In a cross border exercise, 20 cities in Europe’s DACH region were virtually connected in the largest, online BIM event ever, to demonstrate GRAPHISOFT ArchiCAD Teamwork’s real power in real time.

With ArchiCAD 13 Teamwork, GRAPHISOFT has introduced the industry’s first BIM Server for best-in-class real-time collaboration. Early in March, GRAPHISOFT organized its first TeamBuilding event, where visitors were treated to a live demonstration and the chance to experience first-hand the true potential of this revolutionary design collaboration technology.

TeamBuilding participants were invited to work on a multi-storey building from 20 locations throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland, all working at the same time. The exercise demonstrated how flexible BIM project access is from remote locations, while also illustrating the level of transparency achieved in communication. The active BIM Server offers a new collaboration workflow, which replaces the previous file server-based “passive” collaboration workflows. Only “delta” information packages, i.e. only changes made on the local workstations are sent through the network instead of the entire project file. As a result, data traffic is significantly reduced, drastically improving synchronization speed. For design practices that means that regardless of the size of the team or the project, all team members can work together virtually in real time.

Visitor quotes include:

“That was a really interesting event. I thought the new teamwork function would only be suitable for large projects and big firms. But Teamwork 2.0 gives me the option of integrating outside staff and having mobile access to my data when working on remote projects.”
Achim Brand, Planungsburo Brand, Bullay

“With the new teamwork function you work faster and more efficiently, and misunderstandings are easier to avoid. It’s also helpful that you can communicate directly with the designing architects or planning engineers by means of the messenger function. On top of that, I was impressed by the flexibility that the new technology offers in terms of workflow.”
Claudia Seiler, Architekturburo Seiler, Frankfurt am Main