Satellite office + Team work or copy paste/internet/server.

[Anonymous]

Hi.
Do any of you guys have satellite offices?

We're having a heck of a time trying to work on this big house we're doing here. We need alot of people working on it, but we cannot figure out how to do this efficiently.

Does any one use team work over the internet- or through a server.

We have an inner office server at my office, and all of us here use it and work off it.
But our Bedford, NY office doesn't work directly from our server, they copy their work from it and put it back on, cause the server's physical location is here in Lake Placid.
Seems to me the internet connection is not fast enough for them to work from our server, alot of lagging and crashing.



What we have been doing is copying and pasting work from the bedford model to my model and vice versa.

Things can get lost, and alot of stuff has to be done more than once, for instance- our solid element operations get lost through this copying and pasting. Dimensions are hard to deal with.

I guess I am hoping someone will say "Yes, of course you can use teamwork and stream it online" or something! This is a month now we have been trying to do this this way.

Any advice appreciated, Thank YOu!

[TomWaltz]

We have several offices scattered around the globe. I suspect the difference is that we have a very fast connection between the offices. Signing in from one office to another is definitely slower than if you were in the same office, but it's tolerable. What kind of connections speeds are you dealing with?

Also remember, Teamwork only really handles up to 5 or 6 people in a PLP at one time. More than that and Archicad bogs down really badly. Are you overcrowding your model?

You might also be better off to divide the building into multiple files and hotlink them together (similar to the Graphisoft Big Building White Paper)

[Anonymous]

I will find what kind of connection speed we have, but I guess I am wondering HOW you are signing into your other offices?

is it a software thing.

When Bedford signs into to Lake Placid to get our files they sign into our server, which is one solo computer. They use VNC Viewer, so they actually have control of it until they are done.


So, how are you guys doing it?
Extra computers in the office, is it a software thing?

We have used Go To My PC, and Log Me In, so that we can log into other computers in each office, and it is also helpful for when Bedford has a question regarding ArchiCAD and it is hard sometimes to explain your question so I would just log into their computers from Lake Placid and we can walk through it togther.

I think Go To My PC was pretty fast, but, still they would need be logging into a computer here , and we really only have two extra computer stations, and they are not allways empty.

I guess when I said we have alot of people working on this project, only four of us are wokring on the model in ArchiCAD the rest are hand drafters.

So four people would proabably be our max capacity.

So- thank you, and when you sign into otehr offices all teh time and it is quite speedy- you are also using team work?

[TomWaltz]

Because we have a secure connection between the offices, it's just a matter of mapping some folder on a remote file server like \\remoteOffice\\files\\projects\ to a drive in Windows (we use M by convention, but it doesn't much matter as long as everyone uses the same letter) Once you have the drive mapped, you can sign into the PLP like it was local.

There's no extra computers sitting around because everyone is connecting directly to the file server and working with a Teamwork file.

The trick is getting the connection between the offices. A fast, secure connection costs!

You could to the remote graphics thing, but it's kind of a pain. There's a really bad latency the whole time you are working and a lot of the smart cursors don't display right. GoToMyPC or other products are OK for tech support but I would never recommend them as a production method.

[Anonymous]

I agree that the methods I mention ar enot practical for this stuff either.
And yes handy for tech support.

OK, so I will be giving my "tech" guy a call and see what he thinks about hooking us up and costs.

I don't see how the cost could be more than the big guy here is willing to afford.

After all it is practically necessary, and we did just bu one of those 3D printers.

[Anonymous]

How about using Filezilla?...
I've never tried to use it with team work, but I use it to synchronize my partners remote libraries with mine on the server (an old pc that I use as a server)...
The process is done by an amazing freeware application called syncback that updates all the files every hour during the day...
The process is secure and relatively quick with a band width of 2mbits.

[Greg Kmethy]

Jesikuh123 wrote:

What we have been doing is copying and pasting work from the bedford model to my model and vice versa.

Instead of copying and pasting it is certainly more efficient that someone manages the send and receives in your main office. This person would sign in in the name of each team mate, save a local draft (.plc or .pca), send out this file to the remote office, where teammates work with it, then they send back the drafts at the end of the day, and the chap sends and receives all the drafts in the central file again.

This is more secure then doing the actual send and receive over the internet, if you do not have a reliable (probably a leased line) connection between your offices.

Alternatively, you should use hotlinked modules to split up the project.

[Brad Elliott]

I agree with Gergely. That is how we dealt with it here.

Put one person in charge of sending out and receiving the files from the home office. They sign in with the name of the person the file is going to and then email or ftp them the draft file. At the end of the day or when the parceled out file is needed the file is sent back to the home office person and a send and receive is done. If you have been efficient with your divisions you can frequently resend the updated file without ever having to log out.

This does not have to be daily. We have had people performing firecode @ zoning drawings and they kept that draft for the several days required to finish the drawings before sending them back. Same with some of our interiors work.

If the file gets too big for easy emailing create a folder on your server so the files can be dropped and removed from there.

[Anonymous]

Hi Guys.
We are trying this teamwork between to offices.
Our other office has our main file and they are sending me a draft file to work on.

I am wondering if after they save out a draft for me do they sign out of my name? Or do they need to leave it open?

If they do sign out how do we send a receive changes when I send the file back to them?

It seems the main file would not recognize me as signed on anymore so it would not accept my changes?

Also if we have to leave it open is some one down there supposed to have all of the teamwork files signed out and left open on a computer so we remain signed in with the main file?

That seem like it would slow the computer down a lot.

Any advice would be great, Thanks!

[owen]

[Edit] Please excuse any mixed up Ys, Zs, etc ... typing on a damn German Apple Wireless keyboard at the moment.

At my old office we had the same issue working on a major project with a team of around 10 split between two cities .. we had a business grade connection and VPN set up but it was not fast enough for direct sign-ins remotely. We would simply Sign In to the Teamwork files as each of the team members in the remote office, sent them a Draft of this session and then we would Sign Out when they returned the file. You MUST NOT sign the remote teammates out while they are still working in their Draft copy as the Sign In IDs will not match and you won't be able to Send & Receive their changes when they return the files.

Of course being able to Sign In directly from the remote office would be nice but (at least in Australia) a business-grade connection of the speed Tom's office sounds like it has is going to cost you thousands of dollars per month and up. A justifiable expense for a large firms with manz staff in multiple locations, but for small and medium sized firms it is an overhead most cannot afford.