if you have any feedback or new capabilities that will benefit your company workflows, please let us know. For more information about other installation changes in this release, see the Help documentation.