Thursday, September 30, 2010

Ready, download, install

Ahh, the goodies have hit the street earlier today. Sounds like it is going to be a busy weekend of testing, playing and drooling!

There’s lots of talk about the SAP in the blogosphere but you probably want to take special note of the following:

As is customary, the bloggers Robert Manna, Steve Stafford and David Light have provided great commentary and insight (and keep going, and going, and going…), so make sure to check out their writing over the past days as there are several informative articles about the subject.

On the subject of the Revit server, I have to say that I’m not thrilled with the terminology, and the folks at Autodesk have struggled with the language too. I would love to hear what you, the readers, have to say about this. Personally, I would have preferred using something like this:

  • Central Server –> Master Server/Project Vault/Revit Vault
  • Local Server –> Sync Server

Honestly, I am still not sure how this whole setup works and will do my best to get some answers before writing in more depth. For example how does one create local files if the end user cannot physically navigate to any of these servers from Explorer? Are we to assume that we have to use Revit’s current solution of automatically creating local files on our C drive?

In the meantime, you might want to view this video taken from the Autodesk Wiki to get a decent overview of the Revit Server setup.








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3 comments:

Robert said...

Re: creating local files, at this time you can either create a Local using ADSK's provided "tool" or you can open the Central (considered by most a big no no) and Save As.

Something to Note, currently there is no API support for Rvt Server (it is version 1 after all). Given Autodesk's trend, and comments made at the recent Dev Camp, I think it is reasonable to expect that we will see API support for RS at some point in time.

We were not huge fans of the "Create Local Feature" from an EyeTee point of view, but our teams all really like it, soooo, what are you going to do?

Dave Baldacchino said...

Thanks, that's what I figured. I'd rather have Revit offer a robust built-in approach instead of scripts. If we could get the ability to customize the local file path, that would already be a lot better.

As to the terminology, I was going to write something different but then realized that the naming is not that bad after all. The user opens their project from the Revit Server (the Central server) but ultimately works transparently off the "Local server", so really there's no user interaction other than perhaps initial setup. So I'm not so much concerned with the naming anymore.

Robert said...

Actually, if anything the user cares the most about their "Local Server" and the "Central" is generally invisible to them. I say this because user (particularly mobile ones) should be aware of what Local Server they're connecting to. Likely in the case of some of the users the Local Server they connect to is also the network's Central Server, but it does not matter to them and their day to day operations.

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