INTRODUCTION

We have repeatedly mentioned and concentrated on the teamwork aspects of design projects. The ability to share information directly from a building design model with collaborators, consultants, clients, and officials will only grow in importance for designers of buildings. In Chapter 3 you examined how Revit Building imports from and exports to CAD files. In Chapter 4 you explored how to link Revit Building model files together in order to coordinate multi-building site developments.

In this chapter you shall look at Revit Building's Worksets and Phasing mechanisms. Worksets are designed to allow real-time collaborative team design. A Workset is simply a named, segregated collection of elements in a model file. When a project model is divided according to Worksets, more than one user can work simultaneously on different parts of the model. All Worksets are part of the same building model file, so when design developments are published from a local copy to the Central File and reloaded by other users, changes to the model are propagated and coordinated tightly.

Worksets are a professional toolset, and their proper and efficient use takes planning and adherence to common-sense best practices. There isn't enough room in this book to discuss advanced uses of Worksets (editing at risk, rolling back changes, or restricting references). Worksets provide the ability to open only part of a building file's contents. Many Revit Building users divide nearly all their projects even those that only one person will work on into Worksets according to a standard setup, to take...