David Smolker
With the launch of Autodesk’s 2023 products to the AEC Collection, new debuts for working with data in the cloud take center stage. In this post, we cover 5 new services and workflows, some in technology preview, which are available to AEC Collection subscribers. These can help you improve how you setup and standardize projects, share model information with collaborators, and automate tasks to suit the way you and your teams prefer to work.
1) New cloud service in Revit 2023 helps BIM managers deploy and standardize company-wide parameters | Technology Preview
With the Parameter Service released with Revit 2023 in Technology Preview, company-wide parameter libraries can be defined, updated, and deployed more universally and with greater standards control through Autodesk Docs in the AEC Collection. Migrate your parameter files to the cloud to make them more accessible and deployable for your project teams.
Use Parameter Service to create, upload, categorize, search, filter, and view parameter definitions. By sharing parameters from a central cloud repository in Autodesk Docs, you eliminate the need to track, update, and exchange local .txt files appended to Revit. You can batch upload parameters from an existing Revit shared parameters file to seed the cloud library. Then add or update parameters from the cloud to the local Revit model by using the ‘Manage’ tool in the Revit ribbon to access the ‘Parameter Service’.
By sharing parameters in the cloud, BIM managers and project teams gain assurance that everyone is working with the most up to date parameter definitions, making project setup in Revit more predictable, and improving coordination across the project team.
Next up, two desktop-to-cloud workflows for sharing data with “Data Exchanges” initiated with Autodesk Docs and Revit 2023 and made possible by the Autodesk Forge development platform.
2) Data Exchange in Autodesk Docs connects Revit data to low-code automation with the Microsoft Power Automate app ecosystem
Revit 2023 debuts a workflow for bringing Revit data into Microsoft Power Automate, allowing users to trigger automation across the expansive Microsoft ecosystem of productivity apps through a low-code interface. Share just the data needed and trigger actions when a change happens to the Revit model.
Read more about Revit and Microsoft Power Automate here.
3) Share design data for fabrication granularly, seamlessly, and securely with a new Revit to Inventor Data Exchange workflow
A new design to fabrication workflow also gets a spotlight, with the release of the 2023 versions of Revit and Inventor. Once again, Autodesk Docs serves as the data connector between design and fabrication teams, enabling specific, access-controlled sharing of BIM data subsets to inform fabrication workflows in Inventor.
Read more about Data Exchange for Revit and Inventor here.
4) Manage Fabrication data in the Cloud with Fabrication Data Manager (FDM) | Technology Preview
Built on Forge, FDM is a new service in Technology Preview for managing MEP fabrication content for Revit-based modeling workflows. FDM makes it easier to distribute and share content with other users, and creates opportunities for new connected workflows to emerge.
Read more about FDM here.
5) The new Autodesk Docs Point Cloud Viewer with ReCap Pro brings point-cloud data management to the browser
With ReCap Pro 2023, you can now share large reality capture project data with other users via Autodesk Docs to facilitate more effective visualizations, presentations, and inspection workflows in the field.
Once published, you can view and markup point clouds and 360 RealViews of these projects in a browser. This capability is a great addition and foundational to cloud-based workflows for reality capture data.
Read how to share point cloud in the Autodesk cloud here.
The bottom line: New 2023 releases for the AEC Collection put Autodesk Docs and the Autodesk Construction Cloud at the center of hybrid, desktop-to-cloud workflows that better meet the way you and your teams work.