Hi Moira - sorry to hear about your onsite server. We are also a nine person practice and we have been on a heck of a ride the last year and a half. When our IT guy told us it was time to get a new server we made the jump to 100% cloud based. We are working towards having a 500 SF office space instead of 1,800 SF and will be ready by the time the current lease expires. We work primarily in Revit and some AutoCAD. Here is what we did:
Since the principals all were using various personal Dropbox accounts, we signed up for a Corporate account and merged everything. We modified our folder and file naming conventions which needed cleaning up anyway.
If you work in Revit, be aware that you cannot share a central file in Dropbox like you can with a local network. We added Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro to our Autodesk Suite of software. Projects that require teamwork reside there.
We also started using Monograph for time management and reporting and Slack for project and team communication, eliminating inter-office emails completely.
I always thought we did a good job of "keeping up with the times" but we have been on a steep learning curve in the last year. I can report that the staff, working from home, are all very happy with the changes. We have not lost any productivity from the in-office days, I would say even some improvement. For the time being staff can come in and work from here but we just have workstations here to get to the cloud and folks come in when they have distractions at home (kind of funny).
So good luck with your adventure to the future!
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William Amador AIA
Amador Whittle Architects, Inc.
Agoura Hills CA
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Original Message:
Sent: 10-20-2021 01:15 PM
From: Moira McClintock
Subject: Cloud Based Data Storage vs. Traditional Server
Our firm recently had a catastrophic loss of all our server equipment and we are looking into whether it is feasible to migrate to a fully cloud based data storage scenario rather than rebuilding the same hardware intensive configuration. Our current IT consultant is not supportive of this idea and we are interested in hearing from others that might have done this. All of our software is either run locally on laptops or is cloud based. We are a small firm with 8-10 employees typically. Thanks in advance.
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Moira McClintock
Ford 3 Architects, LLC
Lambertville, NJ
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