Protecting Families

[addesigns]

Is there a way to protect families from un-skilled people in the office that insist on not following direction and change families? I would like to have only the few experienced people able to change families. I have been successful with having the families in the Revit Family folder only be saved by a few people but is there a way to prevent people from editing the family that is in the project and overwriting the current version?

[BalajiBBI]

Lock the parameters value. Maintain UAC to prevent editing.

[RobDraw]

Tell them to not alter the families. If they need something that is not present in the file, there should be a procedure in place for getting the content that they need. If there is not a good procedure for getting the right content, then you are always going to have that problem no matter the skill level. Another option is to replace these unskilled people with skilled people.

[addesigns]

Haha I totally hear ya. Wish I could. I figured there prolly is not a way to not let a family overwrite the family that already exist but you never know until you ask. Maybe Ill just write a program to do that.

[RobDraw]

Please share if you ever do that. If you tell them that a part of regular model maintenance, the families will be overwritten on a regular basis in order to assure that standards are being followed and only approved families are being used. I've found that if you tell someone that they WILL lose their changes, they start doing things the correct way.

[tzframpton]

Haha I totally hear ya. Wish I could. I figured there prolly is not a way to not let a family overwrite the family that already exist but you never know until you ask. Maybe Ill just write a program to do that.

All the vetted company Families (even the stock Autodesk content for that matter) should exist on a networked location, and Group Policies should be in place where only a few anointed Revit Managers have full access. All others should have Read Only. This way they can use the content all day long without saving/overwriting the vetted content.

 

If it's the Families housed within the Project that's being edited without permission, then you can always Load > Overwrite Parameter Values from the write protected vetted location, ensuring the correct Family is always in place. Ultimately, this is an internal QC issue and should be handled by an enforceable company policy.

 

I believe there's a paid plugin app on the Autodesk Exchange that will remove the ability to click "Edit Family" from within Revit, if you wanted to take it that far. I feel that's micro-managing and should be completely avoided, but that's your call.

 

Hope this helps. -Tannar

[lulumara]

I know that you need to duplicate the families in order not to alter the families. Go to properties then duplicate it and edit it. Tell employees to duplicate it rename it first before editing it.