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!

[Anonymous]

Owen-
So while the other office still has me signed in I would send my draft file back to them and they would overwrite the draft file that they had and send a receive changes?

how can we over write the old draft file with my new one if it is still open down there?

[owen]

Jesikuh123 wrote:
Owen-
So while the other office still has me signed in I would send my draft file back to them and they would overwrite the draft file that they had and send a receive changes?

how can we over write the old draft file with my new one if it is still open down there?

Your first sentence is correct ... not quite sure i follow the second though so i will just run through the process step-by-step:

1. Main Office (A) signs in as Other Office (B) and designates a workspace.
2. A then saves a Teamwork Draft. Good practice is to append the file name with the Teammate initials e.g 'ProjectX.plp' becomes a 'ProjectX OS.plc'
3. A then closes the Teamwork Draft (not sign out) and sends the saved file to B.
4. B opens the Teamwork Draft and does their thing
5. When B is finished they save the Draft, close the file (not sign out) and send the file back to A.
6. A then opens the received Teamwork Draft, Sends & Receives changes and can then Sign Out of the Draft or redefine the Workspace (and repeat, etc)

hope that helps

cheers,

os

[Link]

Every draft is given a unique ID. When they sign you in, that draft is given an ID of (say) 1. If they send that file to you and you send it back and they send & receive with it, AC still recognizes that ID as 1. This is because you haven't saved the file as another draft, you just dealt with that one file.

Having said that, you can make copies of the draft, either in the OS or by File>Save As, and the new file(s) will have a new ID. IF you try sending and receiving with those new files, AC will give a warning that the ID is different, but will still let you send and receive with them. This means that you can have multiple drafts, (perhaps with multiple design aletrnatives?), and send and receive from any of those drafts that you choose!

All of this only works if they don't sign you out of the PLP in the meantime - you must stay 'signed in', as far as AC is concerned.

Hope that is clear - it's an underused feature that I've mentioned on AC-Talk many times before.

Cheers,
Link.

[owen]

Yes in case i didn't make it clear enough, as Link says NOT SIGNING OUT OF THE TEAMWORK DRAFT is the key ... i would recommend really brushing up on your Teamwork training before trying to use it to work with remote offices - perhaps get together in the same office to run through it so everyone is on the same page and then run some test before you try to do it on a live project. Its really fairly simple once you get to know it, but things can go horribly wrong in Teamwork if people don't know how the whole process works.

And the Drafts-as-Design-Options tip Link is talking about is a very useful one indeed

[Karl Ottenstein]

And, just to clarify further, since I've noticed in my travels that people find this confusing: being "signed in" is not like, say, being logged into your bank's web site to view your account.

When you are 'signed in' to a PLP, there is NO active network connection between the file and you. You could 'sign in' from your laptop, save a draft, and then take the laptop on a trip for a week, come back, plug it in and do a send/receive.

The 'sign in' only has to do with letting the PLP know that someone (you) has reserved parts of the file for use and to record the number/etc (mentioned by Link) so that when a S/R is done later, ArchiCAD knows what to do with it.

The PLP keeps track of the 'sign ins' (really 'workspace reservations'). Signing out not only releases the workspace to other users ... but it also clears the PLP's knowledge of the ID assigned to the draft. So, after the signout, you cannot do a send/receive with the draft.

I'm sure I'm still not clear...dinner time on Friday!

But, another comment is that many people think they need to sign out at the end of each day, or before lunch, or whatever. Not so. You can stay signed in for weeks (although that would be a little odd)....because, again, the 'sign in' is NOT a network connection. It is merely a database operation that stores some info in the PLP, and allocates a draft file to you. I think if the command was "Reserve Workspace" rather than "Sign In", things might be a little less confusing?

Cheers,
Karl

[Anonymous]

OK, so the office with the main file does not need to keep my teamwork open down there, they do a save as for a draft and then close it, but not sign out.
Then I send it back to them, they over write the draft they gave me with the one I am sending back ot them, then open it and send a receive.

I think I get it now, Thanks for your help.