However, things have steadily improved, even if some firms have had to spend a lot of money on expensive network and server infrastructure, IT and compression technology to connect their own offices over Virtual Private Network (VPN). At the start of the BIM-rush, tools for collaborative teams were thin on the ground from any of the software developers. You would think that working with one Building Information Modelling (BIM) system would be easy? Well that certainly was not the case for a very long time. It was all so simple in the days of 2D drawings, but by going to the third dimension and adding lots of intelligence, metadata and more proprietary file formats it has become a massive ‘data wrangling’ job. It is a great term and an essential process but so often the tools we have to work with make that process a CAD manager’s nightmare. If there is a word that is bandied about too much in this industry it is collaboration. Autodesk now globally launches its cloud-based collaboration tool for Revit.

BIM project collaboration has always been essential but CAD software developers often had poor tools for the job, even between users of their own software.

A360 revit