Plant 3D And Working From Home

Autodesk Plant 3D has a few flexible options for you to work from home. Below are the requirements and options for you to get up and running away from the office and still be productive for you company.

LICENSING

Please refer to this link for further information: SU and MU Autodesk Licensing

ACCESSING FILES AND SHARING FILES REMOTELY ON A NETWORK ENVIRONMENT

There are a few options to consider with working on a multi user project.

VPN ACCESS:

Customers can access their SQL Server projects with a VPN connection to access your project in the office. The performance however depends on your bandwidth. You also have the option once connected to use the Create Project Backup. You can then copy this down to your local machine for better performance. You will then be able to work on the project as an SQL Lite version. Once you have an SQL Lite version of the project and for all SQL Lite projects read How to work parallel on a SQLite project in different networks in AutoCAD Plant 3D. This is also how you would reconcile the project back up to SQL Server.

COLLABORATION:

One option is to utilise the Collaboration tools with Plant 3D. This option does not require to connect to the office network. You do require access to BIM 360 Team. Bim 360 Team is a legacy product that is only available to existing customers. Collaboration is not available through BIM 360 Docs at this stage. Similar to Vault, Collaboration projects allow you to work on a local copy for the project. For more information on this see What is BIM 360 Team?

For more information see To Create a Collaboration Project and the Collaboration Workflow.

Also have a look at this video.

VAULT:

Customers have the option of using the Vault environment to work on their projects remotely. Vault allows you to work on a local copy of the project. For more information please refer to Autodesk Vault

There is some configuration that needs to be applied. For more information see  Configure Vault for Plant Projects

To Access Vault from home, relevant information can be found in Vault and Working from Home.

INTERNET SPEEDS:

As you can imagine, an important consideration here is the speed of the Internet. For a rough estimate on how much time is required for uploading and downloading files, here is a Calculator:

In Australia we typically have:

• ADSL 15-20 Mb/sec download to home and 1-2Mb/sec upload to office/cloud
• NBN 25/50/100 Mb/sec download and 10/20/35 upload to office/cloud

For example, a 100MB file will take 14 minutes to upload on a ADSL connection, meanwhile only 30 seconds on a NBN connection.