Love/Hate Relationship with Worksharing Monitor

"Worksharing Monitor" has been around for many versions in Revit. I love using it and always recommend people using it whenever they are on a large team working on worksharing file. It is helpful to see who's in the model and who is synchronizing with Central (SWC) to avoid chaos.

Up until now, this tool is still written as an addin. For one who needs to use it, you have to install this addin, then the tool can be found via the Addin tab. Revit 2014 made a nice improvement, worksharing monitor (WSM) finally gets its own icon in the Addin Tab.

I have a number of users who complain about WSM not being able to open in Revit 2014. I have seen this problem in the past; often times it requires Revit to restart in order to resolve this issue. This time, however, is different, no matter how many times they restart Revit, WSM is still off. After some investigation and tests with IT, we were able to identify the blame. The user was streaming "Spotify" in their workstations while trying to run WSM. After closing Spotify and re-run WSM, they are able to open WSM without any issue. **Note: You can continue to use Spotify after launching WSM.

I have heard other people from the RFO that WSM can be blocked with other software. As it turns out, many streaming sites change port configurations on the users' computers to optimize the use of them. I wish Autodesk can integrate this very useful tool into Revit in the future version. In the mean time, if you run into a similar problem, maybe you could try closing Spotify or other software and run WSM again.