Best procedure for revisions?

[Anonymous]

I am in the process of updating our drawing procedures. Currently its a free for all when it comes to revisions. Some people in our office save mulitle copies of the pln for each revision. Some overwrite the file without saving the previous drawing.

The way I see it, you have one drawing file (.pln), but before making any changes to the drawing, save the layout as a PDF in the project folder. Then make changes and overwrite the (.pln) file with a save. Obviously making your revisions clear on your layout notes!

This way you have a record of previous revisions without lots of large files floating around the server.

Am I right or am I way off? Your thoughts please before I get things set in stone! Lol

[Anonymous]

I agree, except that revision control with text documents is infinitely less complicated than with BIM. It is something that is sorely needed in BIM, but it should be something that is so easy and intuitive to control that it makes you laugh. It should be as easy as it is with paper documents or even more so. I honestly don't believe that software this complicated will create a solution that is as simple and elegant as it needs to be. Maybe we should keep discussing it for another year to iron the kinks out and decide on how it really shoul work for architects. 😉

[Geoff Briggs]

Any new revision control system needs to be forward thinking as well. So far the discussion has centered almost exclusively around changes to printed documents (or their PDF equivalents). But as we move toward more and more sharing of model data directly with other project team members an entirely new revisioning landscape opens up. This in turn needs to flow from the still nascent conversation the construction industry is having about how exactly to accommodate such sharing. I know this scares the bejeezes out of a lot of people, and rightly so, but this brave new world is now a fact of life for architects. Digital collaboration on high profile projects is earning a lot of headlines. Depending on how long you plan to continue practising this will trickle down to firms of all sizes, just as CAD and BIM have. Graphisoft can ill afford to ignore this as Microstation and Revit are garnering most of the attention. Check out these articles about this year's AIA BIM awards as an example, part 1 and part 2.

[Anonymous]

We have some office management software called , which we use to do a lot of our archiving/revision/drawing issue stuff, and its a good solution IMHO, although I'm still quite new to it so we'll see how it goes, and we have one big glitch operating it with ArchiCAD/Plotmaker, which is where i'm looking for some help.

How it works is that within the software is an automated drawing issue system, which links to the actual drawings themselves, so that every time you update drawings it automatically updates the revision letter that will appear on the issue sheet and every time you issue new or revised drawings it automatically saves a zipped copy of the drawing to an archive folder. This avoids the need for big sticks when dealing with forgetful technicians like me, which i'm obviously very happy about.

The problem is that it's set up to work with individual drawing files rather than layout books and building models and things, so we have a dilemma similar to the one discussed above - do we link our automated drawing issue system to the model, and therefore archive lots of big model files which when opened don't look anything like the individual 'paper' drawings we are issuing, or do we link to pdf/dxf/whatever files which we have to remember to manually update every time we update an individual sheet in plotmaker, thus losing the automated-ness and reintroducing the spectre of the big stick when someone (probably me) forgets to update the pdf and it all goes horribly wrong... what we'd really like is either a) a way that we can link to individual sheets in plotmaker, rather than the whole file or b) a way (some sort of macro? way over my head) to get plotmaker to automatically set up a pdf file for every sheet in a layout book and then automatically update (overwrite) it every time we update the sheet in plotmaker.... help!

Any suggestions greatly appreciated. We are currently using AC8.1 and plotmaker 3(!) but are upgrading to AC10 (yippee!) in the near future.