Getting More Out of Guardian 3.3

Chris Shafer: All right, let's go ahead and get started here. So today's agenda we're going to go over and I should say Jake is going to go over configuring Guardian's new All Commands feature. I'm incredibly excited about this one.

Then we're going to switch over to family type protections and then on to view template and view filter protections and then Allison's gonna round it out with demonstrating our new registered projects dialogue. We're gonna give a deep dive on that and then also getting into our new Labels features within.

Many of you may have noticed there's a big feature that is not listed here and that's our new warning protections. So we are going to be doing a webinar in March on this that’s dedicated to that feature alone and much more. This is this we're going to really focus on really the true impact of warnings on a Revit model. So more to come on that.

All right, the presenters today. So as I mentioned, Jake is going to start us off, then I'm going to present a little bit and then Allison is going to run anchor today and present the Registered Projects dialog.

As usual, this being an office hours, the mics are live, so we welcome questions at any time. We just ask if you choose to ask a question verbally, please raise your hand before speaking and we'll call on you.

And in addition, as always with our office hours webinars, our chats are very, very active and our team is here to answer any questions you may have along the way.

So as always, each of our team members has their own custom icon, actually emoji there. And if you see this next to your question, that means that teammate is about to answer that question. So at times it gets busy in there. So we need to keep ourselves organized.

And as always this webinar will be recorded and provided after the fact and if there are particular questions that are, take a little bit more explaining, we may punt that towards the end for some Q&A. So with that being said.

Let's go ahead and dive into the demo. So Jake, if you want to go ahead and take it away.

Actually, before you get started there, one thing I was, I forgot I was going to say this earlier is that, we're curious.

Since 3.3's been out for a little over a month now, if you have any unique uses for any of the features with 3.3, please contribute to the chat. We'd love to hear how people are utilizing it. So throughout the webinar today, if things pop in your mind, just drop it in there.

All right, Jake, all yours.

Jake Martin: All right. Thanks, Chris.

All right, so like Chris mentioned, I'm going to go over the new Managed Commands.

So from our project configurations, we're going to go back to our User Commands tab. So this is, you know, a legacy feature. Guardian's been able to Monitor, Guide, and Prevent several commands over the last few years.

Yeah, so as Guardian's been developed over the last few years, this list has gone from, you know, 20 to today. The default list is about 100-110 default Revit commands, and these are primarily like picks and clicks within the Revit interface.

So any kind of native button has a counterpart within this interface.

With 3.3, we've gone one step beyond and we've added this new button down here in the lower right called Manage Commands.

This window here for managed commands is kind of a holding cell. This is where we can customize pretty much every end-user aspect of these Command Messages.

We can customize the name so it doesn't have to follow this naming convention. I definitely recommend utilizing like a prefix. Sometimes it, not all the time, but correlates to the tab that that button resides in.

The message title is how it's going to appear to the end user as well, so you can get a little bit more contextual when naming this. So like, we have the button itself and then truly what that button does, and then you can get a little bit more granular in terms of whether or not that specific command captures a screenshot.

Prior to this release, screenshots were kind of all or nothing. You could capture a screenshot or not, but with this managed commands interface, you can choose really get down granularly into which ones capture that information.

Also whether or not we captured data on the active view and which elements might have been in the selection of the user when they triggered that command.

And finally.

The default Command Message.

This is totally customizable for the most part. Just going to cancel out of here real quick. All of these kind of default out-of-the-box commands do come pre-curated with Guardian's mascot Peanut the elephant.

But for all those additional ones that I'll show you here in a moment, those kind of come as more of a blank slate.

Alright.

So this is where it gets really cool. Not only do we have this interface to really get super customizable with these, but we've added the ability to source from over 400 different postable commands.

So a postable command is really any Revit command that the API or that Autodesk gives us as a developer access to. So this is over 400 other commands that are native to Revit.

It's quite an extensive list. This excludes any sort of extension, even if it's an Autodesk extension or a third-party add-in, but anything that you can find out-of-the-box within Revit should be here.

So you can select something from this list.

Let's go ahead and copy to clipboard. Uh, pick on that.

So you can add something here. You can customize how this appears to the end user. Again, I like to use a prefix for the tab that's found within.

I think that's in the Modify tab.

This is a really kind of simple example, but I think that more complex system families, this is really useful to offer some sort of in real-time training. You know, very complex things like stairs, railings might offer the end user a link to a resource article and how to actually utilize that.

Chris Shafer: One thing to keep in mind when it comes to these command names.

While you're filling these out, this is also what will show up in Backstage. So just so you're aware, there is that continuation of that information. So when you're looking for something and can't find it, you may want to circle back into your Manage Commands.

Jake Martin: Good point, Chris. Thank you.

All right. And then again, you can customize how this behaves or how Guardian behaves when we capture this information. And then you'll notice that the OK button is grayed out and that is because we haven't quite yet finished entering all this information.

So I'm just gonna come back and do that later, but once I actually add something to the message itself, I can press OK.

And now I've added this command to this kind of intermediate holding cell of an interface for managed commands.

All right, so once you've added that command from the postable commands list to the Manage Commands, it's still not being monitored. It just simply means it's available to be monitored.

So once I've got that in here, I'm actually going to go back into the User Commands interface and go to the Add New button. So this is where we add available commands to actually be Monitored, Guided or Prevented. So now that I've added modify from the postable commands list. I can go ahead and add it to my overall list and customize the settings again.

All right.

One also kind of thing I want to add here is if you don't see something within this user commands list or in the managed commands postable commands interface, it's likely because it has a Custom Interactions counterpart. So if a command's not available in that User Commands area, it means it's rule-based, which is way more customizable in terms of Monitor, Guiding, and Preventing.

Chris Shafer: Jake, Amy in the chat has anything about project base point or survey point? Right now, since those are less a command and more just a omnipresent aspect of a model. Our recommendation is to help prevent people from editing those, to use Pin Protections on those.

Jake Martin: Cool. Thanks for that question. Anything else you guys would add?

Right. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and pass over to you, Chris.

Chris Shafer: All right, great. Thanks, Jake.

All right, while I'm going to be focusing on the Type Protections, View Template and View Filter Protections, there are a couple others I just want to make sure that, some small but kind of mighty features, that have been added or I should say updates to features that have been added.

I know we went over this in our 3.3 release, but I think it's really important to circle back to this is whenever you come into the custom interactions rules, you'll notice that we've added or modified this initial dialogue for listing all the rules.

Before it was just the rule name and we had the little up and down arrow over here on the right. As you can see, this reflects more the user commands interface.

And here, once you have the rule established, you can come over here to your mode. You can set your mode, but now we introduce command frequency. So this is, I know this is a huge request from many of our clients.

So this is a great way to get even more granular in the use of custom interactions. Before, it was just a hard fast rule. If someone went to hide or say copy plumbing fixtures, they were reminded of that every time. Now you can set that as needed.

So where made this may be useful is especially when it comes to hiding in view rules. So everyone loves hiding elements in view, but there are, as everyone knows, there are appropriate ways of hiding elements in view and there are inappropriate ways of hiding elements in view.

And sometimes you just need to get the job done, right? And so this is a good way of coming in here and setting, let's say, levels and grids. We want to set it to guide, but then we want to say once per session. So everyone's reminded this is the rule.

But then it's kind of up to them to break it once they're aware of that, right? Again, it the the goal here is not to tell people no. The goal is just to make sure they're educated on your best practices.

So I just want to make sure everyone is aware of that change. And so this is something that I recommend everyone here on the call kind of circling back to and see how you can customize that experience for your users. OK.

Getting into type property rules, view template rules and view filter rules. Actually I should have said view type protections rather than rules here. This is where you come in here and turn on each of these features.

Now there are different ways you can look at this feature. One is the rules that are provided here and if we go ahead and hit OK here. Also at the file level, you have the protected types dialogue and the protected view templates and view filter dialog.

Now how we recommend configuring this is within your template or starter project, this is a great way of looking at everything that's currently in those from a types perspective, looking at everything that's in there and applying those protections at this level.

And then every subsequent model that is created from that template or starter project, these rules, or I should say, these protections would apply.

When it comes to the rules, think about this as more of future case, and we'll kind of get into that here in a bit when we switch back over to the rules. So, as you can see, for the protected types, we have all the loadable family types.

I think this is pretty self-explanatory. Now one thing to note here is while we have the protected family types, we also still have the protected families. So this is where you would come in and provide the type-level protections. For the family level protections, you still would need to go to the protected family type or the protected families dialog.

All right, coming over here to system family types.

So I of all the new features, this is one of my favorites. So here and the reason being is having myself spent so much time setting up templates over the years, setting up content, kind of perfecting those standards.

And anyone who's actually been through that process knows the easiest part of that process is actually going into Revit and configuring each of these system family types.

The hard part is getting everyone within your organization to agree on those standards and probably even one step beyond that as far as difficulty is once everyone agrees to it, then get everyone to follow those, right? And so really what that what Guardian is doing here is, is making sure that everyone is following exactly what everyone has agreed to.

We've all been probably within those firms where you have those people who are just like, I have to do it my own way, so.

Here under annotation symbols, let's come down to text types. Here are all the, we'll just say the Guardian standard text types. So this is where you can again provide that level of protection on a system family by system family basis.

So my recommendation is this is a great way to go in here, whether it's your text or your linear dimension styles, or even your levels and grids. It seems like everyone is always wanting to change something somewhere. This is a great way of ensuring those system families remain as is.

In addition, as we scroll down here.

Other things that kind of come to mind here is walls.

Again, I've been part of years long efforts into getting everyone under a single sort of wall nomenclature and getting everything set up and then as soon as you put it out, everyone starts doing their same thing.

And so this really applies to just kind of across the board with all your system family types. Whether you're architecture or structural or MEP, I would say this is even more important than maybe in some ways architecture is. This ensures everyone is operating really the same way and utilizing your content correctly.

This is also a great way of communicating to your users is What is your standards? This is a great way of letting everyone know of where to find more information or even linking to learning resources.

So we really see this as not just a standards enforcement, but this is also a way of educating your teams on your best practices with each of these.

All right, cool. The next is let's come down here to view templates and view filters. View templates and view filters work almost identical to one another, so we'll just stay over here and to view templates. So here again within the file settings dialog, you can provide that protection to your out-of-the-box view templates and then again you can educate people in real time when they go to edit one of these view templates.

So, this is all pretty straightforward, kind of self-explanatory here, but we'll just quickly kind of demonstrate this. If we go to, if we activate our view and I thought one was applied here, I apologize. We'll go and apply that.

Now that it's applied, what we'll do is we'll come over here and say we'll want to maybe turn that off, hit OK.

The fact that I didn't apply it, I think is the reason why it's not showing up now.

So hypothetically, in this case, if let's try this again.

We go to edit this.

We're gonna, that's what happens when we do things live here sometimes.

Let's double-check.

We've got that applied. All right. OK, finishing plans, finishing plans.

All right. May have to call up my team in here and be like, hey, what am I doing wrong this time?

Watch, it'll work as soon as I try to change this back. All right, I'm going to say setting this up and for this, preparing for this, it worked just fine. And of course I forgot to reassign it and something I'm doing something incorrectly here, but with that we're going to go ahead and move on.

Back to your project configurations.

So as I had demonstrated earlier, we have these new custom interaction rules here for the type property rules, the view template rules and the view filter rules. So in here if you come in here you can see all the types that we've created thus far, a lot of this was just kind of messing around and what not.

And when you come in and create the rule, you have again all these given conditions. And so many of you are probably already familiar with how a lot of our rules-based protections work, so.

I won't get into the details of this.

Just as a reminder though, is please place your more restrictive or the,, and what we mean by that, when your protection mode is to Prevent or Monitor, those should be at top. Actually Prevent or Guide those should be at top and so in this case, we probably should move our Division 12 case work down.

So and also your more your more specific rules should also be at the top of this because these rules would be ran in order and because as you can see here like all model family types is set up Monitor.

So that would catch some of these above. So you want to make sure that these here below, these are here below. All right. As you can also see, we have these rules that are kind of a catch all and this is really meant so you can see how frequently people are going in and modifying these system family types, so it gives you a good understanding of maybe where you should focus on your protections based off your Guardian Backstage data.

Right then moving down here to your modify view template rules, sort of the same thing, when you initially upgrade to 3.3. Currently 3.3.4 is our latest version. When you do that, you'll find that all these more broad rules are in place and they'll be set to monitor.

The goal here again is just to get a good understanding of how frequently people are actually editing your view templates.

And the same thing applies to your view filter rules.

Now before we hand it off to Allison to go over the Registered Projects, the other thing I want to highlight since we've made some changes here under your Company Settings.

Jake Martin: Chris, you're going to find that the check box for administrator guidance and prevention is disabled when we come in here. I checked.

Chris Shafer: Oh, OK.

Jake Martin: That's why.

Chris Shafer: All right. Um.

It looks like um.

We just happened to.

Let's try this again.

There we go. So what Jake was saying here, enable user commands and custom interactions for administrators, it was that was turned off at being an administrator and so sometimes this is what happens is we're trying things out and we forget to turn it back back on. So we'll circle back to that.

Over here under the company settings, the user commands. And remember with these company settings, these user commands apply to all users that have Guardian installed, not just the ones that are registered.

So as you can see here, we've adopted the user command interface from the project configurations where now you can set your command frequency to each of these.

So again you don't have to or remind people every time or even give your users the option if need be to allow never. So it gives you again that more granular protections on these company-level user commands.

All right, Jake, now that this is back on, I feel the need to test this again.

And hit apply. There we go. Thanks, Jake.

Jake Martin: Yeah, good job.

Chris Shafer: All right, cool. With that being said, let's hand it over to Allison and she's going to present Registered Projects and Labels.

Allison Hawes: Awesome. Thank you, Chris.

Right. So our registered projects got a huge overhaul in 3.3. I’ve got about 14.

Chris Shafer: Hey, Allison. Would you mind pulling your microphone up a little bit?

Allison Hawes: Yes, sorry, I was sneaking in my sips of coffee. I forgot to move it. All right, thank you. All right, so register projects got a huge overhaul with the 3.3 update and so I've got about 14 different areas to focus on.

The first is these the search all columns at the top here so you can search for your project name, project number, you can search by the administrator. What's really great about this is this is a multi-term search now so you can do additional search terms and it will filter that out. So it's a really nice way to get a fast, flexible way to find the exact models that you are looking for.

You also have tabs here, so these are out-of-the-box. We'll start with the all models. You can get into your currently opened templates, cloud models, my projects, local models. If there are still tabs that you would like to add that are not here, you can go to the plus.

You'll see that there are some tabs that have been created. There's another way to get to that with this manage drop-down. One thing to note, if you are on 3.3.3, this says add. If you are on 3.3.4, this has been updated to say manage.

So if I go to tabs here, it's that same dialog box, so you can add any tabs that you might want. You can also create other tabs. One nice feature is that you can make personal tabs. So if you keep this unchecked, the tabs that get created will show for your entire admin who have access to registered projects. If you just want something for your own personal search for organization, you can click this “Make Personal” button here. I'll click OK and I'll see my non-workshared tab has been created.

All right, moving on to the grouping. So this is a new feature that starts to auto-group based on the ACC projects. So rather than having to do the manual process of creating groups and putting similar projects together, this now recognizes those projects that have been grouped together in ACC. So along with the Manage tabs, you can get into Manage Project Group.

If it's a cloud-based grouping, you can't edit that because that is again reading your ACC, but you can begin to create your own groups and edit the names of those. So you still have that option if you'd like to create your own groups there.

One of my favorite features is the currently open. So these green check boxes are letting you know which projects are currently opened. We could go to our tab and see that very easily there. What's really great about this is if you hover over, this will tell you who is in the model and how long they've been open. Chris, sorry to call you out there with the 27 hours. Really nice way to see which models are currently open and again which users are in those models.

Another really excellent feature is this file size trend. So with the horizontal line here, it may mean that your file size is stable, or it may mean that it hasn't collected enough data yet. So there are other icons that can appear here ,they're not showing here, but there are arrows that will point down if your file size has decreased, pointing up if it has increased, and I'll show what those look like getting into the filter option here.

So within the filters in your top right you have the search columns which is the same as over here. There are some preset filters that you can click that will automatically filter based on whichever one you select. You can start to filter by your projects.

By your file location, your Revit version, whether it's workshared, non-workshared, your file size and then these are the trends that you would start to see in this area here. So again horizontal line could mean stable if you've got some down arrows that's decrease, up in red are increase, and that lets you know that that would be a good time to probably get in that Project Central. Take a look at the project at a glance, the timeline, the activities, see what commands and transactions have been occurring that could have led to this rapid or gradual increase.

Underneath the filters we've got this little cog and this is managing your columns here so you can start to add additional columns or remove columns. Within this section, you can't adjust where those columns live, but within the actual dialog, you can start to move this around so this will be set. You know what makes the most sense for you as you're looking in your Registered Projects.

I brought up the Project Central if you've got a file size that is increasing. So over in the kebab menu, if you click there, you can quickly get into your Project Central, as well as there are some other options here. If you right-click within that row, you'll still get that option to get into your Project Central.

Let's see, that was #9. All right, #10. So down below, another quick snapshot of your open models. So there are six that are currently open and three users that are within those six open models.

One of the updates is now you have this page option. So rather than having a long scroll that had a time to load, you can now quickly, we only have two pages, but you can quickly start to jump through to see all of these registered projects.

And then on the bottom right, you'll see we have 43 total registered projects, 37 are showing as filtered. Within this all models tab that is showing you all the active projects. So if I go back up to filter and click on my archived.

The math should be updated, so now we're seeing the six filtered out of our 43 total. You'll notice that my filter now has this little orange dot, so I know that a filter has been applied. I can reset that there.

One of the really nice things about filters within these different templates or I'm sorry tabs. If I go to my cloud models and open up filter, it's already set to be looking at this file location. So these filters do remember within their tabs. So if I go to my non-workshared tab and my filter, you'll see the non-workshared option has already been selected here.

OK, I saved Labels for last because I think this is the best part of this Registered Projects and there's two different ways that you can do labels. You can do a manual label and you can start to do labels that are tied to your shared parameters as long as they're project information.

So you can see I do have. I'm going to expand this a little bit. I do have a couple labels that have already been applied to some of these. If I click on that, any project that has already been assigned a label will start to filter out. So how to do this? There are a couple ways to get to it.

Again, from the kebab menu, you could go down to Edit Labels and go to the cog wheel there or up in your Manage Labels.

Within here, you'll start to see these are labels that we have created. Some of these are manually created. So this building system with envelope and interior, these are manual. You'll start to see these links and that's how you know that those are connected to those shared parameters.

So this is 1 area I would love to know how people see the labels being used. We imagine you can start to track which projects are envelope or interior. You can start to track your consultant firms, your disciplines, jurisdictions, office locations, your project phase, all sorts of opportunities here and it's really, really simple to add these labels and add them to your projects.

Up in this plus, we'll go to label category. I'll just call this example demo. I can pick a color.

Within here, you can go to add. If there are some of these labels that have already been created, you can also create a brand new label. You can also do it from up above to the plus label. Just want to make sure that you are picking the correct category.

So if I create a label here, you'll see I now have this label applied and we'll go ahead and add that to this example project. So edit labels, I'll click this and now my label has been applied to my project.

So now I will show how to get it tied to your shared parameter and there are some very particular steps that you need to take to get it to work, but it's really, really excellent when it when you get that going.

We don't freeze up. There we go.

Couple ways. So if you already have shared parameters that have been pushed up to your cloud, you can bring those down. So I'm going to go example download. So this shared parameter has been pushed up to the cloud.

Let me go ahead and download sync.

And when I close this, just as a reminder, it does have to be a project information, it does have to be a text data type, and it does have to be an instance.

So I have this within my project now.

I'm going to create a new label category.

Call it example download.

And here is the example download that I'm linking.

So now you see the link parameter shows up.

I'm going to save and then I'll go into my Manage project information.

Type.

Say hello here and then I might do another save just to see if this will work. Go up to our add-ins settings, registered projects and now you see the hello has shown up here.

So that is for parameters that have already been on your cloud. If you would like to create a new shared parameter, you would have to then upload to the cloud.

So I'm going to create a new shared parameter here.

Already got it created in my parameter list.

I'll add it to my project information, make sure it's instance. It's a text.

And now I can go to my project dropdown in my shared parameters.

I'll select that upload and sync it.

Maybe.

Joy of a live demo.

From here though, if this continues to spin, once I have uploaded it and it's synced, it's essentially the same steps that I took for the shared parameter file that I or I'm sorry, shared parameter that I brought down from the cloud. I would create my new label, link that parameter and then I could go ahead and fill out the text and it would show up in my Registered Projects. I'm glad it waited until the end to start spinning here.

I don't know if that's gonna work.

And try one. Oh, there we go.

Um, yeah. So that is how you would link those labels.

And again, you can use better examples than hello, but we see a lot of opportunity here for tracking information across. One thing I didn't bring up that I thought was pretty helpful is that you could start to track which template and which save date that template has been applied to those projects.

Chris Shafer: That is something that we're hearing from quite a few clients is they want to know what projects were started with what templates or not their templates and and to be able to start understanding their projects accordingly.

There was a couple questions there. I thought that was, I think Jake had answered this within the chat, but I thought it was it was kind of good to kind of bring here to the larger audience since not everyone may be up to date on the chat.

So Laura had asked about the grouping of projects and how within some groups, you're not able to actually remove a model from that and as Jake had responded, since we're doing auto-grouping with ACC projects, everything kind of falls in, just kind of falls in line automatically for you.

Now with that being said is we are aware that there are firms who had been using the grouping feature as a way of organizing their projects from more of a data perspective as with Backstage, we had the ability to filter by project groups.

Because of labels and labels as Kenneth had mentioned in the chat, since labels are available within Backstage now, is we find this is a a more effective way of managing the organization of your models rather than groups. Cause when you really think about model groups, you're talking about all the models that exist within an ACC project as most, not all, but most most projects tend to live there nowadays.

So I just wanna make sure everyone is kind of aware of those nuances and why we kind of made some of these changes.

Great. Anything else to add, Allison?

Allison Hawes: No, but I'm glad that Kenneth brought it up that you can start to track those labels in the newest version of Backstage template.

Chris Shafer: Great. And if I could ask one of my teammates to drop a link to that download into the chat, that would be great.

So I'll go ahead and start presenting my screen here. With that being said is let's go ahead and open up to any questions any people may be having here. I apologize.

Do this little swap here.

And with that being said, is feel free to at this point unmute yourself and I'm gonna ask my teammates if there are any other questions that are in the chat hat we need to answer. Let's go ahead and bring those forward.

Josh Kennedy: I’ll just jump in and say I think we've gotten to all of the questions except for the very last one that just dropped in the chat.

Chris Shafer: OK great.

Are you going to answer that directly in the chat?

Josh Kennedy: Sorry, I was checking the Q&A section to make sure my statement was correct. I'll read off this question and maybe I'll let one of you three that ran the show today answer it. Are projects slash custom content stored in third-party like Box, Dropbox folders accessible?

Newby question as I'm someone just getting going with Guardian.

Chris Shafer: Yeah, great.

So we do have the the feature of approved content or approved content libraries or within Guardian itself.

It is sort of loading family rules and so this is a great way if you are utilizing something like Box or Dropbox or something like that. This is a great way if anyone is about to load content from any other place to say hey this is these are the locations to find our content. It's a great way and this Guardian as a whole is a great way of kind of managing change management and making sure everyone's educated on where to go to do XY and Z so.

Yeah, Guardian is a great way and that particular tool, approved library sources, is a great way to point people directly to your libraries. Yeah, hopefully that answers the question, Josh.

Josh Kennedy: I think so, and I'll drop a link to our knowledge base article on it in the chat here.

Chris Shafer: Great.

All right, cool. Any last?

Jake Martin: Got a question from Hamid here, Chris. Says can we modify the pause time duration? If yes, can it be customized per user or is it project-wide? That's a good question, Hamid. The short answer is the pause duration is set at 2 hours. Certainly something that I can add to our product request list because I think it's a good one. The pause is per session, so if an end user does have access to pause, it would only be for them for those two hours. You can also set it to Prevent, which means that in order for a user to pause it, they would need to obtain a password, which could kind of initiate the conversation with you prior to them having access to that tool.

Toliat, Hamid: Thank you.

Chris Shafer: Nice.

All right. Any other questions?

Parley Burnett: Chris, not a question, but if I might point out just a quick nuance here that's different between 3.3.3 and 3.3.4. We had some feedback from 3.3.3 that users could rename types or templates and in a way get around protections that you'd set up in your rule-based settings.

So if your rule said something like file family name contains these characters or the type name contains these characters and protect its types from being modified, that's good and great until the users just kind of cleverly figure out they can rename the types and then make changes. So in 3.3.4 we address that, if it's initially protected based on its name, then it would not be able to be renamed, as well.

Chris Shafer: Pretty sweet addition.

Parley Burnett: Yeah, so if you're on 3.3.3, it's a good reason to get up there to the .4.

Chris Shafer: Nice. Thanks for adding that.

Any other questions?

Josh Kennedy: There's been a few more that have trickled in here. Margarita just asked about release notes for 3.3.4, which I think Karen might be sharing right now.

Karen Pierce: Yes, and I can come off mute to just address that maybe for everyone else. But if you're not a member of our Guardian user group already in Teams, do drop your e-mail. We'll make sure you get added into the chat here, but the service updates and releases channel in that Teams, I don't know, is it a group or company? I don't know. But basically in service updates and releases we have posted the 3.3.4 release notes there.

Josh Kennedy: That is confusing. I think within Teams they're called Teams and channels.

Uh, there was one more. I thought we had Chris. Uh, scanning for it.

Chris Shafer: Thanks, Karen.

Jake Martin: There's one from Laura that I think is a good one to answer live. Laura posted a screenshot of their registered projects menu with two groups corresponding to the same project. There's one group that looks to be a manual group and then another associated with the ACC hub.

It's a really good catch and I think one thing that we can see here contextually is that a lot of those projects that are in the original group were last saved in early December of 2025, which means they likely haven't been opened since this version of Guardian has been live. So when those files are next opened, Guardian will see that they're in that same ACC hub and then move them from that manual group into that automated group.

Chris Shafer: That's a good one. Thanks for sharing, Jake.

Karen, I hate to put you on the spot here. Could you speak to some of the or the new I guess feature where we address duplicate registrations?

Karen Pierce: I can certainly talk a little bit to it, but we are still kind of revisiting some of the end-to-end workflows with that. So I know a lot of our customers have expressed concern with the use of existing registration prompt appearing unexpectedly.

So this appears because the Guardian GUID that we're using to set your project config, mapping config, etcetera isn't really where we hope it would be. So in many cases, if nothing has really changed with that model, it would be maybe a good idea to use existing registration.

But I do want to call out that if you're doing any sort of file save as from ACC project to ACC project, even if you're saving down to your desktop, you would actually really want to choose to create a new registration because this is exactly what can cause basically registrations from one model to move into another, and if you're using both of those models that you're kind of doing save as’s on, you might put yourself into a kind of a circular state.

So we are addressing this. We are looking to address it either with server updates, which would mean no installation is required, but there may likely be some 3.3.5 updates with this workflow as well. So we also want to make sure of course it appears for the right users. It does appear for any user that opens the model.

And it does require a sync once the selected choice is made. So if you got end users kind of getting the model and not syncing immediately and making different types of choices, it is causing some confusion that again we are very much aware of and working to address.

Chris Shafer: Thanks for adding that Karen and Josh, any other questions?

Josh Kennedy: I think that's all that I've seen so far. Just one latest one from Casey. Every time you ask me, someone throws another one in the chat.

I haven't read through it yet, so give me a moment here.

I'm not sure if you saw that question there, Chris, and if we'd already addressed it, I was answering a different question. So it was about the dialog that's seen when upgrading a template. The question was recommended to make the new one in that case or retain the existing registration.

Chris Shafer: I'd like to hear Karen's take on this, is a template is a little different than say a project in this case and the reason why were doing this is to make sure that you had the continuation of your data from a Backstage perspective, so I would say in this case when it comes to a a template, do you want there to be that continuation of data? And if so, that's when you would want to select, you know, retain the existing registration versus make a new one.

Karen, would you add anything differently to that?

Karen Pierce: Yeah, if you're upgrading templates from one version to another and it's still effectively the same template, it's just now you have a template that used to be in 24, now in 26, use existing certainly makes sense. But if you're taking a template and maybe even specifically a project file type of template.

But not an RTE here, but an RVT and doing a save as you're definitely going to want to be choosing new one in that case.

Chris Shafer: Great. Thanks for adding that context.

Josh, any more? I can hear the dings going on, but I can't actually see the questions while presenting.

Josh Kennedy: I feel like I need to rush out and say we don't have any open questions right at this moment. I think we're just getting a lot of fun chatter about people using, you know, custom memes and stuff like that.

Chris Shafer: Nice, nice. Well, thinking about fun chatter, I think this is a good segway to our last slide here is is this summer. I just want to let everyone know that Guardian will be sponsoring the BIM Invitational Meetup in St. Paul, MN.

We've attended this, we'll say the meetup in previous years. This is a great way for BIM managers and the like to kind of get together and have those conversations amongst your friendly peers on what is really needed within our organizations, within our firms, and within the industry as a whole. So a great way to speak with like-minded individuals and get some good ideas to take back to your own firm. So the Saint Paul, excuse me, the BIM Invitational is in Saint Paul, Minnesota this summer, July 27th and 28th.

You could register for that if you're interested at biminvitational.com.