Best Practices for Bluebeam Studio Projects

Well, today's a sort of continuation about last week, right? We talked about Bluebeam Studio or Bluebeam Cloud versus Autodesk Construction Cloud and the cloud in general. And it spurred some questions from customers and other folks like, how do I get started with this? How do I, if I wanted to dabble with cloud-enabled things, where do I start? And we figured since if you're listening to this, you probably already have Bluebeam, you know, or some sort of access to Bluebeam Review. So we're going to go through the best practices of how to get started with Bluebeam Studio projects. What are the best practices for Bluebeam Studio sessions? And then if we have time, we will go through and talk about Prime. So it's a whole other management component that may benefit our admin or IT folks. So we'll keep going. But in typical MCR fashion, if you've got questions about anything else, just throw them in the chat and we will answer them as we go. Let's talk about Bluebeam Studio projects with this thing that Michael pulled up. That's exactly your mind reading today. Yeah, so I always like to pull this up first. I had to Google like 10 different things. And then for some reason, there's like the copilot. If you scroll up all the way, it's just great. But this I'll put this in the chat because everyone always asks this. There's another one out there that has like cloud limitations in it as well. You can Google it out there. But basically, there are limitations to some of the things within review in terms of the desktop application and how many attendees can join. So you can have up to 500 sessions and then you can have unlimited projects. Now, there is a stylus down here and we'll talk about that when we get there. There are some limitations in terms of just latency. But the next one is how many files can be uploaded. So you can have 5000 files uploaded into a session and then unlimited in a project. Next one will be what files does it support? PDF for sessions only in any file format except some executables and... Zip files. Yeah, the zip files and sets. How big can files be? One gigabyte each. And then the next one is unlimited for projects. So that is kind of the question mark here because if you have larger files, it says right down here that you will experience. some lower performance. And that is true. I've had that happen. Next one is how big can the markups be? So 10 megabytes each. So this would probably be if like you're attaching anything to those markups. And then projects is unlimited. How much space can you use? Unlimited and then unlimited. So there are some of your limitations. I guess the only other one would be like file revisions. So you do have the version history within projects itself. The next one is can you receive markup alerts? So in sessions you can, but in projects you can't markup alert those attendees like you can within sessions. And then the big part, do all attendees need a license of review? Now attendees, right, we as review users will be the admins or main participants of this, but if you want to collaborate with somebody outside of your organization or whatever who doesn't have review they don't need it pretty cool i mean it didn't take it back they need review they don't need a license for it correct but i will say with the newer licensed tier someone was commenting the other day that they can't their people can't attend a session and mark up with tool sets so they're Yeah, so there are limitations to the different tiers within basic, core, complete, and also the viewer for what you're able to do within sessions now. So with that, how long does studio sessions remain? So this is the one thing. We all just need to be aware that sessions and projects does get uploaded to a cloud server. So if you do have some type of requirement, like let's... Typically, it's more of like a government type of project. You may not be able to upload things into a session or project. So that just comes down to it isn't an AWS server. Bluebeam can reactivate in terms of the PDFs or information that is there. But let's talk about what happens with inactivity on a specific session or project. So for studio sessions, the following happens if it's not being used. So after 80 days of inactivity, a notification email will be sent to the host, and the session will be archived. If the email doesn't arrive in your inbox, uh, okay. After 90 days, the session will be archived. After 170 days, the host will receive another email stating that the session will be deleted. So archived means you can still access it in sessions. It just has a grayed out. I don't know if I have any up. All mine just got deleted because I was maybe ignoring those emails. Yeah. Oh, I got some gray ones. Let's see. Do you have some? Yeah. All right, let me see if I do before we... Well, you should, because they're the same ones, our X-Con one. So I just have profiles. I'm assuming because you are the owner, I don't see it. Yeah. That could be it. So let me... But I have one right here. So this one's ready to be... inactive so it's inactive session will be deleted in 41 days in seven hours so i hover over it if i wanted people to re-access it like jason has on his he can just click it open and then now it becomes active so this means i just haven't gone into this specific no one has session um since you know 80 days and then now i have 90 days after And then 170 days. So it's not like consecutive. So it's not 90 days plus 170 days. So it's 170 days as of it being inactive. The host will receive an email stating that the session will be deleted. And then after 180 days, the session will be permanently deleted and cannot be recovered at this point. Right. Can you share your screen again so we can see what you're seeing? Oh, wait. What happened? I don't know. But Dave was asking. So yeah, I've been getting emails because I ignored some of them, right? But that's what you see. It's going to be grayed out and then it will let you know, like, hey, it's going to go away forever. But if you click on it, it will restart that counter essentially. Yep. Yeah, so you'll have this profile here and it says 41 days, seven hours. And then again, going back into here, I don't know when my share screen cut off. But yeah, so 170 days will be received. And then 180 days will be permanently deleted. So for studio projects, studio projects will never be marked for archival or deletion. So now we're talking about projects. So here are all of our projects. So projects will never be marked. for archival or deletion and can only be deleted by the project owner or a user with full controlled permissions. So they never get deleted, which is great. But in order to delete them, the project owner has to delete them. The studio project will be deleted by the project owner. It will remain coverable for under 20 days. So if someone comes in and is the owner and they're like, hey, I'm going to delete this. It is recoverable for... 120 days. So like PDFs or files that were in there, they can be recovered by Bluebeam. See how it says contact us. Right. Now it says studio projects are never marked for archival, but that doesn't mean that they will never be deleted. That's the way I would read it through that lines because you never know, you know, we could go through another thing that we did with review 2019 and below where you no longer have access to studio in those older versions. So that would be, you know, you would have those sessions that were there are still there. You know, you can still access them in a newer version of the software. But if you didn't upgrade, then technically that is being archived or deleted because you are forfeiting your access to it. I don't know why my thing cut off, why I wasn't sharing. OK, anyways, we'll continue onward and I'll figure out my IT stuff. Um, when do you when do you when do users receive session expiration notifications? So session expiration is when you start a studio session, you have the ability to set an expiration. This would be in need of like, hey, someone needs to have markups completed or the whole team. It's not someone because it's a whole team regardless. It needs to have sessions deleted in a specific certain amount of time, and that's what they're going to go through and do. So, yeah. Right. That would be something where, you know, we have a short fuse project or we know this project is due in 30 days. You know, it's not going to be an ongoing thing. So we're going to set that expiration when we create that. So as we go through here in a little bit and create a studio session, you'll see where there's that option to set that expiration date. And we've done that here on MCR as well. We'll just set it to go for the day or for a couple hours or for a month or whatever. It comes in pretty handy because that will sort of cut off that access for everybody else. Yeah, so let's go through and talk about, I don't think there's anything else really in here. And not really. We can always come back to that at the end when it comes to reassigning ownerships and stuff. Yeah. So within here, and I've talked about this plenty of times, Studio is the wild, wild west. So you really don't have any control over your end users using it. I do have an email from Bluebeam. Disable Studio. studio here um i don't want to show everything but yeah so you can if you if you want to know how to not allow users to access studio there is a way so you can email jason and myself but aside from that is there a way to monitor people's movements in studio there is so if you are going through and looking to do that, it's a thing called Studio Prime. We are now navigating SSO for ourselves, so we will see how that works with Studio Prime. But if you do not have true SSO, you can activate Studio Prime with its integrations. But again, Studio Prime is meant to see visibility into everyone that you decide to add into its sessions and projects. So with that being said, typically you can go to your own studio. So I think there's a quick way to just go to one here. I think it's going to bring me back to Studio Prime. But what is it? Studio. Try it. It'll push me to Studio Prime. So typically what you'll do is you'll want to go through and if you don't have Studio Prime right now, you can still see your sessions. You can't see visibility into your projects, unfortunately. So what we'll go through and do is I'll go to classic mode. Classic mode is what this used to be. So basically you have your sessions here. This is also where you can change your information of like your default name. But my sessions, you can see all of your sessions and you can reactivate them. Like this was deleted. But if I wanted to go through and reactivate it within the timeframe that it gives you, which is like whatever that timeframe was that we were just looking at, you can go through and reopen them essentially. The next one is your user data. So again, you have your name. Everyone has access to this. This is not an additional cost. The additional cost comes to reining in folks, and that is using Studio Prime and the ability to see folks' projects and sessions, get access to those projects and sessions as well. Anything else to that, Jason, you think? No, but that classic mode is... is important that one will work for everybody you don't have to have prime to do that but that will allow you to see sort of what's going on um at a glance which is nice yeah to your personal sessions only correct so it's going back are we going to walk through starting one is that was that your thought yeah you know so if you haven't seen sessions that little 3d 2d house um icon so looks like michael's in the review review advanced profile and on that profile that studio panel is going to be on the left side and people have clicked on it and they see that little sign-in thing and they're like uh-oh what is this you know we get lots of questions about well the studio included or does it cost more or if i sign up you know is it going to cost my company money or what is that it's 100 included with a little bit of an asterisk on there um but you'll be able to sign it now since review is um you review 21 is now a sign-in type of thing you will have the option to use your bluebeam sign-in to Access Studio or if you have an older Bluebeam ID from another company or from an older version, you do have a checkbox that will enable you the ability to sign in to Bluebeam Review 21 and sign into Bluebeam Studio with different email IDs or Bluebeam IDs. Right, so once you sign in you're going to see the screen that Michael has here and the two different components. So let's start with that button right there. What does that flag mean? Yep. One second, though. Somebody asked, does Studio Prime work for a company that needs one license? So you pay for a license type that gets you up to a certain amount of users to track. You're basically just tracking analytics. So one to 100 users is like $2,400. And then $100 up to $500 is a different fee. And then up to $1,000 is a different fee. And then unlimited is a big chunk of change. But some firms need that because they have that many collaborators and users. Yep. So it's great if you're just trying to look and track for what people are uploading documents to a cloud server, right? Because right now you can't. Anyone that has a license can do whatever they want within sessions and projects, essentially. That's where the wild, wild west comes in, right? You don't know what people are doing. And my general number, this number came out of my head, not Bluebeam or anybody else's. But if you've got more than like 20 users. it's worth looking into Prime, right? Because it becomes harder to manage what they're doing. And if you have a departure or somebody goes on a long vacation or whatever, you need to go do something, you can't, right? And you don't have access to know what exactly they are, what they're uploading. You know, are they uploading company secrets or are they uploading, you know, financials or stuff that you don't want them to? Prime's going to give you that sort of aspect. But yeah. Yep, we're getting into projects right now, Dan. So with that, we have our clarity of what we can do from seeing from sessions and projects, right? So let's go through and talk about projects and starting a studio project. So basically what we have is the ability to see joined or not joined. So these are things where people have invited me to join and I just haven't actually joined any of them as well. Next is the plus button. So the difference between projects and sessions is the whiteboard. And then the projects is a piece of paper. So you can hit add from here. So you can do a new project. You can join a project. The one to the right is a funnel. So this is how are we going to sort our data from a project perspective? How can we see different projects that we've been invited to? All that good information. So from here now, what we're going to go through and do is hit the add button. So you can say new project or. join a project now in order to join a project you need the nine digit code you do not need any dashes you can just hit join but we're going to start a new project so when i hit a new project we're going to go through and do another lovely one which is we did one in 2023 it looks like so i'm going to do mcr 2024 as we made it till june without making one of those i know wow right so it's been that long So once you've started a project, there are some... I like to close out the studio panel because it just gives me more real estate. But basically, once you've started one, the first thing I always look at whenever I'm looking at this is what hierarchy I'm in. That's just for me. That's my personal perspective. This starts to build out a hierarchy, kind of like a file management in terms of a folder within another folder within another folder. But another thing to note at the top is the project name. the ID, who is the owner of the project, when it was created, and statuses if you are uploading any documents. You can also add people from here if you wanted to. On the left-hand side you have project settings as well. There's also the project settings right here. Now I like to add folks from this specific button or this one over here, the human with the plus button, because now you can copy and paste mass emails. So if you wanted to copy and paste mass emails you have that option as well. Next thing would be if you wanted to go through and add emails from groups. So I've already pre-created groups, which makes it a lot easier just to click things and add those folks or your user address book. Since we have it plugged into our Microsoft environment, we can go through and plug it in and have it invited from the Microsoft environment as well. You can add a personal message if you're getting ready to invite folks into there as well. So you have that option too. From there. You also have the ability, and I'll just add Jason here. And we'll invite and I'll just add him a message. Fire up my email. Wait for that to come in. Usually comes pretty quick. Good morrow. I was watching Game of Thrones last night and they just kept saying good morrow and I couldn't get out of my head. Why can't we bring that back? I think that should be something. Good morrow. Yeah. I got an email saying you've been invited to Studio Project MCR 2024. And then it's got the Bluebeam logo. It says, join project to start collaborating in big fat blue letters. And it gives me the information. Hello and good morrow to you as well. So from here, you have the drawbars. So basically what you want to be aware of is by default, when you get into here, it is set to restrict by users. So that means that the user has to be invited via email address in order to access your. session. I mean your project. Sorry, we're not talking about sessions. But first and foremost, let's go to general. So the name, you can go through and change the name. You can't change the number because it is specific to whatever the number generation is. Total users, total files, total folders, manage notifications. This is important if you want to be made aware of things within the project. So when things are happening, and this is the preferences of what's happening in projects. So send me a daily digest of all sessions and projects. activity or send me an email when an active project is updated right so those are your options you can manage more so this tells you which ones you are getting these emails account preferences to so we'll go back it's going back and then you have managed shared links so you do have the ability within projects to enable shareable links so think of studio projects as an included dropbox That's what I would equate it to. You have the ability to send shareable links to files that live in studio projects for people to download a copy. Next is user access. So again, that was the invitees. I don't like to invite people from here because you'll have a great time inviting one by one when you can just go up to the human button here and it'll invite them by groups. The next one is the ability to create selected subgroups. not create them, you're just selecting those selected subgroups. Where is, I think, yeah, here it is. So the permissions one is where you can add and create groups. Now, if you don't want to restrict attendees and you want everyone to join your project, just uncheck this button. There you go. And if Jason took too long, I would have emailed him a reminder to join. And I can also deny him access because maybe I don't want him involved in here any more or any longer. So the next one is permissions. So the permissions are very valuable in terms of overall project controllability. Folder permissions is the next one. So this would be like, hey, Jason got invited. What can he do from a project management standpoint? Can he send other people invitations? No, he cannot. Can he manage user access? Nope, cannot. Can he manage permissions? Nope. Can you send PDFs to sessions? So this is a great thing just so everyone's aware of it. And I don't want to deviate too much like we typically do, but you can add a PDF from projects into sessions, which is a preferred workflow if you're doing like any document management stuff on your PDFs that are in a session. But anyways, you can revoke checkout. So how does projects work for PDFs? They are a check-in, check-out basis for any file that is like... Even a Revit file that you upload into here. Can you share file links? Definitely can. Full control? Nope. Okay. So Jason has no permissions from a project standpoint. Boo. This is for all attendees, though. So if I did have more, that would change. You could say, hey, this is specific to Jason Artley. I want to give him access. So I could say, now Jason has full control. all attendees are denied for anything else. So anyone else I add into here does not have any access to anything, but Jason has full control of everything. Right. And that's great for, you know, if you're working with different groups, you know, I may be the architect and I'm working with different subs and I can break out those groups to give them specific permissions. Right. I don't want just anybody being able to upload or print or copy files. I want to restrict that a little bit more, which works pretty darn slick. Because that's one of the big fears that a lot of firms have going into this. It's like, oh, it's on the cloud. It's the wild, wild west. Yes, but you have the ability to take the five minutes to set this up at the beginning and make your life easier. Exactly. So from there, you also have folder permissions. So I don't like to create folder permissions yet. So sorry, because we need to create folders. So there's a couple of different ways. With Studio Prime, you can automate folder creation. But what I have is a pretty easy thing that everyone can do since we all have Windows Explorer or File Explorer. File Explorer, right? Not Windows Explorer. Okay. So I have projects. Studio folder. Where is that? Where do you see that? Oh, there we go. No, that's not it. I think it's in. Maybe it's in here. Yeah, here it is. So studio project folders. So you could go through and create your own. I'm just going to drop you a quick tidbit here. Or you can just have a drag drop like this. And I just dragged and dropped my folder structure in here. So basically what I did was just created a folder structure that I liked with subfolders. And now I just dragged and dropped into here. And I don't know about you all, but back when I worked at a firm, we had a very similar structure, right? If you're starting a new project in your Windows environment, you would have that sort of template folder. There is no difference here. Create that template folder. That way it's consistent across the organization. Everybody's going to be starting a studio project with the same way. Maybe have some standards about how you're going to name it, too, and then what your rules are when it comes to setting that up. Or if you're going to be the admin of everything. your teams can come to you and say, all right, hey, we're going to need a project for 123 Main Street. This is what I've got going on, and then here we go, right? That way, it's consistent for every single project, and that's something that we wanted to highlight as a best practice, right? If you've got every folder and every project being wild, wild west, it's going to be harder to be efficient in the software, but if you keep your folder structures the same and your permissions the same, it's just going to make life easier. It is. And that way, you also have this quick dropdown so you can see everything. This would be great if you're doing dashboards, but we're not getting into that today. That's a whole other, that's like a full session. But yeah, so basically, whenever you click on a folder, this is your folder structure. I look at it from this perspective, not this perspective, because you can start seeing the hierarchy from this perspective. It's a little bit easier from a UI perspective. hey, what's folder within another folder within another folder? Because if you're going to add a folder within a subfolder, you just need to be aware of how it looks, right? So MCR is the hierarchy here, and then you have ARC, and then underneath ARC, as you see the folder is not aligning, those are subfolders. The reason why that's important, as you're probably all wondering, is if I go to folder permissions here, you're going to have subfolders within another folder within another folder, and these all have different access rights. So let's say here, what do I want everyone to do within these is just read. So if there's a document in here, what can people do in here? They can only read those specific files that live in that document. So from this perspective, if I go through and let's just say there was a PDF somewhere in the design files. inherent from parent, people would only be able to read. So they could double-click it open and just read the document. They wouldn't be able to modify it in any way because it's inheriting from the parent. So if it's inheriting from the parent, which is civil, it's inheriting from that parent, which is the project root, which is read. So if I wanted to, I could say, hey, this one is read and write. So everyone has read access to everything, but the design files they can read and write underneath civil. Let's do another one. So let's go to MEP. What I want everyone to be able to do with the MEP. It's hidden. Well, actually, you know what? Jason's part of the civil team. So what I'm going to go through and do is say, hey, I'm going to add Jason Arley. I don't want him to see the MEP team. So he's hidden from the MEP team. The RFIs, probably wouldn't want to see the RFIs and maybe some specs, but the hidden from the ARC. So Jason, when he logs in here. He's going to see civil inherit from parent inherit from parents. So he's going to be able to read the civil, which actually should probably read, write and delete the civil team. So inherit from parent. I don't need to go to these two to say that because they're inheriting from civil, which is rewrite delete, but he can only see the civil and RFIs and specs. So when he logs into Studio Projects, the folders that he is going to see is civil and RFIs and specs only, and any files that live in those. Thank you for saving me from architectural stuff. You're welcome. No updates. So from there, again, being aware of that ability to... be very granular if you wanted to from this perspective or globally for all attendees. You can also create what's called groups. So I could say, hey, this group here has specific access and all I have to go through and do is add the group. Hey, all of my subs, you just create the group once and that transfers over to sessions as well. And all of my folks in the demo group have specific access rights or all attendees or no attendees. So it's up to you. So I like how when, especially when you're doing this repeatedly, that those groups are going to stay. Yep. Right. That's something that has come up before. I don't want to set up a project that takes too long to create the groups and do all this other stuff. Like, no, you set it up once. It's going to remember that. So the next time you create a project, especially if we do that template folder template, it's going to be pretty quick and seamless, but still. take the time to go through here and make sure you have it set up just right because you don't want to have um you know somebody wreaking havoc yeah if i were doing this and i always had to set up permissions i would do it by groups so i would just make sure my groups are set up with specific users that are always attending these projects um and then from there start setting up permissions that way but let's talk about adding files you can do one of three ways you can go through and just drag and drop which is my preferred way because we all know. I don't even know which. We're just grabbing one. So you can add a Revit file. You can add PDFs if you wanted to. So we'll go through in here. We'll go back to my demo docs. And we'll add some PDFs as well. Sheets, shift. These are going to be under the arc. design files here too so we'll go through that pdfs so pdfs can be stored here a revit file but let's talk about how things are interactive in here so from a pdf perspective and maybe i should add some like see if i have any excel files that i don't here's a combined takeoff okay so you do have the ability to store pdfs csvs right They say any files, things that I found they can't do is like an executable zip file. You can store a PDF zip file, which is Bluebeam's version of creating a zip file. It's a .pdf extension. It's called a PDF package. And then you can't store like a sets master file in here. So, okay. So how does it work from PDFs? So the ability to go in here, you are able to. right click and check out or you can just hit open. So if you hit open, it is just a read only. You'll see the lock button from a PDF perspective. And even if I double click open a CSV file, same thing, it's going to be read only. So from here, what I'm able to go through and do is I'm able to view it. That's it. But I can see version history. So there are no new versions that people have modified it. That's the one great thing about Studio Projects is there is version history. from a check-in, check-out basis. That same thing follows suit for a Revit file for CSV. So that's one of the great parts about it. It does have version history and maintain the version histories within projects itself. So if I wanted to modify this, I would check it out. So you can check things out like a book. The great thing about this too is you can see who has what checked out. So if Jason checked out something, I would see, which he can't see any files in here. So he's going to say, let me go to civil. drop something in there oh yeah i can't see your architectural stuff so it just drops i don't see anything yeah i just dropped something in the civil okay so once you check things out though you will be able to see who has them checked out one thing is that you do have the ability to revoke checkout access so if i wanted to when jason decides to check something out and i'll probably have to hit refresh there's the ability to refresh things when you're in here you from this level. I don't want to refresh it from there, so I'm going to refresh it from here. So that was just a right-click on the overall title just to refresh things because, again, this is cloud data and it's not going to automatically sync and refresh. The sync button doesn't mean automatically sync. The sync means to cache. data locally okay refresh second here um so i'm on my side and i see architectural and i see map you have to refresh it because remember i changed the access it weird so right click refresh sync is to cache files local yeah let's see what happens here just so everyone's i still see architectural Oh, but I don't, I see, yeah. It's probably, okay, so that's maybe because I gave you this. Yeah, that's probably what it is. Yeah. But yeah, so refresh means refreshing what is in here. So that made me be able to see his specific logo being checked out. Sync means when there's new files uploaded, it's recaching that file local to your desktop. Reason being, or mobile device if you're on your iPad, if you disconnect from the internet, you do not have access to things that you have not cached local on your local devices. So that's what sync does. Just so you're all aware, automatically syncs files to cache local. You can do that from a folder level or an overall project level. That's what the sync tool is used for. But let's go back to here. So the great thing about this is that you can see who has it checked out by via email address. Now, the one thing you can do is since I'm the owner of this, I can revoke the checkout. Just be aware any markups or any changes that he did on a checkout basis is not going to transfer over when I revoke his checkout. It's just let me do something before you do that. Let's let's experiment. I've made a little markup, so I have it checked out. So if you revoke it, see if I get a message or anything. Let me check this in first. Okay. So if I go and revoke it, are you sure you want to revoke the checkout? Any of the modifications made by the owner will be lost. Okay. Check revoked. So if I go back, I don't see anything, but I will dinky dinky. And, oh, it's giving me an error now. Now I have a triangle logo. Oh. There was some sort of pop-up, but it disappeared. But you clicked through it too quick? Um, well, it says, it's given me a triangle logo with an exclamation point in it. Conflict. So there's a conflict. It's pending, but it's not telling me what exactly it is. So if I close that, ask me if I want to save the changes, but it doesn't say anything about checking it back in. So, interesting. Cool. Kicked you out. So from there, again, being able to check in, check out files is what you're able to do. So you check it out. So you check in, check out like a book at the library. There are no two copies at the library. It's a single copy. What you're able to do is you're able to mark up. So you have those options to go through and mark up. You can do two things. You can update the server copy. So let's say Jason wanted to look at something that I was working on, but I still wanted to work on it. You can hit update server copy because then it would update Jason's side. He can refresh and then he can view that updated copy on the server, which is projects. The other one would just be to check it back in, and then he can go in and check it out if he wanted to. So I go through and check in. It's great to make comments, so don't just click past that so people can see them. We're talking best practices. Leaving comments is one of the best practices. Because comments is right here, and you would see the comment of what was updated versus me just clicking through things as I just commented on Jason clicking through things. So fun stuff there. But yeah, so you get the option to go through and check these in as well so that you'll see that version history. And it's very easy. You can just say open that version if you wanted to see a past version. So we'll hit close here and then we all know the split screen capabilities. So we can see the differences, right? If you wanted to restore from this version, you can. If you wanted to restore back from the old version to the new version or back and forth, right? You can go pretty inception in there if you wanted to. And when you do that, it will create a new revision. So if I go tell two to be current again, it's actually going to become four. Yep. So now it's four. Go back. Yeah. That's at inception. Pretty handy. Properties. Great. So the other one would be a Revit file. So we'll CSV. We'll just go and click the CSV. Again, it's in read-only. Why? Because I didn't check it out. So if I made modifications, it wouldn't save it. So if you wanted to, you could check it out. The one great thing that was an update for this is if you wanted to open this, now it's not read-only. You accidentally closed review because I've done that before. It doesn't lose its saving. location. So you can close out a review, you can save it, it will still save that metadata back into review. That happened to me a little bit ago when I was trying that out way back, and it wouldn't actually save. It would require you to save it local. So there we go. So I can hit save. If I want to make any modifications, we'll just delete data. I'll hit save, hit exit. You could check it in if you wanted to. I'll just do update, check in. Here we are. And then if I open it again as read-only, because I didn't want to, you'll see that this is still updated. So if someone else opened it, right? Clicked out of there quick. Okay. Next one is a Revit file. I would just be aware that this doesn't tell you what version. I would definitely name the version that this Revit project is in. So we all know we can't go backwards. And when you double click this open to open it, it's going to open up your most recently used version of Revit. So there's a lot of cautionary items in this realm of using Revit in this environment, but it does work. So if you're a single user and you title it what version it is, just open up the version that you want it to open up in. So I just, I don't even remember myself. So we'll go to my desktop, project one. I'll go to... Version history here. Revit properties. So this is 2023. So what I would do is I would go through and I would open this up in 2023. So I would open up Revit 2023. And this does work with AutoCAD. I don't think we tried Simple3D. AutoCAD or Simple3D doesn't care as long as you're opening something newer than anything 2018 and up. It'll be fine. Yeah. So we got quite a... quite the spread yeah so i'll open up 2023 here and then we can open up the project so basically again you would check it out if you want to modify something so i would go into here i would say okay i'm going to check this out and then you would just double click it open um since there's no like file explorer to this you just double click it open which typically is never the best way to open A Revit project, but you know. Okay, so from here, we can go through and make some modifications. So if I wanted to just go move this over, hit save. Perfect. It's saving back into that environment. And then I could hit escape. You can come back into here. We can go and say check in. I don't have to necessarily check in, but I can. We'll just do it anyways. Moved. Check in. Perfect. And then I could go through and we'll just double click it as a read only. You still have Revit open. Yep. Perfect. So you just did that with Revit. Obviously, when you're using different design software, there are limitations and gotchas and all that other stuff. Would you recommend using Revit for this? Or would you stick to more spreadsheets and Word docs and PDFs? I don't know. So if I already have Autodesk Construction Cloud, ACC, I would use that. But if I don't have that... And I'm working as a single user, and I have review, and I wanted the modulability of working from anywhere and being able to access my file. From a file transfer standpoint, I would use projects. Now, if I just wanted to quickly share a larger file, because we all know emails aren't great for that, yes, I would use this. I would just drag drop my project into here and share it to whoever. by lifetime of project and not require a password. Exactly. So this comes up a lot as well. You know, emails are sort of organization dependent on how big you can send. I think here we're still tied to like 15 megs or something, 15 or 20 megs, which is about the same it used to be 15, 20 years ago. But at the same time, our files are getting bigger and more complex. And this is where folks are like, well, now I have to introduce Dropbox or Google Drive or. something else to get these big files spread out. Here, since we're already using review, we've already got a license to it. We've already got logged into it. We're just going to upload it here to our, maybe a share file folder, perhaps. Again, another best practice so you know what files are meant to be shared. Create this link. Now, Michael, if you send me that link and I don't have review, it's still going to let me play with it, right? Correct. Yep. So if you don't have review, it doesn't matter. With the shareable link, if you paste it into your Explorer here, this is what it looks like to the end user. So you just hit download and it's downloading just like a typical download from the internet. It works really, really well. Yep. And it even gives you a little blurb about what it is and maybe it's going to create a little bit of FOMO on the receiving end and like, you know, how about I just get Bluebeam review as well and then we can play in the same. I was going to say sandbox, but I was, you know, same cloud. Same cloud. A little bit different because we're no longer grounded, right? Right. Oh. So that ability to keep things in the cloud, easy access to them, that's one great thing in here. Again, you do have the ability to limit, limit, limitate. I was going to say limitate, but that doesn't make sense. Add limitations to folks that are joining in to here. You can, again, see the number of total files, total folders. One of the great things about Studio Project, again, is that ability to have folder permissions and that ability to invite and share files as well. And ease of access to any type of file that you want to store within Studio Projects. The other one would be to initiate a session from here. So let's say this is where our repository is. You know, we've talked about single sources of truth. You can initiate a session from Studio Projects into Studio Sessions with a live live stream. link from that perspective. So again, all you have to do is right click on a PDF and you can say add to a new session or add to an existing one if there was one created. So all I need to do is say what the session name is MCR 2024. And right off the gate, it will initiate a session. So it's going to check this out. So if it was checked out by someone else, you wouldn't be able to roll it into a session. But basically, you'll have a new session icon here, and it's going to roll it into a session for us. It's going to open it up into a session as well at some point here. There we go. So it probably did it, but since this panel was closed, it already rolled it into a session. So here it is. You have the user, which is me initiating it. I know that would be cool if it would just initiate every one part of the project as invited, but they want you to intentionally invite people into this. So I would have to invite Jason again into here as well, but I have him under a group so I could just quickly do that. But again, it's checked out now, so you'll see that it's checked out here. And if I wanted to open it up in the session, I can open it up in the session and modify it. So you would use this if you were collaborating on a project, right? And instead of just sending that email, like sending that link as we just did, like, hey, let's go over this in a session, right? And that's where we're going to spend our last nine minutes and talk about sessions and what's that for, right? Because projects, again, all your project files, all your hierarchy, everything that's all in one place, your single source of truth, your common meeting ground, whatever you want to call it, but sessions, the different world. So what are we going to do in sessions? Why would we create a session from a project? Yeah, so Studio Sessions offers the ability to markup simultaneously. So where projects you checked it out as single user and you could see updates, the benefit of using Studio Sessions is the ability to markup simultaneously. So if it's a large set that's not broken out and multiple people need to coordinate and collaborate on a PDF set, the really only option to do this is in Studio Sessions. We tried doing that in... um acc because of course right we some of us have access to that we talked about that last week but those are rasterized and they're not as full strength of what we could do from a markup perspective right so can what can we do with studio sessions is the ability to live markup collaboratively so i'm going to add jason as well because he's going to have this open so that he can come into here and we can see this collaborative environment and what that kind of entails right you So Jason has been invited. I can also see who's not joined, which he has not joined, and I can send a reminder, 10 reminders, that he just gets blown up right now. But once he joins, yeah, once he joins, you can see things. So as people start opening up files, so I'm going to follow the attendee. So that's just by selecting his name, right-clicking, saying follow, and I can see what he has open, and I can follow his cursor as he's going through and looking at the... the pdf set here so again the ability to collaborate if we didn't i know someone asked at one point if we had if they had like a zoom capability with it no you would just have to have zoom or teams to visually see things if you wanted to this way or if we weren't on a call i mean on a meeting invite i could just follow him and be on the phone with him and say as he's talking through and looking i can see his stylus moving of where things need to go right and how things need to be modified So we'll deviate from his markups because what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my own area and I want to show what an alert looks like. So Jason's going to make a markup and he's going to be able to alert an attendee and we'll show you how to do that. Basically, what I'll get is a notification down here. Yeah. we'll get a notification down in my notifications list and it gives you a yellow ping right here i know it's it used to be very bright and over it but it was right here so right here is where it is notifications it is right here once you click it it brings you to where that markup was made So you can alert attendees if you wanted to. You can also right click and say mark as unread. So then you're aware that, hey, I clicked it, but I needed to go back to something and I need to go back and click to it again. And then you can dismiss it as well. So that's where if I were going to notify somebody, there is a chat function as well. So let's say we're working in different time zones. I can say, hey, Michael, I'm concerned about this area. Can you come take a look? I'm going to send you a notification about what I'm talking about. So there's a way that you can collaborate here. Again, if you're on different sides of the globe or different time zones or you get split shifts or whatever it is, you don't always have to be, hey, meet here at one o'clock. We're going to go over a set of plans. That's what this is for, to give you a little bit more freedom and allow you more time to review at your leisure. Exactly. So that ability to be modular with how you're going through. and communicating with your team members. That's one of the great benefits of this. I can't go through and modify Jason's stuff. He is the owner of it. So that is a huge part of markup integrity and the ability to collaborate simultaneously. That's why you would want to use sessions. The ability within projects is to store files, right? And it's a check-in, check-out basis. So you don't have that freedom to markup simultaneously. You do have the freedom to look at the PDF. simultaneously but you don't have the ability to mark up simultaneously so that's the one difference i would say between both of them correct now we've walked through some of the best practices of studio projects and sessions but we didn't talk about the limitations based upon your subscription type oh right so that's new depending on what level of review 21 you have right you have your basic you have your core and you have your complete So depending on which version you have will affect what you are able to do when the things that we show today, do you have that link? I don't know where that link is. Yeah, right there. You'll be in pricing. Oh, you mean just the pricing one? Cause that will show you. Dude, every time I'm like, I got licensed bro. Um, but there's another one for like the reader, right? But in here, yeah, there are limitations. If you have basics, you cannot create a new project or session. If you have basics, and that's where things get weird, because if you remember the old perpetual model where we had standard CAD and extreme, folks with standard could create their own sessions and projects. That's no longer the case. There's also somewhere in here, and they buried it now, with... It tells you what a free user can do and what a... Yeah, it was something like basic markups, no tools, or something like that. Yeah. Doug, I'm not sure if Bluebeam View still exists. I think what they just want you to use it now is in that view mode or in that unpaid collaborator mode. So disable functionality in view mode, which is the free mode, which is not a paid for license, right? Adding markups to PDF outside a session. But it doesn't say like what your markups. I remember seeing something where they were limited to basic stuff. They weren't able to do measurements or anything else. Yeah, there's a list somewhere, and it tells you exactly what you can and cannot do, but they buried it for sure. Well, Dave. So there is, before we wrap up here, Dave's going to be hosting a tool building workshop this afternoon over at U Chapter 2. So he posted a link in the chat. If you're checking it out, go over to U Chapter 2 and see Dave do his thing over there. It'll be pretty cool. I'm not hosting, just attending, whatever. Same thing. But that about brings us to the bottom of the hour again. Thanks for joining us. As always, if you've got questions about, you know, how should I do this or what's the best route or what's the best tool for the job, that's what we're here for. Reach out to Michael or myself or anybody over here at ATG and we're happy to get you sorted. Hopefully you found today informative. Hopefully this inspires a little bit of curiosity to give this a try. It works really well. You know, we've been doing this MCR stuff for over three years now. Both of us have been using Revu for quite some time and using this stuff. And if there was a drawback, if there was, you know, something that we would find as a reason not to use it, we wouldn't be, you know, blowing smoke, right? We're going to tell you all those things. And that's why we wanted to do this best practices today to help you. uh be aware of some of the gotchas and then also just use it more because it's really cool exactly so with that send us out of here bud yep with that thanks everyone thanks for joining as always we appreciate every single one of you and keeping the momentum going for mcr as long as it's been but until then we'll see you all next week all right take care

How do I, if I wanted to dabble with cloud-enabled things, where do I start? And we figured since if you're listening to this, you probably already have Bluebeam, you know, or some sort of access to Bluebeam Review. So we're going to go through the best practices of how to get started with Bluebeam Studio projects. What are the best practices for Bluebeam Studio sessions?

And then if we have time, we will go through and talk about Prime. So it's a whole other management component that may benefit our admin or IT folks. So we'll keep going. But in typical MCR fashion, if you've got questions about anything else, just throw them in the chat and we will answer them as we go.

Let's talk about Bluebeam Studio projects with this thing that Michael pulled up. That's exactly your mind reading today. Yeah, so I always like to pull this up first. I had to Google like 10 different things.

And then for some reason, there's like the copilot. If you scroll up all the way, it's just great. But this I'll put this in the chat because everyone always asks this. There's another one out there that has like cloud limitations in it as well. You can Google it out there.

But basically, there are limitations to some of the things within review in terms of the desktop application and how many attendees can join. So you can have up to 500 sessions and then you can have unlimited projects. Now, there is a stylus down here and we'll talk about that when we get there. There are some limitations in terms of just latency.

But the next one is how many files can be uploaded. So you can have 5000 files uploaded into a session and then unlimited in a project. Next one will be what files does it support?

PDF for sessions only in any file format except some executables and... Zip files. Yeah, the zip files and sets.

How big can files be? One gigabyte each. And then the next one is unlimited for projects.

So that is kind of the question mark here because if you have larger files, it says right down here that you will experience. some lower performance. And that is true.

I've had that happen. Next one is how big can the markups be? So 10 megabytes each. So this would probably be if like you're attaching anything to those markups. And then projects is unlimited.

How much space can you use? Unlimited and then unlimited. So there are some of your limitations. I guess the only other one would be like file revisions.

So you do have the version history within projects itself. The next one is can you receive markup alerts? So in sessions you can, but in projects you can't markup alert those attendees like you can within sessions.

And then the big part, do all attendees need a license of review? Now attendees, right, we as review users will be the admins or main participants of this, but if you want to collaborate with somebody outside of your organization or whatever who doesn't have review they don't need it pretty cool i mean it didn't take it back they need review they don't need a license for it correct but i will say with the newer licensed tier someone was commenting the other day that they can't their people can't attend a session and mark up with tool sets so they're Yeah, so there are limitations to the different tiers within basic, core, complete, and also the viewer for what you're able to do within sessions now. So with that, how long does studio sessions remain? So this is the one thing.

We all just need to be aware that sessions and projects does get uploaded to a cloud server. So if you do have some type of requirement, like let's... Typically, it's more of like a government type of project.

You may not be able to upload things into a session or project. So that just comes down to it isn't an AWS server. Bluebeam can reactivate in terms of the PDFs or information that is there. But let's talk about what happens with inactivity on a specific session or project.

So for studio sessions, the following happens if it's not being used. So after 80 days of inactivity, a notification email will be sent to the host, and the session will be archived. If the email doesn't arrive in your inbox, uh, okay. After 90 days, the session will be archived.

After 170 days, the host will receive another email stating that the session will be deleted. So archived means you can still access it in sessions. It just has a grayed out. I don't know if I have any up. All mine just got deleted because I was maybe ignoring those emails.

Yeah. Oh, I got some gray ones. Let's see. Do you have some? Yeah.

All right, let me see if I do before we... Well, you should, because they're the same ones, our X-Con one. So I just have profiles.

I'm assuming because you are the owner, I don't see it. Yeah. That could be it. So let me...

But I have one right here. So this one's ready to be... inactive so it's inactive session will be deleted in 41 days in seven hours so i hover over it if i wanted people to re-access it like jason has on his he can just click it open and then now it becomes active so this means i just haven't gone into this specific no one has session um since you know 80 days and then now i have 90 days after And then 170 days. So it's not like consecutive.

So it's not 90 days plus 170 days. So it's 170 days as of it being inactive. The host will receive an email stating that the session will be deleted. And then after 180 days, the session will be permanently deleted and cannot be recovered at this point.

Right. Can you share your screen again so we can see what you're seeing? Oh, wait.

What happened? I don't know. But Dave was asking.

So yeah, I've been getting emails because I ignored some of them, right? But that's what you see. It's going to be grayed out and then it will let you know, like, hey, it's going to go away forever. But if you click on it, it will restart that counter essentially. Yep.

Yeah, so you'll have this profile here and it says 41 days, seven hours. And then again, going back into here, I don't know when my share screen cut off. But yeah, so 170 days will be received.

And then 180 days will be permanently deleted. So for studio projects, studio projects will never be marked for archival or deletion. So now we're talking about projects. So here are all of our projects.

So projects will never be marked. for archival or deletion and can only be deleted by the project owner or a user with full controlled permissions. So they never get deleted, which is great.

But in order to delete them, the project owner has to delete them. The studio project will be deleted by the project owner. It will remain coverable for under 20 days.

So if someone comes in and is the owner and they're like, hey, I'm going to delete this. It is recoverable for... 120 days.

So like PDFs or files that were in there, they can be recovered by Bluebeam. See how it says contact us. Right.

Now it says studio projects are never marked for archival, but that doesn't mean that they will never be deleted. That's the way I would read it through that lines because you never know, you know, we could go through another thing that we did with review 2019 and below where you no longer have access to studio in those older versions. So that would be, you know, you would have those sessions that were there are still there. You know, you can still access them in a newer version of the software.

But if you didn't upgrade, then technically that is being archived or deleted because you are forfeiting your access to it. I don't know why my thing cut off, why I wasn't sharing. OK, anyways, we'll continue onward and I'll figure out my IT stuff. Um, when do you when do you when do users receive session expiration notifications?

So session expiration is when you start a studio session, you have the ability to set an expiration. This would be in need of like, hey, someone needs to have markups completed or the whole team. It's not someone because it's a whole team regardless.

It needs to have sessions deleted in a specific certain amount of time, and that's what they're going to go through and do. So, yeah. Right. That would be something where, you know, we have a short fuse project or we know this project is due in 30 days. You know, it's not going to be an ongoing thing.

So we're going to set that expiration when we create that. So as we go through here in a little bit and create a studio session, you'll see where there's that option to set that expiration date. And we've done that here on MCR as well. We'll just set it to go for the day or for a couple hours or for a month or whatever. It comes in pretty handy because that will sort of cut off that access for everybody else.

Yeah, so let's go through and talk about, I don't think there's anything else really in here. And not really. We can always come back to that at the end when it comes to reassigning ownerships and stuff. Yeah. So within here, and I've talked about this plenty of times, Studio is the wild, wild west.

So you really don't have any control over your end users using it. I do have an email from Bluebeam. Disable Studio.

studio here um i don't want to show everything but yeah so you can if you if you want to know how to not allow users to access studio there is a way so you can email jason and myself but aside from that is there a way to monitor people's movements in studio there is so if you are going through and looking to do that, it's a thing called Studio Prime. We are now navigating SSO for ourselves, so we will see how that works with Studio Prime. But if you do not have true SSO, you can activate Studio Prime with its integrations.

But again, Studio Prime is meant to see visibility into everyone that you decide to add into its sessions and projects. So with that being said, typically you can go to your own studio. So I think there's a quick way to just go to one here.

I think it's going to bring me back to Studio Prime. But what is it? Studio. Try it.

It'll push me to Studio Prime. So typically what you'll do is you'll want to go through and if you don't have Studio Prime right now, you can still see your sessions. You can't see visibility into your projects, unfortunately.

So what we'll go through and do is I'll go to classic mode. Classic mode is what this used to be. So basically you have your sessions here.

This is also where you can change your information of like your default name. But my sessions, you can see all of your sessions and you can reactivate them. Like this was deleted.

But if I wanted to go through and reactivate it within the timeframe that it gives you, which is like whatever that timeframe was that we were just looking at, you can go through and reopen them essentially. The next one is your user data. So again, you have your name. Everyone has access to this. This is not an additional cost.

The additional cost comes to reining in folks, and that is using Studio Prime and the ability to see folks' projects and sessions, get access to those projects and sessions as well. Anything else to that, Jason, you think? No, but that classic mode is...

is important that one will work for everybody you don't have to have prime to do that but that will allow you to see sort of what's going on um at a glance which is nice yeah to your personal sessions only correct so it's going back are we going to walk through starting one is that was that your thought yeah you know so if you haven't seen sessions that little 3d 2d house um icon so looks like michael's in the review review advanced profile and on that profile that studio panel is going to be on the left side and people have clicked on it and they see that little sign-in thing and they're like uh-oh what is this you know we get lots of questions about well the studio included or does it cost more or if i sign up you know is it going to cost my company money or what is that it's 100 included with a little bit of an asterisk on there um but you'll be able to sign it now since review is um you review 21 is now a sign-in type of thing you will have the option to use your bluebeam sign-in to Access Studio or if you have an older Bluebeam ID from another company or from an older version, you do have a checkbox that will enable you the ability to sign in to Bluebeam Review 21 and sign into Bluebeam Studio with different email IDs or Bluebeam IDs. Right, so once you sign in you're going to see the screen that Michael has here and the two different components. So let's start with that button right there.

What does that flag mean? Yep. One second, though. Somebody asked, does Studio Prime work for a company that needs one license? So you pay for a license type that gets you up to a certain amount of users to track.

You're basically just tracking analytics. So one to 100 users is like $2,400. And then $100 up to $500 is a different fee.

And then up to $1,000 is a different fee. And then unlimited is a big chunk of change. But some firms need that because they have that many collaborators and users.

Yep. So it's great if you're just trying to look and track for what people are uploading documents to a cloud server, right? Because right now you can't. Anyone that has a license can do whatever they want within sessions and projects, essentially. That's where the wild, wild west comes in, right?

You don't know what people are doing. And my general number, this number came out of my head, not Bluebeam or anybody else's. But if you've got more than like 20 users.

it's worth looking into Prime, right? Because it becomes harder to manage what they're doing. And if you have a departure or somebody goes on a long vacation or whatever, you need to go do something, you can't, right? And you don't have access to know what exactly they are, what they're uploading.

You know, are they uploading company secrets or are they uploading, you know, financials or stuff that you don't want them to? Prime's going to give you that sort of aspect. But yeah. Yep, we're getting into projects right now, Dan.

So with that, we have our clarity of what we can do from seeing from sessions and projects, right? So let's go through and talk about projects and starting a studio project. So basically what we have is the ability to see joined or not joined. So these are things where people have invited me to join and I just haven't actually joined any of them as well. Next is the plus button.

So the difference between projects and sessions is the whiteboard. And then the projects is a piece of paper. So you can hit add from here. So you can do a new project. You can join a project.

The one to the right is a funnel. So this is how are we going to sort our data from a project perspective? How can we see different projects that we've been invited to? All that good information.

So from here now, what we're going to go through and do is hit the add button. So you can say new project or. join a project now in order to join a project you need the nine digit code you do not need any dashes you can just hit join but we're going to start a new project so when i hit a new project we're going to go through and do another lovely one which is we did one in 2023 it looks like so i'm going to do mcr 2024 as we made it till june without making one of those i know wow right so it's been that long So once you've started a project, there are some...

I like to close out the studio panel because it just gives me more real estate. But basically, once you've started one, the first thing I always look at whenever I'm looking at this is what hierarchy I'm in. That's just for me.

That's my personal perspective. This starts to build out a hierarchy, kind of like a file management in terms of a folder within another folder within another folder. But another thing to note at the top is the project name. the ID, who is the owner of the project, when it was created, and statuses if you are uploading any documents.

You can also add people from here if you wanted to. On the left-hand side you have project settings as well. There's also the project settings right here.

Now I like to add folks from this specific button or this one over here, the human with the plus button, because now you can copy and paste mass emails. So if you wanted to copy and paste mass emails you have that option as well. Next thing would be if you wanted to go through and add emails from groups. So I've already pre-created groups, which makes it a lot easier just to click things and add those folks or your user address book. Since we have it plugged into our Microsoft environment, we can go through and plug it in and have it invited from the Microsoft environment as well.

You can add a personal message if you're getting ready to invite folks into there as well. So you have that option too. From there. You also have the ability, and I'll just add Jason here.

And we'll invite and I'll just add him a message. Fire up my email. Wait for that to come in. Usually comes pretty quick. Good morrow.

I was watching Game of Thrones last night and they just kept saying good morrow and I couldn't get out of my head. Why can't we bring that back? I think that should be something. Good morrow. Yeah.

I got an email saying you've been invited to Studio Project MCR 2024. And then it's got the Bluebeam logo. It says, join project to start collaborating in big fat blue letters. And it gives me the information. Hello and good morrow to you as well.

So from here, you have the drawbars. So basically what you want to be aware of is by default, when you get into here, it is set to restrict by users. So that means that the user has to be invited via email address in order to access your.

session. I mean your project. Sorry, we're not talking about sessions. But first and foremost, let's go to general. So the name, you can go through and change the name.

You can't change the number because it is specific to whatever the number generation is. Total users, total files, total folders, manage notifications. This is important if you want to be made aware of things within the project.

So when things are happening, and this is the preferences of what's happening in projects. So send me a daily digest of all sessions and projects. activity or send me an email when an active project is updated right so those are your options you can manage more so this tells you which ones you are getting these emails account preferences to so we'll go back it's going back and then you have managed shared links so you do have the ability within projects to enable shareable links so think of studio projects as an included dropbox That's what I would equate it to.

You have the ability to send shareable links to files that live in studio projects for people to download a copy. Next is user access. So again, that was the invitees. I don't like to invite people from here because you'll have a great time inviting one by one when you can just go up to the human button here and it'll invite them by groups.

The next one is the ability to create selected subgroups. not create them, you're just selecting those selected subgroups. Where is, I think, yeah, here it is. So the permissions one is where you can add and create groups. Now, if you don't want to restrict attendees and you want everyone to join your project, just uncheck this button.

There you go. And if Jason took too long, I would have emailed him a reminder to join. And I can also deny him access because maybe I don't want him involved in here any more or any longer. So the next one is permissions.

So the permissions are very valuable in terms of overall project controllability. Folder permissions is the next one. So this would be like, hey, Jason got invited. What can he do from a project management standpoint? Can he send other people invitations?

No, he cannot. Can he manage user access? Nope, cannot. Can he manage permissions?

Nope. Can you send PDFs to sessions? So this is a great thing just so everyone's aware of it. And I don't want to deviate too much like we typically do, but you can add a PDF from projects into sessions, which is a preferred workflow if you're doing like any document management stuff on your PDFs that are in a session. But anyways, you can revoke checkout.

So how does projects work for PDFs? They are a check-in, check-out basis for any file that is like... Even a Revit file that you upload into here.

Can you share file links? Definitely can. Full control?

Nope. Okay. So Jason has no permissions from a project standpoint. Boo.

This is for all attendees, though. So if I did have more, that would change. You could say, hey, this is specific to Jason Artley.

I want to give him access. So I could say, now Jason has full control. all attendees are denied for anything else. So anyone else I add into here does not have any access to anything, but Jason has full control of everything. Right.

And that's great for, you know, if you're working with different groups, you know, I may be the architect and I'm working with different subs and I can break out those groups to give them specific permissions. Right. I don't want just anybody being able to upload or print or copy files. I want to restrict that a little bit more, which works pretty darn slick.

Because that's one of the big fears that a lot of firms have going into this. It's like, oh, it's on the cloud. It's the wild, wild west. Yes, but you have the ability to take the five minutes to set this up at the beginning and make your life easier.

Exactly. So from there, you also have folder permissions. So I don't like to create folder permissions yet.

So sorry, because we need to create folders. So there's a couple of different ways. With Studio Prime, you can automate folder creation. But what I have is a pretty easy thing that everyone can do since we all have Windows Explorer or File Explorer. File Explorer, right?

Not Windows Explorer. Okay. So I have projects.

Studio folder. Where is that? Where do you see that? Oh, there we go.

No, that's not it. I think it's in. Maybe it's in here.

Yeah, here it is. So studio project folders. So you could go through and create your own. I'm just going to drop you a quick tidbit here.

Or you can just have a drag drop like this. And I just dragged and dropped my folder structure in here. So basically what I did was just created a folder structure that I liked with subfolders. And now I just dragged and dropped into here. And I don't know about you all, but back when I worked at a firm, we had a very similar structure, right?

If you're starting a new project in your Windows environment, you would have that sort of template folder. There is no difference here. Create that template folder.

That way it's consistent across the organization. Everybody's going to be starting a studio project with the same way. Maybe have some standards about how you're going to name it, too, and then what your rules are when it comes to setting that up. Or if you're going to be the admin of everything.

your teams can come to you and say, all right, hey, we're going to need a project for 123 Main Street. This is what I've got going on, and then here we go, right? That way, it's consistent for every single project, and that's something that we wanted to highlight as a best practice, right? If you've got every folder and every project being wild, wild west, it's going to be harder to be efficient in the software, but if you keep your folder structures the same and your permissions the same, it's just going to make life easier. It is.

And that way, you also have this quick dropdown so you can see everything. This would be great if you're doing dashboards, but we're not getting into that today. That's a whole other, that's like a full session.

But yeah, so basically, whenever you click on a folder, this is your folder structure. I look at it from this perspective, not this perspective, because you can start seeing the hierarchy from this perspective. It's a little bit easier from a UI perspective. hey, what's folder within another folder within another folder?

Because if you're going to add a folder within a subfolder, you just need to be aware of how it looks, right? So MCR is the hierarchy here, and then you have ARC, and then underneath ARC, as you see the folder is not aligning, those are subfolders. The reason why that's important, as you're probably all wondering, is if I go to folder permissions here, you're going to have subfolders within another folder within another folder, and these all have different access rights.

So let's say here, what do I want everyone to do within these is just read. So if there's a document in here, what can people do in here? They can only read those specific files that live in that document. So from this perspective, if I go through and let's just say there was a PDF somewhere in the design files. inherent from parent, people would only be able to read.

So they could double-click it open and just read the document. They wouldn't be able to modify it in any way because it's inheriting from the parent. So if it's inheriting from the parent, which is civil, it's inheriting from that parent, which is the project root, which is read. So if I wanted to, I could say, hey, this one is read and write.

So everyone has read access to everything, but the design files they can read and write underneath civil. Let's do another one. So let's go to MEP. What I want everyone to be able to do with the MEP. It's hidden.

Well, actually, you know what? Jason's part of the civil team. So what I'm going to go through and do is say, hey, I'm going to add Jason Arley. I don't want him to see the MEP team.

So he's hidden from the MEP team. The RFIs, probably wouldn't want to see the RFIs and maybe some specs, but the hidden from the ARC. So Jason, when he logs in here.

He's going to see civil inherit from parent inherit from parents. So he's going to be able to read the civil, which actually should probably read, write and delete the civil team. So inherit from parent. I don't need to go to these two to say that because they're inheriting from civil, which is rewrite delete, but he can only see the civil and RFIs and specs.

So when he logs into Studio Projects, the folders that he is going to see is civil and RFIs and specs only, and any files that live in those. Thank you for saving me from architectural stuff. You're welcome. No updates. So from there, again, being aware of that ability to...

be very granular if you wanted to from this perspective or globally for all attendees. You can also create what's called groups. So I could say, hey, this group here has specific access and all I have to go through and do is add the group. Hey, all of my subs, you just create the group once and that transfers over to sessions as well. And all of my folks in the demo group have specific access rights or all attendees or no attendees.

So it's up to you. So I like how when, especially when you're doing this repeatedly, that those groups are going to stay. Yep.

Right. That's something that has come up before. I don't want to set up a project that takes too long to create the groups and do all this other stuff.

Like, no, you set it up once. It's going to remember that. So the next time you create a project, especially if we do that template folder template, it's going to be pretty quick and seamless, but still.

take the time to go through here and make sure you have it set up just right because you don't want to have um you know somebody wreaking havoc yeah if i were doing this and i always had to set up permissions i would do it by groups so i would just make sure my groups are set up with specific users that are always attending these projects um and then from there start setting up permissions that way but let's talk about adding files you can do one of three ways you can go through and just drag and drop which is my preferred way because we all know. I don't even know which. We're just grabbing one.

So you can add a Revit file. You can add PDFs if you wanted to. So we'll go through in here. We'll go back to my demo docs. And we'll add some PDFs as well.

Sheets, shift. These are going to be under the arc. design files here too so we'll go through that pdfs so pdfs can be stored here a revit file but let's talk about how things are interactive in here so from a pdf perspective and maybe i should add some like see if i have any excel files that i don't here's a combined takeoff okay so you do have the ability to store pdfs csvs right They say any files, things that I found they can't do is like an executable zip file. You can store a PDF zip file, which is Bluebeam's version of creating a zip file.

It's a .pdf extension. It's called a PDF package. And then you can't store like a sets master file in here. So, okay.

So how does it work from PDFs? So the ability to go in here, you are able to. right click and check out or you can just hit open. So if you hit open, it is just a read only. You'll see the lock button from a PDF perspective.

And even if I double click open a CSV file, same thing, it's going to be read only. So from here, what I'm able to go through and do is I'm able to view it. That's it.

But I can see version history. So there are no new versions that people have modified it. That's the one great thing about Studio Projects is there is version history. from a check-in, check-out basis. That same thing follows suit for a Revit file for CSV.

So that's one of the great parts about it. It does have version history and maintain the version histories within projects itself. So if I wanted to modify this, I would check it out.

So you can check things out like a book. The great thing about this too is you can see who has what checked out. So if Jason checked out something, I would see, which he can't see any files in here. So he's going to say, let me go to civil. drop something in there oh yeah i can't see your architectural stuff so it just drops i don't see anything yeah i just dropped something in the civil okay so once you check things out though you will be able to see who has them checked out one thing is that you do have the ability to revoke checkout access so if i wanted to when jason decides to check something out and i'll probably have to hit refresh there's the ability to refresh things when you're in here you from this level.

I don't want to refresh it from there, so I'm going to refresh it from here. So that was just a right-click on the overall title just to refresh things because, again, this is cloud data and it's not going to automatically sync and refresh. The sync button doesn't mean automatically sync. The sync means to cache. data locally okay refresh second here um so i'm on my side and i see architectural and i see map you have to refresh it because remember i changed the access it weird so right click refresh sync is to cache files local yeah let's see what happens here just so everyone's i still see architectural Oh, but I don't, I see, yeah.

It's probably, okay, so that's maybe because I gave you this. Yeah, that's probably what it is. Yeah.

But yeah, so refresh means refreshing what is in here. So that made me be able to see his specific logo being checked out. Sync means when there's new files uploaded, it's recaching that file local to your desktop.

Reason being, or mobile device if you're on your iPad, if you disconnect from the internet, you do not have access to things that you have not cached local on your local devices. So that's what sync does. Just so you're all aware, automatically syncs files to cache local. You can do that from a folder level or an overall project level.

That's what the sync tool is used for. But let's go back to here. So the great thing about this is that you can see who has it checked out by via email address.

Now, the one thing you can do is since I'm the owner of this, I can revoke the checkout. Just be aware any markups or any changes that he did on a checkout basis is not going to transfer over when I revoke his checkout. It's just let me do something before you do that. Let's let's experiment. I've made a little markup, so I have it checked out.

So if you revoke it, see if I get a message or anything. Let me check this in first. Okay.

So if I go and revoke it, are you sure you want to revoke the checkout? Any of the modifications made by the owner will be lost. Okay. Check revoked.

So if I go back, I don't see anything, but I will dinky dinky. And, oh, it's giving me an error now. Now I have a triangle logo.

Oh. There was some sort of pop-up, but it disappeared. But you clicked through it too quick? Um, well, it says, it's given me a triangle logo with an exclamation point in it. Conflict.

So there's a conflict. It's pending, but it's not telling me what exactly it is. So if I close that, ask me if I want to save the changes, but it doesn't say anything about checking it back in. So, interesting. Cool.

Kicked you out. So from there, again, being able to check in, check out files is what you're able to do. So you check it out.

So you check in, check out like a book at the library. There are no two copies at the library. It's a single copy.

What you're able to do is you're able to mark up. So you have those options to go through and mark up. You can do two things. You can update the server copy. So let's say Jason wanted to look at something that I was working on, but I still wanted to work on it.

You can hit update server copy because then it would update Jason's side. He can refresh and then he can view that updated copy on the server, which is projects. The other one would just be to check it back in, and then he can go in and check it out if he wanted to.

So I go through and check in. It's great to make comments, so don't just click past that so people can see them. We're talking best practices.

Leaving comments is one of the best practices. Because comments is right here, and you would see the comment of what was updated versus me just clicking through things as I just commented on Jason clicking through things. So fun stuff there. But yeah, so you get the option to go through and check these in as well so that you'll see that version history.

And it's very easy. You can just say open that version if you wanted to see a past version. So we'll hit close here and then we all know the split screen capabilities. So we can see the differences, right? If you wanted to restore from this version, you can.

If you wanted to restore back from the old version to the new version or back and forth, right? You can go pretty inception in there if you wanted to. And when you do that, it will create a new revision. So if I go tell two to be current again, it's actually going to become four. Yep.

So now it's four. Go back. Yeah. That's at inception.

Pretty handy. Properties. Great.

So the other one would be a Revit file. So we'll CSV. We'll just go and click the CSV.

Again, it's in read-only. Why? Because I didn't check it out.

So if I made modifications, it wouldn't save it. So if you wanted to, you could check it out. The one great thing that was an update for this is if you wanted to open this, now it's not read-only. You accidentally closed review because I've done that before.

It doesn't lose its saving. location. So you can close out a review, you can save it, it will still save that metadata back into review.

That happened to me a little bit ago when I was trying that out way back, and it wouldn't actually save. It would require you to save it local. So there we go.

So I can hit save. If I want to make any modifications, we'll just delete data. I'll hit save, hit exit.

You could check it in if you wanted to. I'll just do update, check in. Here we are.

And then if I open it again as read-only, because I didn't want to, you'll see that this is still updated. So if someone else opened it, right? Clicked out of there quick.

Okay. Next one is a Revit file. I would just be aware that this doesn't tell you what version.

I would definitely name the version that this Revit project is in. So we all know we can't go backwards. And when you double click this open to open it, it's going to open up your most recently used version of Revit.

So there's a lot of cautionary items in this realm of using Revit in this environment, but it does work. So if you're a single user and you title it what version it is, just open up the version that you want it to open up in. So I just, I don't even remember myself. So we'll go to my desktop, project one. I'll go to...

Version history here. Revit properties. So this is 2023. So what I would do is I would go through and I would open this up in 2023. So I would open up Revit 2023. And this does work with AutoCAD. I don't think we tried Simple3D.

AutoCAD or Simple3D doesn't care as long as you're opening something newer than anything 2018 and up. It'll be fine. Yeah.

So we got quite a... quite the spread yeah so i'll open up 2023 here and then we can open up the project so basically again you would check it out if you want to modify something so i would go into here i would say okay i'm going to check this out and then you would just double click it open um since there's no like file explorer to this you just double click it open which typically is never the best way to open A Revit project, but you know. Okay, so from here, we can go through and make some modifications.

So if I wanted to just go move this over, hit save. Perfect. It's saving back into that environment. And then I could hit escape. You can come back into here.

We can go and say check in. I don't have to necessarily check in, but I can. We'll just do it anyways. Moved.

Check in. Perfect. And then I could go through and we'll just double click it as a read only.

You still have Revit open. Yep. Perfect. So you just did that with Revit.

Obviously, when you're using different design software, there are limitations and gotchas and all that other stuff. Would you recommend using Revit for this? Or would you stick to more spreadsheets and Word docs and PDFs? I don't know.

So if I already have Autodesk Construction Cloud, ACC, I would use that. But if I don't have that... And I'm working as a single user, and I have review, and I wanted the modulability of working from anywhere and being able to access my file.

From a file transfer standpoint, I would use projects. Now, if I just wanted to quickly share a larger file, because we all know emails aren't great for that, yes, I would use this. I would just drag drop my project into here and share it to whoever. by lifetime of project and not require a password. Exactly.

So this comes up a lot as well. You know, emails are sort of organization dependent on how big you can send. I think here we're still tied to like 15 megs or something, 15 or 20 megs, which is about the same it used to be 15, 20 years ago.

But at the same time, our files are getting bigger and more complex. And this is where folks are like, well, now I have to introduce Dropbox or Google Drive or. something else to get these big files spread out. Here, since we're already using review, we've already got a license to it. We've already got logged into it.

We're just going to upload it here to our, maybe a share file folder, perhaps. Again, another best practice so you know what files are meant to be shared. Create this link. Now, Michael, if you send me that link and I don't have review, it's still going to let me play with it, right?

Correct. Yep. So if you don't have review, it doesn't matter. With the shareable link, if you paste it into your Explorer here, this is what it looks like to the end user. So you just hit download and it's downloading just like a typical download from the internet.

It works really, really well. Yep. And it even gives you a little blurb about what it is and maybe it's going to create a little bit of FOMO on the receiving end and like, you know, how about I just get Bluebeam review as well and then we can play in the same. I was going to say sandbox, but I was, you know, same cloud. Same cloud.

A little bit different because we're no longer grounded, right? Right. Oh. So that ability to keep things in the cloud, easy access to them, that's one great thing in here. Again, you do have the ability to limit, limit, limitate.

I was going to say limitate, but that doesn't make sense. Add limitations to folks that are joining in to here. You can, again, see the number of total files, total folders. One of the great things about Studio Project, again, is that ability to have folder permissions and that ability to invite and share files as well. And ease of access to any type of file that you want to store within Studio Projects.

The other one would be to initiate a session from here. So let's say this is where our repository is. You know, we've talked about single sources of truth.

You can initiate a session from Studio Projects into Studio Sessions with a live live stream. link from that perspective. So again, all you have to do is right click on a PDF and you can say add to a new session or add to an existing one if there was one created.

So all I need to do is say what the session name is MCR 2024. And right off the gate, it will initiate a session. So it's going to check this out. So if it was checked out by someone else, you wouldn't be able to roll it into a session.

But basically, you'll have a new session icon here, and it's going to roll it into a session for us. It's going to open it up into a session as well at some point here. There we go. So it probably did it, but since this panel was closed, it already rolled it into a session.

So here it is. You have the user, which is me initiating it. I know that would be cool if it would just initiate every one part of the project as invited, but they want you to intentionally invite people into this. So I would have to invite Jason again into here as well, but I have him under a group so I could just quickly do that. But again, it's checked out now, so you'll see that it's checked out here.

And if I wanted to open it up in the session, I can open it up in the session and modify it. So you would use this if you were collaborating on a project, right? And instead of just sending that email, like sending that link as we just did, like, hey, let's go over this in a session, right?

And that's where we're going to spend our last nine minutes and talk about sessions and what's that for, right? Because projects, again, all your project files, all your hierarchy, everything that's all in one place, your single source of truth, your common meeting ground, whatever you want to call it, but sessions, the different world. So what are we going to do in sessions? Why would we create a session from a project?

Yeah, so Studio Sessions offers the ability to markup simultaneously. So where projects you checked it out as single user and you could see updates, the benefit of using Studio Sessions is the ability to markup simultaneously. So if it's a large set that's not broken out and multiple people need to coordinate and collaborate on a PDF set, the really only option to do this is in Studio Sessions. We tried doing that in...

um acc because of course right we some of us have access to that we talked about that last week but those are rasterized and they're not as full strength of what we could do from a markup perspective right so can what can we do with studio sessions is the ability to live markup collaboratively so i'm going to add jason as well because he's going to have this open so that he can come into here and we can see this collaborative environment and what that kind of entails right you So Jason has been invited. I can also see who's not joined, which he has not joined, and I can send a reminder, 10 reminders, that he just gets blown up right now. But once he joins, yeah, once he joins, you can see things. So as people start opening up files, so I'm going to follow the attendee. So that's just by selecting his name, right-clicking, saying follow, and I can see what he has open, and I can follow his cursor as he's going through and looking at the...

the pdf set here so again the ability to collaborate if we didn't i know someone asked at one point if we had if they had like a zoom capability with it no you would just have to have zoom or teams to visually see things if you wanted to this way or if we weren't on a call i mean on a meeting invite i could just follow him and be on the phone with him and say as he's talking through and looking i can see his stylus moving of where things need to go right and how things need to be modified So we'll deviate from his markups because what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my own area and I want to show what an alert looks like. So Jason's going to make a markup and he's going to be able to alert an attendee and we'll show you how to do that. Basically, what I'll get is a notification down here. Yeah.

we'll get a notification down in my notifications list and it gives you a yellow ping right here i know it's it used to be very bright and over it but it was right here so right here is where it is notifications it is right here once you click it it brings you to where that markup was made So you can alert attendees if you wanted to. You can also right click and say mark as unread. So then you're aware that, hey, I clicked it, but I needed to go back to something and I need to go back and click to it again. And then you can dismiss it as well. So that's where if I were going to notify somebody, there is a chat function as well.

So let's say we're working in different time zones. I can say, hey, Michael, I'm concerned about this area. Can you come take a look?

I'm going to send you a notification about what I'm talking about. So there's a way that you can collaborate here. Again, if you're on different sides of the globe or different time zones or you get split shifts or whatever it is, you don't always have to be, hey, meet here at one o'clock. We're going to go over a set of plans. That's what this is for, to give you a little bit more freedom and allow you more time to review at your leisure.

Exactly. So that ability to be modular with how you're going through. and communicating with your team members.

That's one of the great benefits of this. I can't go through and modify Jason's stuff. He is the owner of it.

So that is a huge part of markup integrity and the ability to collaborate simultaneously. That's why you would want to use sessions. The ability within projects is to store files, right? And it's a check-in, check-out basis.

So you don't have that freedom to markup simultaneously. You do have the freedom to look at the PDF. simultaneously but you don't have the ability to mark up simultaneously so that's the one difference i would say between both of them correct now we've walked through some of the best practices of studio projects and sessions but we didn't talk about the limitations based upon your subscription type oh right so that's new depending on what level of review 21 you have right you have your basic you have your core and you have your complete So depending on which version you have will affect what you are able to do when the things that we show today, do you have that link?

I don't know where that link is. Yeah, right there. You'll be in pricing. Oh, you mean just the pricing one? Cause that will show you.

Dude, every time I'm like, I got licensed bro. Um, but there's another one for like the reader, right? But in here, yeah, there are limitations.

If you have basics, you cannot create a new project or session. If you have basics, and that's where things get weird, because if you remember the old perpetual model where we had standard CAD and extreme, folks with standard could create their own sessions and projects. That's no longer the case.

There's also somewhere in here, and they buried it now, with... It tells you what a free user can do and what a... Yeah, it was something like basic markups, no tools, or something like that. Yeah.

Doug, I'm not sure if Bluebeam View still exists. I think what they just want you to use it now is in that view mode or in that unpaid collaborator mode. So disable functionality in view mode, which is the free mode, which is not a paid for license, right?

Adding markups to PDF outside a session. But it doesn't say like what your markups. I remember seeing something where they were limited to basic stuff.

They weren't able to do measurements or anything else. Yeah, there's a list somewhere, and it tells you exactly what you can and cannot do, but they buried it for sure. Well, Dave.

So there is, before we wrap up here, Dave's going to be hosting a tool building workshop this afternoon over at U Chapter 2. So he posted a link in the chat. If you're checking it out, go over to U Chapter 2 and see Dave do his thing over there. It'll be pretty cool.

I'm not hosting, just attending, whatever. Same thing. But that about brings us to the bottom of the hour again. Thanks for joining us.

As always, if you've got questions about, you know, how should I do this or what's the best route or what's the best tool for the job, that's what we're here for. Reach out to Michael or myself or anybody over here at ATG and we're happy to get you sorted. Hopefully you found today informative.

Hopefully this inspires a little bit of curiosity to give this a try. It works really well. You know, we've been doing this MCR stuff for over three years now.

Both of us have been using Revu for quite some time and using this stuff. And if there was a drawback, if there was, you know, something that we would find as a reason not to use it, we wouldn't be, you know, blowing smoke, right? We're going to tell you all those things. And that's why we wanted to do this best practices today to help you.

uh be aware of some of the gotchas and then also just use it more because it's really cool exactly so with that send us out of here bud yep with that thanks everyone thanks for joining as always we appreciate every single one of you and keeping the momentum going for mcr as long as it's been but until then we'll see you all next week all right take care

Transcript for:Best Practices for Bluebeam Studio Projects

Transcript for:
Best Practices for Bluebeam Studio Projects