CAD Collaboration

GOAL: Facilitate high availability, collaboration, and backup among branch office CAD users, by providing unobtrusive real-time mirroring and locking of files.

A recent study of 40,000 projects found that 66% of projects completely fail or are late, over budget or missing critical features. The cost overruns average an alarming 43% according to the Standish Group International.

One factor that can contribute to these failures is geographical distance among project team members. Project teams now rarely have the luxury of working together in a single location. And they often lack even the assurance of having a stable team for the life of the project. Thus, as companies outsource more design and manufacturing services, their teams must find ways to work together across geographical and often company boundaries.

• Very large design project files require local copies at each branch location
• Need to reduce litigation risks and protect intellectual property
• Increased pressure to keep long-term electronic archives to stay competitive, leverage archived assets, and reduce overall design costs
• Geographically dispersed design teams necessitate sophisticated collaboration solutions

Typically, many different entities are involved in getting a building constructed, including building owners, users, financiers, design professionals and consultants on the many specialized component parts found in a building.

Collaboration techniques involving technological tools have been available and in use for many years now in various industries, generating a growing amount of information and experience about implementation issues and solutions to problems that have been faced and overcome, with varying degrees of success.

With this in mind, the PeerSync Collaboration Package was created to include the following functionality:

• Transparent file synchronization and file locking among N number of geographical office branches
• Bandwidth Usage Minimization, through Bandwidth Throttling and Byte Level replication
• Real-Time CAD File Transfer for fast recovery and usage
• Real-Time File Locking among branches
• Parallel File Processing

Requirements

• All systems must be Windows based file servers.
• The Peer Collaboration Package (i.e. PeerSync Server, PeerLock Server, and the PSListener agent) should be installed on each file server participating in the collaboration group.
• The servers must be able to see each other via UNC Path.
• Please do not try to test using Wordpad/ Notepad. These file types cannot be locked due to the nature of the application.
• PeerLock by default is set to be optimized for file servers. As such, files should be opened from desktops connecting to the file server; not locally on the file server through the Windows Explorer.