teamwork workspace

[Anonymous]

We're a small company which has just started using archicad 11. We need more than one team member working on a certain storey. Can this be done? Can we isolate an area on a storey for one team member and another area for another team member? If this done how do i go about setting this up? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Anonymous]

When you sign in you can define your workspace with a marquee, but I think there is more to it than that too. (Don't use TW much, sorry).

Try a search of the forum.

[Rob]

As Stuart suggested:
1. draw a marquee around the area you want to work in (thick for multiple storeys, light for one storey only)

if you have an element that runs through two or more marqueed areas the first person who signs in gets it.

This approach does not work when you need to (typically) work on zones or enclosure walls, facades, RCPs or any floor plan continuous area-like / perimeter-like elements.
It works for furniture, annotation, internal / partition walls or any local / self-contained areas in a sense.

Try to manage your work differently eg. different task based on layers - one person is annotating, second dealing with overall set-out, third placing furniture etc

In regards to Teamwork - it has got its shortcomings but I really do hate extensive hotlinking as it imposes question marks in several areas:
1. problems with workflow (eg. sections/elevations works can't be distributed among team mates)
2. portability (having more than two offices - different drive names and MS Windows whims)
3. there is always some smarty pants creating new attributes in linked file so you can end up with zillions of fills, layers etc in the master file (and I will laugh if someone tries to tell me that CAD manager can look after that - a mission impossible, sometimes I feel like they wait to create a new layer named 'Wall next to bedroom 2' with all possible elements in it just to see my dismay)
4. no automatic backup (TW file does have it - a quick fix solution without calling IT fello)
5. can not use Trace tool to full extent
and so on...

[Anonymous]

My two cents.
If you do not use it extensively; Teamwork is heavy stuff, just to remember how it's work.
We are also a small company.
We work with modules and talk together.

[TomWaltz]

pretty much you just put a marquee around the space you want to sign out. You can also skip the marquee and sign out the layers you need if you need people to be working in areas wrapped around each other a little more.

Teamwork can be a little clunky, but believe it or not, it works pretty well once you know how to use it.

[Link]

I'm a big Teamwork advocate, but I have also seen companies copy the project into two and then hotlink the two files together (skipping nested modules). This allows two people to work on the same project at the same time.

A little unorthadox, but it's another way to get simple jobs done.

Cheers,
Link.

[Jere]

I work in a small company (only two full time technologists) and we use Teamwork on almost every project. Generally one person models the building and then we teamup on it to finish the working drawings. We've had no issues at all. We like it quite a bit.

[Anonymous]

Thank you all for your prompt replies.
Will discuss which technique would be most beneficial for our type of work.