We just released the first Service pack for Revit. This has been long awaited.
Most of you probably know that Revit did not use traditional services packs for updates in the past. We had these things we called builds which were full installations of Revit that needed to be installed each time there was an update.
Updating Revit always meant having to uninstall your previous version and install the new one. This happened when installing using a Network deployment or a single standalone seat.
For a standalone installation this happened automatically during the installation process of a new build, but for a deployment this could be painful as you had to manually uninstall the build from each machine in order to install the new deployment that you had to create for the new version.
Then there is content downloading. Every build of Revit asked if you wanted to download content for your installation. Sometimes, this content was new with a web update, sometimes it wasn’t. It wasn’t always clear what was new, what was old, and what changed. The other problem was that content could take a long time to download (especially if your internet connection was slow). It’s was a lot of data to go and get.
The service pack now includes all the content that has changed with the update. This means you don’t have to waste time downloading the content after you have downloaded the update and you only get what has been updated or is new.
A little support note: Make sure you read the documentation before installing the service pack.
There is a lot of great information in the documentation that explains how things work and how you can install it to multiple machines etc. Everything becomes much easier if you read the documentation.
I do want to mention three things that are in the documentation here:
First, it’s important to note that if you have Web Update 1 installed and you deleted the C:\Program Files\Revit Product Name\Download folder to make space on your hard drive, you will need to re-download the build again (either Web Update 1 or the original version, depending on which version you currently have installed) and double click on the download so that it extracts the files. Once the actual installation begins, you can cancel the installation, but if you do not have the download folder on your machine, installation of the Service pack will not be able to begin.
The reason for this is that Revit is looking for the Autodesk Revit.msi that is typically stored in the download in C:\Program Files\ Revit Product Name\Download\RevitSetup\RevitBuilding or RevitStructure or Revit MEP. If it the msi cannot be found during the installation it will not start (this is why you need the DVD in your drive if you installed from the DVD as well).
Second, this service pack cannot be appended or merged with an existing deployment. You will need to install the service pack on every machine individually no matter if you used a deployment to install Revit. the service pack does include some switches so that this process is easier. Again, look at the documentation.
Third, the service pack cannot be uninstalled separately from Revit. You will need to totally uninstall and reinstall Revit if, after you installed the Service pack, you would like to remove it.
I've been antipating the service pack for a long time and I hope that you find the installation much easier and more user friendly. Let me know what you think.
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