Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Revit and Sharepoint

One of the topics I do feel I can talk about is some work that we've done surrounding Revit and Sharepoint...

One of our clients REALLY likes Sharepoint sites for collecting project data, issues lists, etc. So the question came up - could Revit become more integrated with Sharepoint?

The answer is yes - pretty easily... Sharepoint has a Web Service API (and we've become reasonably comfortable with web services thru all the Vault and Productstream work we've done)... The API covers a lot of territory, but when you talk about publishing or synchronizing BIM data, you're pretty much correlating with SharePoint "lists" - lists are tables which can be defined by an administrator.

So we've done some prototype work to Integrate the Sharepoint Design Issues list with the Revit Elements that are related to each issue... And also publishing schedules (such as Room Schedules) out to Sharepoint - a neat FM-flavored prototype. Now all we would need to do is tie the data in Sharepoint to the corresponding DWF, and you'd REALLY have something.

So while the Revit API is still pretty limited, systems integrations applications like this are ready for prime-time...

3 comments:

Todd M. Shackelford said...

Nice stuff Matt. this one really gets you thinking about the possibilities. Keep up the fabulous work.

Gene Gladden said...

Matt,

Have you seen much work done with APIs for Autodesk Vault (2009) and Sharepoint?

Matt Mason said...

Gene,

I saw some posts a couple years back indicating that some corporate developers were playing around with Sharepoint and Vault.

We always thought that we might come up with something - but we could never find the client who shared the vision.

Then in the 2009 Vault application Autodesk added a "Publish to Sharepoint" option - so it's become easier to at least manually publish to Sharepoint.

What would you like to see it do? (Sharepoint is a big topic).

-Matt