Upgrading Projects to Revit 2013 Today!

Anyone that thinks upgrading from one version of Revit to another is an easy task is crazy...! Here is a quick brain dump.

I guess the easy part was creating the deployment and with the help of our IT department, pushing that using GPO went on without a hitch. But, even this part took some thinking... Thoughts below.

• Create deployment - easy
• Revit.ini portion of deployment didn't work, so we had to push the .ini after the install was complete. Easy, but definitely should be working within the deployment
• Extensions - Why don't they let you install these as part of the deployment. Another thing you have to do after the fact... Thanks IT for Scripting the install of these (3) elements!

Our philosophy here @ EUA is to upgrade ALL our projects that are currently active. I know many may not agree with this philosophy , but that's whats been working for us for the past (7) years... That way we don't have multiple Content libraries to maintain, people don't have to have multiple versions on the PC's, staff don't open and upgrade projects they shouldn't, bla, bla, bla. It works...

Upgrading projects not that painful other than we have our staff clean, purge, review and fix warnings, etc. prior to the upgrade. Not a bad thing to do anyways, so we do it... Then upgrade. Oh yea, we have all our consultants upgrade too. They have multiple versions anyways, so that's typically not been a problem. We all share our updated models and off we go!

Now, updating our content that are not .rfa files is another story... There are a few options for updating .rfa files. This is easy

• Old Batch upgrade tools
• File Updater Add-in
• CTC's Family Processor

 We also have customized our Revit Family Templates (.rft) files. Yea, I know we're not supposed to, but we do it anyway and up to this point has worked AWESOME. When we start new families, we have all the parameters , reference planes, etc. we need and everything is nice and tidy. We'll, there is definitely a hiccup in upgrading in 2013. You CAN'T do the trick of renaming the extension and batch upgrading anymore. There once again are a few tips/tricks out there, but nothing is good or fast... UGH!

We also reload all the families in any .rvt files that contain content, like Drafting Views, etc.... Why is it anyway that Revit thinks a family is "different" once it's upgraded to a new version, so if you load a drafting view for example, it adds a (1), (2), etc. after Detail Components (now named Detail Items - another big pain...!). That forces us to reload any content in those projects...

Well, that is enough food for though today...