Christiaan

What category/folder system do you use to organise your (digital) library of technical and product literature these days? I'm particularly interested in how people are using Uniclass 2015 to do this, but curious to hear what others are doing too. If you use Uniclass 2015 do you use the Ef Elements/functions table? Or the Pr Products table? Or the Ef Elements/functions table and then the Pr Products table within each of the element groups? Maybe you throw a few Ss Systems folders in? And Zz CAD. What about webpages or scanned magazine articles? Standards? Building codes? So what does your folder structure look like? I haven't found a pleasing way to organise this stuff using Uniclass 2015 yet.

One of the biggest limitations we currently find is Title Blocks. If anybody needs to edit anything even associated with a single Title Block then they need to sign them all out.

It can be a bit of a faff if you have a lot of down stands (because you need to break your ceiling up into sections) but what I tend to do is make the ceiling void a component of my ceiling Slab object and give it a white fill.

I think the Notes Database/Notes Manager needs a rethink. There's something fundamentally wrong with it. The ratio between our experience of problems compared to the engineer's ability to reproduce our bugs is too high, so our experience doesn't improve. It's the only piece of Vectworks that I fear to work with anymore. I have bug reports that have been marked as fixed because the engineer found some way to overcome the symptom but the underlying problem doesn't get fixed because it's too difficult to track all the tiny little steps that lead up to the problem. There are too many variables. So the problems keep occurring. I don't know how other CAD vendors deal with notes (I'd be curious to know if anybody can explain) but do they all have the same problems? There's got to be a different approach that's more robust, no? Perhaps we could be given the choice to embed notes databases directly in the file (because the fact that it's a separate file is half the problem in my experience)? Or create a new tool that takes some different approach and eventually deprecate the current tool?

@Hugues yes, Place As Keynote was checked in the Working File. I will try to reproduce but I suspect this aspect of the problem needs a few different things in place before it happens. Are you able to reproduce the relative path problem (VB-167842)? Because that is easy to reproduce. And it seems to me my solution of putting the sync folder in the Shared folder is a security risk, especially if people are using laptops with multiple users.

Interesting. Did not know this.

Same here, we've been using Dropbox with Project Sharing and had very few problems.

That's what I do as well. I made this wish to deal with the cumbersome nature of this workflow:

Hey @_James sorry for the late reply but I've been down a little rabbit hole looking for the best approach—not just to project and business management (as my original post above)—but to everything you need to run an office, and remotely. Up until now my approach had been the following: Dropbox for file syncing and sharing Asana for task management Avaza for timesheets Nuclino for wiki Backblaze for backup Dreamhost for website and email BT Cloud Voice for phones iCloud for shared calendars, contacts and email archive Malwarebytes malware protection No specific project management service nor CRM, and I think we were using Sage for accounting This served us well but one of the main problems is that iCloud is not designed for business or multiple users; so two issues that we'd periodically experience were mixups with calendar invites (i.e. only one person could accept an invite) and a tug of war with My Card identity (which gets used in other apps like Mail and to auto fill text fields in Safari etc.). In looking for ways to solve this I weighed up the major players: Fastmail (best mail, contacts and calendar service I could find but their data centres are in the US, it lacks integrations with other services, and it's an additional cost over and above Dropbox, which a number of our clients also used) G Suite Business (really attractive suite of services with endless integrations and a choice of where your data is located, but I don't really like their Mail client nor their propriety approach to email APIs, file syncing doesn't support delta sync (which is needed for Project Sharing), there's no wiki type service, Google Voice is not optimised for UK, it only offers a 14 day trial, and is relatively pricey if we want and, again, it's an additional cost over and above Dropbox, which a number of our clients also used) Microsoft 365 Business Standard (great suite of services and integrations, data centres located in country of payment, but file syncing doesn't support delta sync (needed for Project Sharing), email hosting is limited 50GB and, again, it's an additional cost over and above Dropbox, which a number of our clients also used) Dropbox (we love Dropbox, but it's on the pricier end of the scale, it has no mail, contacts and calendar service, and it's data centres are generally located in the US, although I think there is the possibility of having them located in EU now) So nothing really felt like a perfect fit. If Dropbox had a mail, contacts and calendar service I probably wouldn't have bothered with any of this research. But in the process of making all these comparisons (and looking at all sorts of CRM and project management integrations), a new world started to open up to me. I came across ownCloud, which is an open source project that does all of these things and more (including delta sync). There's a more popular fork called Nextcloud but it doesn't support delta sync. And then there's a standalone open source sync service called Seafile (with delta sync). And while ownCloud and Nextcloud etc. have dedicated hosted services, there are limitations to this approach (and you're backing costs adding up). The main benefits start to roll in if you host these things yourself, which got me thinking about my web host, Dreamhost. And indeed they can host this sort of stuff, but it's not straightforward and their data centres are in the US. Which lead me to DigitalOcean, a revelation for me. I now realise that you don't have to be tied to services like Microsoft 365 and G Suite, or even Dropbox. You can host your own provide cloud computing services via cloud computing hosts like OceanDigital, Dreamhost's DreamCompute, Google Cloud Platform, etc. OceanDigital is the cream of the crop as far as I can tell and you can choose where your data is located. It helps if you have some experience with web hosting services but you can generally do this stuff in a way that leaves all the hard work (i.e. maintenance and updates to the host) and even you install something like Cloudron on your cloud computing host you open up this huge world open source software with one-click installs. So that's where I'm heading. For no more $20/40 a month I can set up everything I need and more. Webhosting, contacts, calendars, file sync, wiki, timesheets, VoIP, CRM, project management. You name it. Email hosting is also possible but it's such a science that it's probably better off left to the specialists. I haven't chosen my final stack yet but I'll let you know how I get on.

Thanks for the shout out. This kind of categorisation could also be done with Tags. When Jim and the team overhauled the forum there was some discussion about preconfigured tags but it wasn't so straightforward. Not sure if there's been any developments since the discussion below but Jim's gone now so there's no one driving it forwards. In hindsight I think a closed system would have been better. I'd rather there was a comprehensive set of tags that everybody had to use and a Wishlist for adding more over time. This way when you search a tag you can be sure you're retrieving all relevant threads.

@lupin any suggestions for the third party WinDoor plugin would be better off sent directly to OzCAD.

Oh damn, sorry about that guys, missed that bit and got overly excited. Really cool to see you're working on that 👌🏼

As of v2021 this thread can be moved to Wishes Granted 😃 See Big BIM presentation by Rubina, 2:50 mins in: https://www.vectorworks.net/design-summit/virtual-keynote

I think this thread well and truly deserves to be moved to Wishes Granted. In 2021 we're moving above and beyond with tear-able tabs that can be arranged in any way you want. Fantastic.

Has anybody tried using Vectorworks to create 4D construction simulation stills or animations to demonstrate the sequencing of a complex build (i.e. dividing a building into stages on a tight site, showing how crane and site welfare would work, etc.)? How'd you go about it and how was the result? Did you use Clipcube? Wondering if it's better just to advise the contractor to go buy a licence of Synchro Pro. It wouldn't be for management of the build, no scheduling etc. Visualisation only, to demonstrate to the client how the build sequence will work.