New Revit Tools appear on the Revit subscription site

The following two new tools for Revit 2008 have appeared on the Revit subscription web site; these are the Work Sharing monitor and Batch Print for Revit. These are available for all Autodesk subscriptions members running either Revit Architecture, Revit Structure or Revit MEP.

Batch Print
The Batch print tool is designed to allow you to easily print a large number of drawings from a Revit project unattended. Basically, you prepare your default printer or plotter as well as your Revit project. You then use the Batch Print tool to send any number of drawings to your printer or plotter. You can also control the order in which these drawings are printed. Once you start Batch Print no further interaction is required, Revit will handle the rest.

When you first install the Batch Print tool you will be able to find it under the “Tools” pull down menu. On selecting Batch Print the following dialogue box will appear.

This allows you to select which drawings or views you want to print.
The second tab allows you to reorder your prints.

A point to note, which is highlighted in the Readme.pdf on the Subs website, is that Batch Print does not currently work with virtual printers such as DWF or PDF, which is a shame.

“Batch Print is currently not designed to handle virtual printers. A virtual printer typically requires user attention, which Batch Print currently does not emulate.”

Worksharing monitor

Anybody who is using Revit in a “worksharing environment” is going to find the Worksharing tool a real bonus. In affect the tool answers many queries when working on multi-user project such as…

Who is currently working on this project?
Is my local copy of the project up to date?
When will my Save to Central operation finish?
Has my request to borrow elements been granted?
Are any issues interfering with my work on a Revit project?

I absolutely love the way that Worksets actually work. But for a long time I’ve had some niggling concerns about how users know when things are up to date or why they need to throw a pencil at a colleague to get him or her to relinquish borrowed items!! The Worksharing tool goes a long way to addressing these. The Worksharing tool is only of value to you if you have enabled Worksets and the project is being divided amongst several users. Once you’ve installed the Worksharing tool and you will need to do this on every workstation involved with the project, you can customise the tool in a number of ways to display notification for certain periods of time etc. The interface looks like this…


As you can see the current users are listed and this informs other users who is working on the project. You will also notice a “system performance” icon across to top of the window. If you select this, it open up the system performance dialogue which gives you the current status of virtual memory, physical memory, disk space, network speed. This is all extremely valuable information because it allows you to watch for those dreaded out of memory errors that can often occur on large projects.


When you save your file to central, you also get notification that the file was saved successful, which is nice. :-)

A particularly useful feature is the edit request notification. When you place a request to edit an element somebody else either owns or is currently borrowing, the request appears in the edit request section of the Worksharing monitor dialogue, which I found to be particularly useful.
There are a few known issues, so again it’s worth downloading and read the readme.pdf which is supplied, but this is an excellent tool which should help to overcome some of the short falls when working on projects with multiply users.


To download and use Batch Print and the Worksharing monitor you must be a subscription users. Login into the Autodesk subscription web portal.
Then scroll down the page until you find the section called “Product Information & Downloads”; just below this you will find a section called “Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC): Product Modules & Add-Ons”



Select the link.....This will take you to the Autodesk Building solution Products Modules, Addon and Enhancements. Scroll down the page until you find the links to Batch Print and Worksharing monitor.