Colleague, Ryan Wells, exhibiting in one of my favorite images. I had arranged for an ultra short throw projector to be mounted on a late 80s era drafting table. The projector was connected to a laptop running a cloud app to digitally review drawings. The same tools that most senior reviewers used could be used on this set up, straight edges, rulers and french curves... just needed the stylus in place of the red pen.
There was a lot of work Stantec did at the Amazing Brentwood site for Shape Properties and Tower 3 was the first of the work to be an all Stantec design and delivery. This was also the first project at Stantec where I was given the opportunity to set up the Revit environment with all of my preferences. After the success of my other technology research initiatives I was also given carte blanche for the environment and I choose to experiment with A360 Team.
The most impressive aspect of pushing into this new technology was that it was truly cloud based. Review teams no longer needed special software to be a part of the project and even our client was given Autodesk accounts to log in and check on our BIM progress. This was a brave new world of collaboration and one of the biggest jobs was to have all of the teams agree to the new digital environment... this took time but ultimately we were able to showcase the time being saved and that the security was even better than we could afford to provide.
At the time in 2016, A360 Team was a brand new online collaboration and delivery platform from Autodesk that leveraged C4R (collaboration for Revit). This allowed teams to collaborate with a cloud based central model and freed the teams up from having to exchange background files every week. Brentwood Tower 3 was the first large scale project at Stantec to leverage this tool and explore all of its features with my advocacy and interest for better collaboration.
Capturing the markup process has been an endeavor that I have been continually searching for better ways to solve with technology. The industry is stuck in a very old fashion of putting red ink on paper, or digital red ink on PDFs but there has yet to be a truly intelligent way to capture the process and store the completion in a database of sorts. There are other tools, like Revizto, that do solve that very problem that I'm currently attempting to advocate for. BIM360's commenting feature is a big more like a social media platform and not a functional capture but it's ease of access is unprecedented. Log into a website on any device and start marking up drawings. It's incredible.
I was interviewed along with my colleague, Felix Tan, on our success with BIM360 Team at Autodesk University in 2016. This video continued to be their marketing piece for BIM360 through 2018.