Archive Facility Document Storage Solutions

Hi Lise – Fanshawe has been storing project information in a few areas. 1 – we also have been using a home-grown MS Access database to manage active projects (have been waiting for years for robust replacement!); 2 – we store documents in SharePoint in a prescribed project template format which includes a series of folders and 3 – our drawing files are stored in AutoDesk Vault.

We are in the process of piloting SharePoint 365 in the hopes of consolidating our documents and have also been experimenting with AutoDesk Construction Cloud. We’re finding that it’s not easy to identify a one-stop-shop for secured file storage and sharing to meet all our needs. A significant challenge that we’re now facing is that the size of our 3D models (e.g. Revit) continues to grow. It is becoming more of a challenge to share views with our maintenance teams and linking to supporting software (ArcGIS, Archibus). We’re trying to avoid making copies that would subsequently have to be maintained.

I’ll be curious to hear what others are doing and how you progress.

Regards,

…Rich

At Humber College, we’ve re-utilized our own on-campus servers for saving our post-construction documents instead of saving them in the cloud. This means we are using the traditional windows explorer interface to save and access our as-built drawings, O&M manuals, and record files that are submitted by the contractor after project closeout. We’ve experienced many issues with saving very large files through the cloud and our IT department has advised us to use Humber owned servers for now until we find a more effective solution. This being said, our capital team has utilized both Humber owned servers and Microsoft OneDrive for on-going projects. Sharing files through OneDrive has proved to be an easy and effective way because you can control the individuals who have access to the folder. Plus sharing the folder is easy because you can share the folder link instead of sending files via email.

With the above being said, we use Archibus to re-create architectural floor plans. This also provides as an easy way to find and print floor layouts when needed.

I hope this helps.

At Seneca our drawings go into Autodesk Vault – this was set up years ago. The manuals get scanned or uploaded to SharePoint – so far this is just being managed with an excel file but it is still a wip. Project files are by year in SharePoint with a structure for the file format.