The leading experts in AVAIL’s all-in-one content management solution are our architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry customers. To tap into this valuable AVAIL experience, our Customer Success team gathered a group of leading customer Champions for a closed meeting in June to share their most impactful AVAIL strategies and content management best practices. We noted the key takeaways from their meeting below to impart our Champions’ wisdom to the greater AVAIL-user community.
Seven Top Tips from AVAIL Champions Q&A:
Coming soon: AutoCAD and Civil 3D add-ins, plus Stream for Egnyte
One of the greatest features of AVAIL’s content management system is that it is completely customizable. Unfortunately, AVAIL’s blank canvas can sometimes also make it difficult for beginners to visualize the overall value of AVAIL.
We checked in with the leading experts in AVAIL, our top architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) customer Champions, in a recent AVAIL Champions Q&A to gather their best AVAIL strategies, workflows, and tips that have transformed the way they manage and consume CAD and BIM content.
Steve Bennett, Director of Design Technology at strategy-based design firm Taylor Design, was asked to share his seasoned AVAIL insights and sparked a great conversation amongst the attendees. Advice from Champions like Steve can not only help other AVAIL users get the most out of this powerful, all-in-one content management platform, but also assist AVAIL beginners to see the possibilities of what AVAIL can do for their AEC industry team.
So, whether you’re just getting started with AVAIL or already running a complex multi-discipline AVAIL implementation, here are our Champions’ top tips from June's AVAIL Champions Q&A.
Visual navigation is hugely important for AEC industry production teams, and one of the simplest ways to enhance efficiency in AVAIL is to thoughtfully curate your firm’s library utilizing Channel Cards and Key Cards.
The best customer examples create visual cues and intuitive navigation paths for users. Organizing cards by Revit version, project type, or detail category helps reduce friction and makes browsing a firm’s CAD and BIM content library so much easier than clicking through generic folders on File Explorer or into large project files.
“Having clear graphics that make it easy for people to identify visually—either with images or with text—is the focus for us with Key Cards and Channel Cards,” says Steve from Taylor Design. “It helps users get to the relevant content that they need without necessarily having to use the search box within AVAIL.”
AVAIL search is powerful—but it's best when it’s done strategically. Several AVAIL Champions in the meeting stressed the importance of end users starting searches within the right Channel to avoid overwhelming, irrelevant results.
For example, if a designer is looking for a detail, they should start in the firm’s detail Channel. That way, the search stays focused on relevant content instead of pulling in every tag from the library.
Scoped searches like these significantly cut down search time.
AVAIL is an all-in-one content management system: it isn’t just for Revit, AutoCAD, and Civil 3D content. Champions shared how they're using Channels to also house PDFs, Excel sheets, Word documents, URLs, and other types of documentation.
Some BIM managers choose to collect these standards documents in a separate Channel that is only shared with a small group of people. The standards, then, are only shared with users on the document-level through AVAIL’s new Related Content feature. In this workflow, instead of being overwhelmed and searching through large amounts of standards documents, users are only served the documentation that pertains directly to the piece of content they are using.
Other design technology leaders utilize their firm’s standards documentation Channel as the central repository for their workflows, making sure everyone from admins, to designers and project managers are onboarded on the Channel. This setup—which can also be paired with Related Content to bring commonly used standards documents to users—helps a firm achieve standards compliance and operational consistency.
One of the questions on our Champions’ minds in the meeting was how their fellow Champions are utilizing a newer AVAIL feature, Palettes.
Palettes received strong praise as a lightweight way to distribute project-specific kits such as curated sets of Revit details for a given project. Others use it to export views as PDFs for markup and collaboration.
Global civil engineering digitally enabled solutions provider Parsons gives users the freedom to create and share Palettes, says Kal Houhou, Director of Digital Delivery. It’s a great way to tailor what a team needs without extra overhead.
Palettes give all AVAIL users the power to curate unique lists of content. Paired with the PDF Exporter feature, elements from a Palette can be exported into a PDF for easy markup.
Check out how others are using Palettes in our Palettes Playbook.
When it comes to managing content in multiple Revit versions, several firms have opted for separate Channels per version, syncing tags via TagIO to maintain consistency.
Others use dynamic filtering based on Revit version tags within a unified Channel.
For many BIM managers and design technology teams, balancing library control with user autonomy is tricky.
Taylor Design handles this by maintaining tight control over Channel creation while offering a “Wild West” Channel where any user can load content and share it with the team.
The Wild West Channel paired with all the other pre-approved and curated content in AVAIL helps Steve and his team protect Taylor Design’s standards while still giving users freedom.
For those using AVAIL for Revit content management, the latest version of AVAIL for Revit 5.5—which is now available as a Preview Release—introduces full-text search of Drafting Views using AI-empowered OCR technology.
Taylor Design’s team has already taken advantage of this new feature. “In the past, I would have to develop my own tags for our details in AVAIL and apply them manually,” Steve says. Now, he’s hands-off. He simply harvests all Drafting Views, and AVAIL automatically tags all the text in the detail. “It's beautiful to be able to search for that content,” Steve says.
With Drafting Views now full-text searchable, it is far easier to find the right details at the right time.
Organizing, managing and searching block libraries is about to get easier. We are adding AVAIL add-ins for AutoCAD and Civil 3D to our all-in-one content management solution.
Among other content management features, AVAIL for AutoCAD and AVAIL for Civil 3D will help extract and manage block libraries by representing each block in AVAIL, making them easily accessible and searchable.
Interested in learning more? Sign up for updates on the add-ins and join our webinar AVAIL’s All-In-One Content Solution Adds AutoCAD and Civil 3D Add-Ins July 30 at 2pm EST.
AVAIL Stream for Egnyte is also on the horizon! When available, the integration will intelligently monitor Egnyte and automatically publish updates to AVAIL—no manual intervention required. Sign up for updates on the Egnyte integration and watch our webinar Stream-lining Content with Egnyte and AVAIL: The Information You Need, Faster.
Many thanks to the Champions who generously shared their insights during the AVAIL Champions Q&A.
Founded in 2016 as a solution for architecture and engineering firms to find the information they need faster, AVAIL creates software for the global architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. AVAIL’s content management system (CMS) platform and Revit application tools help designers and engineers take control of their intricate network of files in one visual, streamlined solution. AVAIL’s customers include industry leaders Gensler, Perkins&Will, IMEG, LEO A DALY, and Populous.