"Template" pre-loaded with worksets

I’m not sure if this has been blogged about before, or who even suggested this at our firm, but our template isn’t a real template; it’s a workshared project with worksets.

Note that every link has a dedicated workset. This allows us to be selective about which links we want to load when we first open up our active project.

Some of the benefits are:

-    multiple people can work on the template, at the same time

-    workset naming standards is established, everybody is familiar with these

-    shorter initial set up time

but more importantly:

-    view templates can be set to include what worksets should be visible or hidden. In my opinion, this one is huge; it’s otherwise impossible to complete the setup of your views & view templates prior to starting the project.

Be cautious though, if somebody starts a new project without detaching their copy, they could do a lot of damage. This is why our template files are located on a drive that just a few people have writing permission to. When we start a new project, there are two different approaches: open a detached copy of the template model, or opening the template model and doing a Save As with the ‘Make this a Central Model after Save’ option checked. The starting view has a reminder for the person setting up the project.

Thoughts?