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?
