Best Practice Tips for Worksets

I swiped these notes from a burried Autodesk web site and it is a little dated but still applies. Best Practice Tips for Worksets: 1. It is important to remember that once Worksets are activated, there is no way to turn them off. The only options available are to continue using Worksets, or to revert to a previously saved file (before Worksets were activated). 2. The Workset username is determined by the Windows log-on name, not by the Revit installation process. 3. If mapped drives are used, all users of the same central file must map the central's network path to the same letter. Worksets will not work with different users trying to access the central file using different network paths because currently Revit stores the absolute path with the Central File. The Central File (CF) understands an absolute path which must be identical on all computers that are working on the project while using worksets. For example, if User 1 has mapped his J:\ drive to the CF location, User 2 must also map his J:\ drive when working on the same project. If this practice is not followed, error messages that the CF cannot be found will occur." 4. To change the number of backup files for a project after the initial Save As..., choose the Save As... option again, and select the Options... button. Here you can change the maximum number of backup files as desired.

Thanks to for posting this tutorial on their site. 5. There is no prompt to alert the user that he is working in the Central file (While it is not good practice for many reasons, a user may work directly in the central file at any given time). A good way to quickly determine if you are in the central file or the local file is by looking at the 'Save to Central' icon located next to the standard Save icon in the standard tool bar. If the icon is grayed out, then the user is currently in the Central File. If the user is in a local file, the icon will be active. 6. While working in a local file and perfoming a 'Save to Central...', is a backup created?Yes. In this case, the existing Central File becomes the backup and a new Central File is created (typically on the server). A user may also just choose File ; Save, which does not save their changes to the Central File. In this second scenario, the user is saving his or her "local" file, and a backup of the local file is created in the same directory where their local file resides (typically on their hard drive). In both cases, the backups are contained in the directory with the same name as the file. 7. After checking out a workset, if changes are made to the model or the Settings/Views, the user should 'Save to Central' before checking the workset back in. If the worksets are not checked back in, any changes will be lost because Revit only saves changes that are in Worksets that are marked Editable at the time of Save to Central. 8. Editable at risk status: Use caution when checking out worksets from a local copy without being connected to the network and the Central Location. This user must be extremely careful about checking in his/her changes prior to anyone else; otherwise there is a risk of losing changes to all worksets that the user checked out. The benefit of this status is that if a copy of the central location is taken home and the user forgets to check out a certain workset, he/she can still do so from home without reconnecting to the Central Location.