Why OneDrive and Dropbox Aren't Enough for Growing AEC Firms
OneDrive and Dropbox are great tools for storing documents, sharing files, and giving employees access to their work from almost anywhere. For a one or two-person architecture, engineering, or construction firm, they may even work well as the main place to store project data. The problem is that this approach often doesn't scale well as the company and its projects grow.
AEC firms deal with data differently than most businesses. Large Revit models, CAD drawings, renderings, point clouds, PDFs, and project folders containing thousands of files are all part of the normal workload. OneDrive and Dropbox primarily work by synchronizing files between computers and cloud storage. That's convenient for normal office documents, but it can become much more complicated when several employees are constantly opening and modifying large project files.
As the number of users and amount of data grows, firms can start running into sync conflicts, duplicate files, outdated copies, long download times, and computers running out of local storage. These might only be occasional annoyances in a two-person office, but when twenty people are working across dozens of active projects, small issues can quickly turn into lost time and frustrated employees.
Revit adds another layer to the problem. Workshared Revit models aren't designed to be treated like ordinary documents in a generic file synchronization service. When multiple people need to work in the same models, a platform designed for that workflow, such as Autodesk Construction Cloud, is often a much better option. Firms working primarily from a single office may instead get better performance from properly designed local storage and fast networking.
None of this means OneDrive or Dropbox are bad products. They still have an important place in an AEC environment and work extremely well for Microsoft Office documents, personal files, PDFs, and sharing information with clients and outside partners. The problem comes when a convenient file-sharing platform slowly becomes the company's entire project storage infrastructure simply because it worked when the company was smaller.
As an AEC firm grows, its IT infrastructure should grow with it. The right solution might be a local file server, Autodesk cloud collaboration, other cloud infrastructure, or a combination of several technologies. ProSoft IT Services helps AEC firms choose and support solutions based on how their teams actually work, with the goal of keeping project data fast, reliable, and easy to access as the company grows.