Organizing + Securing Your Company's Revit Content

Over the last 20 years, AEC firms have paid for millions of billable hours for Revit creation content. This content includes system families, loadable families, groups, schedules, detail views, materials and more. How does a company not only secure this content from accidental edits or deletion, but also organize that content for ease of use and access? How about access across multiple offices or even continents?

Using the HIVE content management system, your firm can organize and secure your company’s Revit content all in one place. Securing Revit content, especially client-provided content protected by an NDA, has never been more important to a firm’s intellectual properties. Using HIVE, the BIM or project manager can create user-specific groups with access to specific content libraries.

HIVE CMS and What It Can Do

The answers to these questions are now available to all design firms using Revit. HIVE is an industry-leading content management system developed specifically for the AEC industry. Firms can organize, manage, set permissions, and ensure the latest content is kept up-to-date and available for all project participants, even when working remotely. Users can quickly find Revit, AutoCAD, PDF, images, and other file types quickly using libraries, tags, favorites, and file metadata.

Users can quickly pull the exact content they need from HIVE and upload more efficiently, which means less time searching and more time being productive. With HIVE’s cloud-based abilities, you won’t have to worry about file and storage sizes.

There are many key features that HIVE offers and each one has its own unique purpose. Search and Discover both look for content, but Discover searches used parameters. Saved Searches can be set up to be user-based and company-based, allowing users to pull content even faster. Tags allow you to filter through specific libraries and content in those libraries. Uploading content is as simple as drag and drop or even double-clicking and specifying your piece of content.

Utilize Libraries to Store and Organize Your Content

Libraries can be considered a collection of groups and users. This may seem counter to the traditional definition, but since content within HIVE is not contained in any library, content is associated to one or more libraries so that access can be granted by the library itself. Therefore, a library is a list of users and groups as well as references to content. Because content can be associated to more than one library, it is more easily tracked and managed, as this eliminates the need to duplicate files and data.

Libraries in the CMS are logical containers of content. There are three kinds of libraries:

Organizational Libraries – these are the most common libraries an organization creates for their own users. They are listed only if a logged in user has been granted access by an admin.
Shared Libraries – these are libraries that have been shared with another organization. The user that has been invited to a shared library can do many of the same things that can be done with an organizational library.
Public (Subscription) Libraries – these are libraries that have been made available to all organizations within HIVE. These libraries are read-only.

Create HIVE User Groups to Access Specific Content

Groups are the best way to assign roles and permissions in HIVE and are managed on the GROUPS page of the USERS and GROUPS area in the Account Management Portal. The account management portal allows company admins to generate users along with granting access to the HIVE suite. This can all be done through any web browser without running HIVE, allowing for more flexibility for company admins. With this possibility, managing users and adjusting permissions is a lot simpler.

Some key features that are provided are User Management, Group Management, and Active Directory Synchronizer. If you manage many users, there are multiple options to handle these tasks. Group Management allows you to divide users in your company into specific areas instead of having everyone in the way. Now with Active Directory Synchronizer, adding users and managing them into groups is an easy task that will provide its own value.

Protecting your client-provided NDA content has never been easier. Create a library for that client’s content and then create a group to access that content. Only approved group members can see and use that content. This is all managed through the Account Management Portal that only your admin role can access.

Conclusion

When I worked in my previous architecture firm, I really wished we had HIVE. The amount of time you can save as a BIM or project manager when uploading, organizing, securing or updating Revit content is incalculable. And with the ability to organize your client content by users and groups, it is so much easier to manage your content.