A recent promotion announcing Civil 3D availability on BIM 360 Design had me wondering if AutoCAD Architecture (ACA) projects would work using BIM 360 Docs with the Autodesk Desktop Connector.
If so it would be rather useful for legacy projects. ACA projects have some odd control files (xml but with different extensions) but creating a new project worked and sync'd perfectly.
I could create content, model and views, add annotation and place views on sheets as normal. Not surprising given ACA was just operating in the local Desktop Connector folder and syncing up to BIM 360. Even the file access intensive project standards update (to standards files still on the network) worked although rather slowly.
So far so good, but then the snag which kills it all. The local BIM 360 ‘Drives’ are actually folders in the current Windows User folder: C:\Users\[CURRENT USER]\BIM 360.
That means all the file pathing in the project can only work for one user at a time. If a second user attempts to open the project AutoCAD Architecture realises it needs to be re-pathed, attempts to do it, then fails. That is because the Desktop Connector demand syncs so only the file opened is on that users machine. That is the deal breaker.
* This post is an example of ‘Betteridge's law of headlines’