Sharing from home

Worksharing is a great tool within Revit products for working on a model with multiple users.  It allows individuals to work on files and save those changes back to a central file.  It typically requires two things, a Central file located in a place where all users have access and a local file on your local machine for working in. 

The question is how can someone take a project home and work on it?  While working in Wisconsin, I found a need to be able to take work home with me over the weekend as I am sure a lot of Architects and Engineers have had to do.  With AutoCAD it was easy, just take the files home and work and bring them back Monday and replace the originals.   How does it work with Revit when worksharing is involved?

Well, if you can be on-line at home:

Use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection and Remote Desktop software to remote into a machine in the office and work virtually off of that machine.  This is a nice clean approach that lets you actually work as if you are in the office.  In my mind this is the best approach and has the least amount of chance to cause problems.  I use this approach now, when I need to work from home.  This works great because you can have multiple users remote into the office to get the work done.

It’s a little bit harder if you need to be offline (disconnected from the Internet), but there is a way.  These tips come from the AEC Lounge at AU this year.

1. For just yourself:
   
   • Make sure no one else is working in the file
   • Check out all the Worksets to yourself
   • Work off-line in your local file at home
   • Save to Central when you get back to the office (remember to relinquish all those checked out worksets)
2. For more than one person (trickier, but possible):
   
   • Make the needed worksets editable while still at the office and on the network
   • Be sure to save the Local File before closing it
   • At home, you can work, modify stuff in the editable Worksets, and you can add things to any workset
   • Warning!If you try to edit something in a workset that you don’t have checked out, Revit will warn you that it is only Editable at Risk. Try to avoid this! If someone at the office modifies the same element, you will NOT be able to Save to Central—all of your changes in all worksets will be lost!

Hopefully, you don’t have to work too much from home or on the road, but in the event that you need to, these are some good practices that you can use.  Again, special thanks to the Revit QA team for this tip!

Comments

[Work At Home To Make Money]

Revit is the best for working files.

[alejandro matos]

Thanks for such interesting answer on worksharing. But what if there is no server at job site, it is just you and someone else working from home in a single small project, let's say a large house with no detached buildings. Is there some sort of way of simulating a central file in which both users feed back and forth? There are only two users working on laptops.