Besties for Life: Autodesk Construction Cloud and the Autodesk Desktop Connector
If you are embarking on any Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) or Autodesk BIM360 Projects – either as a Host of a Project on your own Hub, or as a Guest Member on another’s Hub – then you’ll already know there are a lot of things to set up to get things running.
One very important step in the setup process is to get everyone who is working on the Project to get the Autodesk Desktop Connector installed and properly set up on their PC.
The Desktop Connector (also referred to simply as the Connector) is your helpful (and essential) pal that sits in the background sorting everything out for you when you need to work on Files on the Autodesk Cloud services.
It’s not unheard of for Project Members to be able to see Files when the log into the web and look at a BIM360 or ACC Project but then, they can’t open the File in Revit, or AutoCAD. This will often be related to missing the step of having the Desktop Connector installed and setup on their PC.
Getting things up an running is a relatively straight forward process and here are the essential steps you need to know:
The installer:
The latest version of the Desktop Connector is always found here – https://www.autodesk.com/adsk-connect-64
Make sure you get everyone who is working in your practice using the same version of the Desktop Connector.
Installing Desktop Connector:
Download the executable and run it. Some Members may have I.T restrictions on their PC’s so they may require Admin / I.T. to do the installation for them.
After installation, we recommend a reboot of the PC.
Connector should start up automatically when the system boots. If not, go to the Start Menu and search for the app’.
Initial Project Selection
The latest version of Connector is opt-in. This means that Members need to explicitly set the Connector to Sync Projects locally. If they do not do this then they will not be able to work with Cloud based Files on BIM360 or ACC.
When you first Sign into Connector, you will be asked to make your initial project selections.
All the projects you can access are listed in All projects.
- Click a hub (also referred to as “Site”) to view the relevant projects.
- Select your projects (You can select up to 40 projects). Note that if there the User is not invited to any Projects at the time they set up the Connector then they will not be able to select any in this dialogue. Once they have been invited to a Project(s) then they can go back and add them here.
- Click Save.
Your projects will begin adding to File Explorer.
- Click OK to close the dialog box.
Conclusion:
Following the steps above will ensure that Project Members will be ready to start working once you’ve followed all the other Admin tasks in your Autodesk Account and the BIM360 / ACC web portal.
There are some other more involved settings that you can change on the Desktop Connector but we’ll leave those for another article.
