From the course: BIM 360: Docs Essential Training

About files and folders in BIM 360 - BIM 360 Tutorial

From the course: BIM 360: Docs Essential Training

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About files and folders in BIM 360

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- Now that you've learned how to create and configure a BIM 360 project. Let's start looking at placing some data in that project. We'll begin with some important information about files and folders. BIM 360, is a cloud-based file management system. Similar to other online file management systems you may have seen. You can upload nearly any type of file and some file types are even viewable within the BIM 360 environment. This is one of the things that makes BIM 360 different than other online file management systems. Its ability to view design file types like; RVT for Revit, DWG for AutoCAD and AutoCAD based systems and many others. In fact, lets look at a page from our knowledge base. And i'll just scroll down through some of the supported viewable file types, that BIM 360 supports, and you can see that there are quite a few. So let's switch over to the BIM 360 docs screen or document management screen. Now just like other file management systems, you can organize your data by creating folders and sub folders. But you should know before doing that, there are two main sections in BIM 360 document management. And you can see them here; plans and project files. This is basically a brand new project and these folders are here by default. Now you can rename them but they will remain in place. You can't delete either one of these folders. So these are the top level folders for the two main sections of document management. The plan section you can think of being intended for official documents, like Revit sheets, PDF's of plans specs and other official document type things. Project files, on the other hand, is intended for design files and work in progress information. Including Revit models and the sheets that go with them, representing work-in-progress. AutoCAD DWG files, Navisworks files, photos, notes, and many other things. And you should know that files behave differently when uploaded to the plan section versus the project file section. I've uploaded a PDF into both folders and you can see right now I'm looking at the plans folder, and it appears that there are multiple files uploaded to this folder, but that's actually not the case. This is a single PDF file, but because I've uploaded it into the plans folder it separated it out into individual documents, each one representing a page in the PDF. So this was a multi page PDF that I uploaded to the plans folder and it has separated it out into individual documents. If I look at the project files folder, we see the exact same PDF file but it doesn't separate it out into individual documents. So that's just a glimpse of how things are treated differently in the plans section of document management versus project files. And once again, think of plans as official documents so PDFs of plans, Revit sheets of plans, specifications things like that. Where as project files is more work-in-progress, design files and other information that is necessary and important as you're progressing through the design of a project. So another way to think of this is, as you're working in projects files you may work in that section of docs for several weeks or several months until you hit a milestone where you're ready to release some documents up into the plans folder. Maybe your 30% submission or something like that. And you typically give different people permissions to the plans folder, than you do to project files. You can think project files as where your team works. So all the people working closely on the project and developing it and designing it are going to work in this folder and have permission to that folder. But the plans folder maybe a completely different group of people, who only get to see the official documentation that is spun out of the work done in project files. Now we'll get into all of this more deeply as we progress through this chapter and other chapters. Okay, so that's some general information about files and folders and BIM 360 docs. Lets dig a little deeper in the upcoming videos.

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