teamwork in archicad

[Anonymous]

how do your company work in team in archicad?

use its teamwork tool? or use your own method? and what is your layering system?

and beside, when we work on a complex shopping arcade, the file become so heavy and slow, then we switch to other software instead of archicad.

actually, we hope we can finish a whole project by using archicad, but we can not stand the pain when using archicad sometimes. we believe in archicad, but for our experience, we just can't control archicad well.

[Anonymous]

Username Link
And I've never been to Hong Kong, but always wanted to!:-)

There's definitely a lot to know about Teamwork! One good trick is to use it for alternative design options as I explained here.

Cheers,
Link.

thanks link

if i need your help, i will send a pm to you, or maybe you send me a pm for your contact and the charge for this service

[Anonymous]

Erika wrote:
Angus,
Your firm should hire someone to help. Linc Ellis here on this forum is based in Australia and travels the world doing this kind of work. Contact him.

I am essentially a 1 to 2 person office and have tried to decipher teamworks off and on for awhile now. I finally got through the whole administrator, team leader and team mate set up, only to discover my current layer set up doesn't seem to work well with teamwork.

I think with more work I can figure this out, but really why does it have to be so non intuitive and difficult? I read the manual and the help section and they are minimal to say the least. If someone knows where I can go to get a concise, straightforward tutorial on teamwork. please let me know.

Thanks,

Don Lee

[Anonymous]

Sooooooooo, does anyone have any suggestions for a 2 person office who (might) want to use teamworks? So far after a couple of attempts, I find teamwork not so easy to use and possibly not suited for a two person office.

With the economy going nowhere, I'm not too excited about hiring someone to come in just to set up teamwork. Besides, is it unreasonable for me to expect that it shouldn't be that hard?

Don Lee

[Dennis Lee]

This is not gonna help you w/ teamwork, but just to share my view:

I have a two person office as well, and I did TRY to work with teamwork to no avail. It just didn't make sense for me. Too many restrictions on who can do what and not, too much setup work involved for a small firm.

When I had it going briefly, it was a full sign in w/ full authority on one person - except maybe one drawing (one layer for all the notes for example in reflected ceiling plan) or one layout signed out to the other person.

After a while though, the sign-in out of whatever layer that other person needed to use with the confusion of multiplying plc files everywhere (not to mention the times when I had to make a new fill pattern or a composite or a linetype or even a layer! - everybody has to sign off, and team leader sign in with exclusive access to make any attribute) kind of became more of a hassle than dividing work project by project. I do project A in the morning while you do project B, then we switch, etc...

When there is only one project to work on with a urgent deadline, I just make a 'temporary' copy file for the other person to work on, and later imported the work into the master pln file manually. Also, another option is for that person to work on a separate file, and I bring it into the master file by hotlinking the other's mod file.

Anyway, if you are very disciplined, have a lot of passion for AC, and have TIME to play around, then I think you can eventually learn to do it without professional help. For me, for a two person office, the time invested to set up plus the efforts required to maintain that systematic organization with ever varying types and scales of projects (I think this is the key), does not seem more effective than the old fashioned / manual method I have resorted to.... for now.

[Anonymous]

Hi Dennis:

Thank you for your detailed reply. I think I will just forego Teamwork for now and as you say do things "manually".

Don Lee

[JaredBanks]

Don Lee,

I'll throw my 2 cents into the ring. I've worked with teamwork on and off for about 2 years now, on projects with up to 5 or 6 people and more recently on projects with 2 people. I know I'm not using all the capabilities of teamwork, but I think my system works well for 2 people in the residential firm I work at. I doubt this would work as well for larger groups.

1) team members sit next to each other (or very close by) to facilitate communication and every morning discuss what the tasks are for the day. Knowing what everyone is going to do really makes things so much easier.
2) Have two layer combinations for sign-in and splitting up work.
I call mine --interiors-- and --exteriors-- so they appear at the top of the list. And yeah, they basically split the layers between interiors and exteriors (with interiors also having electrical layers and exteriors having all the structural layers plus whatever else can be cleanly divided into one or the other).
3) If the work can't be cut by layers for the day, we'll slice the building either by stories or in half with a marquee.
4) Then have at it.

If you need to make changes to things not in your space, write them down to change later, or go over and change them on the other machine. It's faster to stop the other person for 3 minutes than to sign in and out, etc. I find that someone can invariably get the model with exclusive access either at the end of the day or at the beginning (or at lunch if there's a crunch). This all goes back to the better you can plan out the work in realistically doable chunks the easier teamwork will become. If teamwork becomes first come, first serve, what are you working on these days? then you'll be in a world of hurt.

Oh, one last thing. Anyone can sign in as the team leader, but if one of the people is in charge of the overall file (not necessarily the person in charge of the project), that'll help keep things clean, organized, and humming along. Hope that helps.

If anyone has strong disagreements or recommendations with this process let me know, because I'm always interested in doing things more efficiently. And I am/will be teaching this process to the other 16 ArchiCAD users at my firm so I'd rather not have to reteach too much!!!

plan plan plan work work work

[Link]

Sounds very realistic to me. The Teamwork specific layer combinations are a big help IME.

Cheers,
Link.

[JaredBanks]

I originally used teamwork without layer combinations for sign-in and it was a hassle every day fighting over layers, yelling at people (or wanting to yell at people) for not paying attention and taking too many layers or the wrong layers or layers they didn't need...

The five, ten, fifteen minutes it takes to set up the combos at the beginning of the project are completely worth it (and then once they're in the template file... priceless). And on a larger team I would imagine the benefits increase.

[Anonymous]

JaredBanks wrote:
I originally used teamwork without layer combinations for sign-in and it was a hassle every day fighting over layers, yelling at people (or wanting to yell at people) for not paying attention and taking too many layers or the wrong layers or layers they didn't need...

The five, ten, fifteen minutes it takes to set up the combos at the beginning of the project are completely worth it (and then once they're in the template file... priceless). And on a larger team I would imagine the benefits increase.

Hey thanks for the info Jared, I'll give it a try!

Don Lee

[Anonymous]

Hey all,
Most, if not all of our projects are done in Teamwork.
Project set up is CRITICAL
and shouting at people only breaks down the lines of communication.
Once you find out what you can and can not do Teamwork can be quite handy.
Our teams range anywhere between 2 to too many people

Give it a go