BIM 360 Doc - Schedule Publish Feature

While most of us are going through the stay-at-home ordeal, this gives me some time to finish this blogpost that has been sitting in my draft folder since last December. 

It also happens to be the week Revit 2021 that is just released. Well, none of that actually has anything to do with this post.

This is one of the nice features introduced to BIM 360 doc. I don't recall when Autodesk introduced it but I have been using it for all the new projects we host on BIM 360 doc.

It is my understanding you have to have "Team" enabled within the hub in order to use it. This feature itself is very subtle. You would very much miss it if you don't know this existed.

This feature can only be accessed if you are the Project Admin for this particular project. You can find it under Project Admin --> Services tab --> Design Collaboration This is also where you create Team in the first place. 

Note that you won't even see this Schedule Publish option unless you check the box next to the specific team (e.g. Architectural here). One more thing though, you will need to have at least one model initiated to the cloud in that specific team folder for this "Schedule Publish" icon to appear.

Once Schedule Publish is selected, you can choose your preference. For some reasons, while I am preparing this post, only "Weekly" can be chosen as option. (I used to be able to choose daily as option). Then you can choose any day/time of your preference.

When all the options are set, you can move that slider to enable the schedule. 

Select Close and you are done. What it will happen is every week (e.g. Friday) BIM 360 will automatically publish a copy of the "live" Revit model to the site. It will be the last SWC (Sync with Central) version right before the scheduled time. As a result, a copy of the model is populated in the Team folder. 

You can click on the model and it will launch the online viewer for you. You can also download or share with your team. Most importantly for me, it creates an automatic archived file for the project.

This feature alone has saved our projects several times when we need to retrieve model elements from the previous version. 

I highly recommend your team to do this to take advantage of this feature. 

In closing, I hope I will have a bit more time to write more during this work from home situation. 

Stay safe everyone!