Autodesk Seek for Autodesk Revit Add-In Goes Live

After the 5 month the free^* technology preview of Autodesk^® Seek for Revit is nearly over and the Add-in goes live on Monday 2nd November 9am Eastern whatever that is in GMT.

Autodesk® Seek for Revit allows you to conveniently access high-quality BIM models, drawings, and product specifications for more than 66,000 commercial and residential building products, representing over 400 manufacturers, from inside Autodesk® Revit® 2015 or 2016 software.

Quickly search or browse over 66,000 products

Easily place RFA or RFAs with additional Type Catalogs

Preview product details before placement into your project

Conveniently specify the download location for your files and your search results page size preference
 

When seek started in 2007 the content was, shall we say very iffy, and no better than lots of other AutoCAD block and Revit family collections on the internet. As a CAD and BIM manager I didn't want users downloading and using content gathered off the web because of the problems they can bring with them.

In 2009 the Revit Model Content Style Guide or RMCSG was created .

Link to download the Revit Model Content Style Guide  If you do download it, typically Autodesk It’s all a bit catch 22 the instruction on what to do are in a readme.pdf file in the zip file that you download and extract, so here they are outside of the download for your information:-

1 Download the zip file

2. Extract the contents of the zip file to a local directory

 

3. Navigate to the Extract To folder you specified, and open the Revit_Model_Content_Style_Guide_v2_1 folder.

4. To begin, open the General_Guide\Revit_Model_Content_StyleGuide.pdf file. Review this document to understand the workflow and basic guidelines and standards for model creation.

5. Open the Category_Specific folder, and notice that there are subfolders for specific part types. Open a part type subfolder, and review the documents and cample content as required by your content needs.

In 2012 Autodesk actually started a QA system on the content being submitted to Seek and QA Badges are provided. To find out more about these see The Power of Badges at http://blog.seek.autodesk.com/?p=7

The graphic below shows seeks use in providing quality content in the BIM Workflow

Despite the Autodesk QA system I suspect that a lot of BIM Managers will still want to vet anything going into their companies Revit models, until they have total faith in the Autodesk QA system and you have to face it there have been problems with Autodesks produced families in the past, and the system has to prove its self worthy of their trust.

That being said it's great to see positive steps being taken by Autodesk to improve the Seek service and quality of content. Hopefully it will mean a  faster rubber stamping by the company BIM Manager to use it. 

There are programs out there that assist BIM Managers in company content management but that's for another post on another day.

LRUG hope to be running some family creation sessions next year, and it will be good to get some feedback from members on the new Seek add-in and the quality and actual use of the content and any internal vetting systems that are in place.
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