Remote hosting of teamwork files

[tonyfitz]

Our office has recently been awarded a couple of rather large projects which will require multi office collaboration across 3 countries. We have been using teamwork on various projects for a while now, with access into our server via a VPN connection, which causes difficulties for some of our consultants.

We are currently reviewing our whole data management systems and as a starter are looking at Trimble Connect to allow file sharing across offices and platforms for all non Archicad files. This will allow us an easily accessible and managed shared file server and the ability to use their IFC sharing capabilities to present work in 3D wherever needed without the need for any special software.

Our biggest headache at present is what to do with our ArchiCAD Teamwork files and how to host these, so that access is easy and current problems like VPN issues are eliminated. Currently we host projects on various servers which also seems to cause issues. We have considered BIM Cloud but really for what it offers think it is bloody expensive and we would still have to host files somewhere, so are looking to avoid all the cost associated with going down that line just yet.

We have narrowed our options down to 2;
Option 1
In House Server
Stick with our in-house server model, but position the teamwork host server outside of the Firewall to eliminate VPN issues and have online backup in place to safeguard against failure. If we went this way, what recommendations would there be on hardware for the server ?

Option 2
Remote Hosting
Host our BIM Server files on a remote server system such as Amazon Cloud. We are still trying to find out if this is possible.

Any feedback on best solutions, keeping in mind affordability would be most appreciated.