When you’re building a Revit content library, sometimes it makes sense to tap into the wisdom of the crowd. And there's no crowd more tuned into your projects than the people already working on them.

After all, your team has been delivering projects even without access to a comprehensive library of Revit families. They've managed to find ways to get the content they require, and they’re likely to be aware of which projects used which content in the past. Who better to help you expand your Revit library?

But if you want to source content from your team, how can you go about it in a way that’s easy, organized and efficient? In the past you may have had to choose between putting suggested content straight into your library, or gathering it all outside of your content management system. Both of these approaches have significant drawbacks.

Announcing team editable collections

Kinship's new team editable collections feature makes it incredibly easy to gather, review and curate suggested content from your team. Instead of having to manually invite individual team members to join a collection, it's now possible to click a single button to make a collection editable for your entire team.

Team editable collections offer an excellent way to build your library in the shape of how your team already works to deliver projects. Team members have full permission to add and modify content in the collection, offering a single dedicated space for suggested content to arrive before it's reviewed by an administrator or content manager and added to your library. Permissions are automatically updated as you add or remove team members, leaving you with one less thing to worry about as you onboard new hires or as people move roles.

An efficient way to expand your library

To ensure an efficient workflow for managing your library, you want to have as few locations as possible to aggregate and review new content. Team editable collections do just that.

Rather than having to gather content from team members through emails or multiple network folders, you can use a team editable collection to provide a single holding place where everyone can submit content. Administrators and content managers no longer need to keep track of content coming in from multiple channels, helping prevent content from getting lost and time from being wasted.

Team editable collections also have the benefit of allowing your team members to see and comment on suggested content from colleagues. This can help you get feedback from your team on which content is most popular, which content may not work so well and if any modifications are required to meet project needs. It also helps eliminate duplicate submissions and highlight alternative versions, as Kinship will automatically alert users if a family they are uploading has the same name as another family in the collection.

Share the content only when you’re ready

When you're sourcing suggested content from your entire team, you may not want it to be used in projects until you’ve had the chance to review, update and approve it. We recently added another option for Team Collections that can help ensure suggested content doesn’t start circulating among the team until you’re ready.

When creating a new Team Collection, you’ll now see a checkbox option for “Do not display results in Revit searches”. This setting prevents the families in the collection from appearing when your team searches for content using the Kinship add-in within Revit. By checking this option for a team editable collection, you can be sure that the content won’t be discovered and used in projects until you’ve reviewed and added it to your library.

Sample workflow

Let’s look at how you can put all of this into action in Kinship to create an efficient workflow for capturing and curating content from your team.

1. Create a new Team Collection called “Team Favorites”.
2. Check the options for “Allow all team members to add and modify content” and “Do not display results in Revit searches”.
3. Give your team a set period of time to add all of their favorite content to the collection. They can upload their suggestions using the Kinship add-in in Revit. For additional context, recommend that they add a comment to each family as to why they suggest it or how they have used it in the past.
4. Once everyone has added their suggestions, give them a chance to review other suggested content and add any comments to families they think are particularly good or bad or need updates.
5. When the “comment period” has concluded, go to Collection Info and uncheck the setting for “Allow all team members to add and modify content”. This will effectively “lock” the collection from further editing by the team so that you can now review and curate the suggestions.
6. Use the comments, as well as each family’s Project Instances page, to get a better sense of its potential uses. Remove the content that you don’t want to keep, or move it into another restricted collection that the team can’t see.
7. As you update and approve the remaining families, move them into your library for the team to start using as recommended content. You can consider creating a list in the library called "Team Favorites" and including all of the approved families there, so the team can more easily find them in the future.
8. If there are any suggested families that you don’t want to put into the library, but still wish to keep available for the team if needed, you can simply leave them in the collection and uncheck the option to “Do not display results in Revit searches”. The remaining content in the collection will now appear in Revit searches, but it will appear below library results and will not show as recommended content.

Available now

Team editable collections are now available across all plans. When creating a new team collection, you’ll see a checkbox option to “Allow all team members to add and modify content”. For existing team collections, go to the “Collection Info” page to access the same setting.