Using Teamwork as a standard practice.

[Anonymous]

We have decided to begin using teamwork as a standard practice on ALL projects. This decision has been based on the tremendous performance improvements I have seen in AC 8.1. There are now no significant delays in signing in, changing workspace, sending and receiving, etc. compared to opening and saving a solo project. The only added overhead is (obviously) the requirement to define the workspace.

The advantages we see are greater security against data loss (multiple backups & local drafts) and more administrative control of standards (having to sign in with with exclusive access to change attributes.

I am posting this both to provoke feedback and discussion as well as to promote the idea to others and respond to any questions people might have.

Any takers?

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the advice I will look into this and let you know how I get on.

[Anonymous]

• file paths and networking seems to be a biggy: library loading, cache libraries, BGarchicad accessing plp files across a network all have too many 'quirks' if something unexpected happens to that network.

• there seems to be a 'critical mass' to a file (size) at which point some of the elements seem to drop off of the database whilst still displaying on screen. they end up in nobodies workspace until re-assigned. this can take a long time and some organization when combined with the networking/library issue above.



As reply to Archiben
It is true there are issues with library file paths and networking speeds
we have encounterded these issues in our office
How Ever!
there is a simple and elegant solution
you can create on each machine a folder which will contain all the librarys
which don't need to constantly be updated (ArchiCAD Library 8,9,10 Standard Textures Etc)
you may create this file at any location of any machine
name this folder. Make sure that the folder name is identical for all machines, even though the file path DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THE SAME!
go to the properties tab of the file and click sharing
and make sure all check marks are on for all the boxes,
then go to your tools menu and click map network drive.
select a letter and under folder brows to the folder you've just created
you will be able to copy items in to the folder only through your internal path but you will be able to load your library directly from your new letter drive
so now all team work projects can load their librarys from the same path
when actually they are loading it from the local machine
It works great and it's SO fast that we are using it even for our solo Projects.

P.S all the librarys which are constantly being updated, such as custom objects Etc, we still load from the server to make sure everybody are using the most updated version (but these are usually are so small so it is not an issue

[Anonymous]

There is a very handy free utility called BatChmod for managing and fixing file permissions and stuff in OSX.

You can find it at: www.macchampion.com/arbysoft/

It should be used with some care (see warnings on website) but it is really quite easy as well as quick and effective.

[__archiben]

Tamir wrote:
As reply to Archiben
...
then go to your tools menu and click map network drive.

and how would i do that on a mac?

~/archiben

[Thomas Holm]

Matthew wrote:
There is a very handy free utility called BatChmod for managing and fixing file permissions and stuff in OSX.
You can find it at: www.macchampion.com/arbysoft/...

Take care when using BatChmod (see my advice below). Use it only on folders with data/documents, no programs, prefs or settings files.

And Set Owner and Group to NoChange by setting those to the dashed line ------- option unless you know exactly what you want.

[Anonymous]

It looks like time to breathe some life back into this topic.

At one of my clients we are implementing Teamwork as standard practice. I will be sure to post our experiences as we go along.

While we made this decision using AC9, it becomes even more important (and useful) in 10 with the PM integration.

BTW, Djordje; It seems to me that this topic might be more appropriate to "Working in ArchiCAD" or the "CAD Managers" forum.

[TomWaltz]

How are you handling creating new projects? Just sharing the project as soon as you do a "New from Template"?

[Anonymous]

TomWaltz wrote:
How are you handling creating new projects? Just sharing the project as soon as you do a "New from Template"?

We are now just converting projects already started so that hasn't come up yet, but it will most likely be the standard.

The main problem I have found with teamwork is that people are unfamiliar with the details of the workflow when it is only used occasionally. The biggest issue is that people forget to sign out since there is no reminder about this when you quit/shut down. Until GS fixes this it can only be managed by developing good habits, and these can (of course) only be developed with regular use.

On another note: Besides the "Would you like to sign-out/keep sign-in?" dialog, I would like to be able to require comments in the Send and Receive dialog. I ask/tell people to always type a couple of words (liked "fixed retaining walls" or such) whenever they send changes, but it isn't really enforceable (and the cursor defaults to the wrong field )

[SeaGeoff]

Matthew, I noticed on another thread you report that Gigabit Ethernet makes the use of Teamwork much faster. I have been warned that the full benefits of GB are not realized unless your file server is equipped with multiple hard drives in a RAID configuration since the network throughput can exceed that of a single drive. Can anyone speak to this? Thanks.

[TomWaltz]

Geoff wrote:
Matthew, I noticed on another thread you report that Gigabit Ethernet makes the use of Teamwork much faster. I have been warned that the full benefits of GB are not realized unless your file server is equipped with multiple hard drives in a RAID configuration since the network throughput can exceed that of a single drive. Can anyone speak to this? Thanks.

It depends on your file server and its speed. It does not need to be RAID or anythign extreme, but it does need to either be able to write at 1 GB+ or have enough memory to cache incoming data until it can be written.