Organizing the Warehouse and Template Models on Your Server

Okay. In this video, I'm going to show a recommended approach to storing and organizing the Revix assets on your server. Now of course, I'm assuming you have a server. I'm gonna make a couple of points about if you don't have a server, if you have one of the other options. So you you most likely have a server, in which case just follow along.

If you are sole prop or something like that and you just work off of your own computer, then it's gonna be even simpler. And you don't have to work share because it doesn't matter because you don't have anyone else accessing your models. If you do have multiple people in your firm who might access these models and you're storing everything on something like Dropbox or Box or Drive or anything like that, then you we're gonna talk about that because if files are stored on any of those sort of cloud hosting things, you can't work share them. It it it doesn't work with a work sharing thing. So you gotta watch out for that, and you you need some other system to handle that.

I'll mention that when we get there, but be that as it may, I recommend at least you set up the folders and everything the way I'm about to show no matter what your situation is, and then just how we deal with those. We'll get into the details of that depending on what kind of infrastructure you have. Okay. So probably on your server, you've got a drive or a partition that is your company standards drive, and likely you've got a folder in there that says Revit or BIM. If you don't, you need one, so make one.

In this instance, we're calling it Revit. So go ahead and open that, and let's make a new folder. And let's make the folder it's gonna say twenty twenty three template and warehouse. Okay. And over here, we've got our downloads folder where I've downloaded all of the Rev X assets.

Now you you there's also a download for things like the projects files. That's separate. I'm not gonna get into those, so I just didn't include them so they wouldn't distract you. And I'm going to do this as if you've got the mechanical probe, but if you've got a different discipline or full MEP, it's the same deal just more files. So we're gonna extract these. K. And I'm gonna grab the three Revit models. I'm gonna copy those. I'm gonna come over here in 2023 and I'm gonna paste them. I'm gonna go up.

I'm gonna create a new folder called shared parameter shared parameter file rather. And I'm gonna copy in the Revix shared parameters, put it in here. And I'm also gonna create a little text document next to it. I'm gonna say, don't edit this file on file. I'll spell it correctly. File unless you know what you are doing. I'm not gonna be able to handle that. Let's let's spell that correctly. Doing. And that's just you can't warn people enough about messing with shared parameters files.

So I just like to put little warnings scattered throughout the system. Okay. So we've got our 2023 template in warehouse. We've got our shared parameters file. We've copied things over. Let's go in here. So now you've got a choice. You may decide to strip out these dates that we put in here. We put these here so you so you it's easy to keep track of which version of these as we update it, you know, if we release one in January 17, it'll say twenty six zero one seventeen. So we want you to to be aware of that.

If you wanna ship those out, that's fine. We just want to make sure that we've got the record of which version this is so things don't get complicated. So now we have a choice. The choice is these are all currently non workshared models. They're not central models.

They're just standalone Revit models. Okay. If you are in a local server environment where you've got people, where you've got other multiple people who might want to be making updates to the template, to the warehouse, accessing these, then you're gonna want to make both the template and the warehouse central models. Don't wanna make them central models in this location. That's so that you don't have problems with multiple people trying to access it at the same time.

Okay. If you are on Dropbox, don't do that because it will it will break. The the the central work work sharing doesn't work or it'll work until it gets corrupted. So I don't recommend that you try to do that. So so if you're on Dropbox or something like that, skip this step. And if you're just a sole op, it doesn't matter. You're gonna be running off of just standalone models, so that also doesn't matter. If you're on ACC, I recommend that you don't store these on your local server. I actually kind of recommend that you put them up on ACC. That's what we do at Rev X because we're a distributed team and we all want to access the models and we don't have a server somewhere, so we use ACC.

It's great. But that's kind of a separate set of videos. So point is, at this step, if you're on a server, if you're sort of plain vanilla IT situation here, we are going to turn these into central models. So I'm gonna open there. I'm gonna open my warehouse, and you see the work sharing detach from central and create new local are grayed out.

That's because it's a standalone model. K. So here we are. And I want to work share it, so I'm gonna come over to collaborate tab, collaborate, and I'm going to stay within my network. If you if you were gonna push it up to ACC, you'd click in the cloud, but that's not what we want. We want within our network. Okay. So we've activated work sharing. You can tell because the work sets, default work sets have been created. And then we need to do a save as.

And so here's the choice of we can choose what to name this when we save it. And if you're not planning on making updates to your warehouse, if you're planning on just absorbing the new updates as we send them, then maybe you want to keep this. But if you want to be working on it yourself, kind of want to make this your warehouse and remove that date and it's going to become the central source of truth warehouse for your firm. So then you might call this like you might even add like let's just say that your firm three letter acronym is ABC. Right?

So you might add your name in there so you know like this is ours now, like we own this and we're making modifications to it. And and that will allow you to keep them distinct. So I'm going to options just to confirm for ourselves that this is gonna make this a central model after the save, which it is, and then we say save. Okay. So it's finished saving, and of course, anytime you save a model as a central model, you want to immediately get out of it because you don't want to be in the central.

I'm gonna go to open and here we go, the ABC pro warehouse and you can see if I single click on this, create new local is checked. So this is now a central model. I can access it. Anyone else on my server can access it, create a new local copy, make modifications to it, sync with central and everything's good. Okay. So now let's do the same thing for the template. Again, the template is a standalone file. We're gonna open that, and we're gonna do a collaborate within the network. Okay. Okay.

It's been work shared. Again, here's the worksets, and I'm gonna do a file, save as oops. I missed. Close that file, save as project, and, again, I'm gonna say RevEx a b c. I'm gonna take the date out.

This is now gonna be my main template that I, as BIM manager hat wearer for firm ABC, this is now our template I'm gonna start putting in our standards and things like that. If and when or when rather Rev X releases new templates, I'm gonna open them. If I like what I see in there, I'll grab those pieces of things and I'll push them I'll pull them over into this. Now again, this is a decision. Like for now maybe you don't want to own it, you just wanna use it for a while and maybe not make any modifications to the template, and as we release more, take those in and then at some point split it off into your own.

That's a decision that you're gonna have to make. It's a judgment call. I can't tell you what or when the right decision is, but that is kind of the deal. So okay. We're saving this as central model here. We're naming it. Okay. Central model has been created. And let's go back here. Let's see what we've got.

So now we've got our our ABC template and warehouse. We we also have these are the ones that we got, so you could put them in an archive folder just to keep a record of the Rev X as received models. And then the two d link model yeah. Let let's go talk about this. Open two d link model.

It's a standalone model. So this is the model that you would use if you're running projects with CAD backgrounds. So all this is is a container to link in models. I go into this more depth in my how to set up a CAD project series, so you can check that out. Point is is that some people make these central models, some people don't.

I'm just gonna show you how to make it a central model. It's rare that more than one person is gonna wanna get into this model at the same time, so probably not a big deal, but for consistency's sake, I like you know, if I've got my standards if they're gonna be central models, like to do that just so that it doesn't confuse people with like 13 different ways of opening a Revit model. So it's kind of like a few more clicks might save some disaster or time or confusion or frustration on the part of the staff that I'm supporting. So I've made it a central model. I'm gonna do files, save as, project here, and I'm just gonna yeah.

I'm just gonna take that out. Don't feel like I need that. I don't need to add a b c or anything like that because this is just a container model, so I'm not really I'm not really sweating that. So I'm gonna save it as a central model and close. Okay. So let's review. Oh, we don't need this one. Here we go. Link model, and, yeah, we're gonna move that one over as well. Now I've got my twenty twenty three template and warehouse files.

I have my template, my warehouse, and my two d link model, and, of course, I've got my shared parameters file over here. So a couple things to talk about right now is that you may want to decide to lock control access to these models because you don't want perhaps just anyone getting in here. So that's an IT thing. You can control the files, you can control the folders, make them read only, make a list of who can get in and who can get out. I can't show you because this is I don't have the server infrastructure on this machine, But if you need to do that, you can do that.

So that's just again, that's a decision and a call that you need to make. Most firms it's not a big deal and a lot of small firms, everyone kinda has the keys to the castle in terms of the Revit stuff because you want everyone to be able to get in and make updates and that sort of thing. Okay. So that's that's the 2023. But when people most of your projects are probably gonna be in later versions in 2023.

They're gonna be 2025 or maybe even 2026, of course. And you don't want to have to update the template in the warehouse every time you need to set up a new project. In particular, you don't want to have to upgrade the warehouse every single time you need to go get a family. So if nothing else, you want to maintain multiple versions of the warehouse because otherwise it's just a lot of time that people have to do every time they need to go grab one. Okay?

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna make a new folder and we're gonna call it the twenty twenty four template and warehouse. And we're just gonna grab these three models. We're gonna copy them, come over to twenty twenty four. We're gonna paste them, and then we're gonna change the names because these are the 2024 versions. Okay.

And then we're gonna create a text file as a reminder to ourselves and or others that the twenty twenty three models are the source of truth. Do not edit or customize do not edit or let's say add content to these models. Right? And so that's just a reminder when people come in here that like, right, these aren't live because Revit isn't backwards compatible. Right?

So if you create a new family in the 2024 warehouse, you won't be able to push it back into 2023 warehouse. So you always wanna be thinking about that, and that's why it's all always important to maintain your standards in as late of a version as you're actually starting new projects in. And so the and that's why we need to maintain twenty twenty three, 24, twenty twenty five template warehouse models. It's kind of annoying. It's kind of a time suck for the BIM manager, but it does save time on project work going forward.

As the person, I'm assuming you're the person who's gonna be setting up most of the models. It's up to you if you don't wanna bother making multiple templates because that's not such a big deal. Users aren't using those every day. It really depends on the tempo of how many templates you're setting up per week. Some people only set up, you know, I don't know, one or two projects a month.

Some people set up three projects a week. If you're setting up three projects a week, you probably want a whole batch. But if you're only doing a couple times a month, it's not a big deal, and so maybe you don't need to keep this. But the warehouse, people are always gonna be in the warehouse in different versions of it, so you want those. And so what we've got to do now is we've got to oh, man. I wonder if I even have Revit 24 on my computer. Yeah. It looks like I do. We're in luck. So we've we've named these Revit twenty twenty four, but these models are still Revit twenty twenty three.

Right? So we've got to go through and we've got a and we've also moved them. So these are central models in 2023 that we've moved, we've made a copy of, we've moved them, and we've told them that they're Revit 2024 now. So we've got to remake them as central models and we've got to upgrade them to Revit 2024. So here we are in Revit 2024 and we're going to open our warehouse.

So detached from central, it's it's available to check. It's unchecked and create new local is not checked. It's It's not checked because we're in 2024 and this is 2023 model, and Revit isn't gonna make it let us make a new local of that. And we wanna detach from central because we wanna detach it from the previous location. Okay?

So in one step, we're gonna upgrade from 2023 to 2024, and we're going to detach it from central. When we do a save as, we'll remake it as a central in its current location. Go ahead and click open. And for this, detach and preserve is fine. If you detached and discarded, it would disable work sharing and it would create a standalone version of the model.

And so if you wanted it if you still wanted to be a central model, you'd have to go re click collaborate tab, collaborate on this machine. Since we elected to keep the worksets, we won't have to hit that button. We'll just say save as and then save over in its current location and it'll be a central model. Alright. So it's upgraded the warehouse and all we have to do is file, save as project, make sure we're in the right place.

We're writing over the same the correct model, pro warehouse. Yep. There we go. And you can you don't need to hit options, but you can do that to verify for yourself that it's gonna make it a central model after save. Hit save. Gonna save over that backup file. Alright. It's saved. And again, we've just saved a central model. First thing we wanna do is close it, and we'll just verify for ourselves that it's all good.

So we've got create new local check. If I were to get into this model now, it would create a new local copy which is what I want. So I'm not gonna go through and do the rest of this for like six more versions of Revit and make you watch me do that, but it's the same thing. You're gonna you're gonna open this model and with detach from central selected, it's gonna upgrade it to Revit twenty twenty four. You're gonna do save as. It's gonna be central model. It's gonna be good. Gonna do the same thing with this one. Then you're do it for twenty twenty five, you're gonna do it for twenty twenty That is annoying, but that is kind of the name of the game. And again, depending on the dynamics of your firm, your project flow, what you're doing, you you might not have to do this that often.

I know some firms aren't even doing twenty twenty four. Right? They're only getting twenty twenty five and twenty six. In that case, skip twenty twenty four. Like, don't do it if you don't need it. You know, think about what you actually need and only do that.