Interesting thread. Resellers often don't know software as well as their users so sales presentations are often 'crash and burn' sessions! (Have done a few of those myself where ignorance was not the culprit as much as badly behaving hardware.)
Having not used Teamwork -- and not completely understanding how it works -- perhaps someone would like to describe how it works to an AC alumni user (me). Esp with regards to all the files that are interacting on the workstation, and the server.
With regards to Revit: sylvain is correct. All Revit files start as single user files. Clicking the worksets button creates worksets in the current open file; the next save after this creates the central file. You copy the central file to your hard drive; that's the local file. You work on the local file, and click the "Save to Central" button to update the central file and get updates in the central file that you don't have.
Worksets that contain 3D objects are named by the user -- Exterior shell, Interior Partitions, Structure, etc. When a user selects an object -- wall, dimension, whatever -- Revit immediately contacts the central file to see if the object is available, if so you can edit it, if not, it tells you who's got it signed out and you can at that point ask them to hand over control through the Editing Requests dialog box.
Worksets aren't hard -- it's the collaborative process that has all these indepedent CAD users unglued. You have to work together, and sometimes people don't like that.
As for files, there's the local and central files, and that's it. On megaprojects you can link files together but walls from linked files don't clean up with walls in the host file. So you got us beat there 😉
If someone wouldn't mind doing a desktop share over the phone one day, we could have a good look at each other's software and take notes, and report back to the users with what we find. A lot of the information circulating on these (and AUGIs forums) is because the posters don't really know how The Other Program works. So I'd prefer to talk to a knowledgable AC user -- no resellers! I'm currently working on contract for a number of parties -- including the reseller in my sig, so I'm only interested in getting and giving the straight goods.
Any takers? I got some huuuuge projects I could show, and some midsize projects too.
