Guardian 3.3 Live Release

Parley Burnett: Hey, everybody. It's great to be with you. Thank you for joining us on a Monday afternoon. And we're excited to go through what we have to share today. This is always really a big party for our whole team.

This being a release announcement webinar where we've invited everybody from existing users to others who are interested in what we have. And you know, as a team, we really celebrate this moment. You know, we really do look at it like a party in a way because it's not just the development team that's been hard at work here, which they have been and we're very appreciative of the many long hours they've put in for this, but our whole team, you know, looking at this group, we're all sharing our videos out.

We're all just really excited to be here with you. Everyone's worked really hard on updating websites and emails and the release notes, everything. Everybody's pulled together on this one, so we're just glad to be here together.

I want to just also give a shout out here to our newest team member Allison Hawes joined us about two months ago, month and a half maybe, if I have that right. Been very great for our team already. So yeah, please put your hands together, heart emojis, whatever you want to welcome Allison, we're excited to have her.

But yeah, as we go, several of us will be participating in doing live demonstrations of new features. Like Megan said, we love the chat, so keep that going for us today if you don't mind.

Let's go to the next slide here.

So why Guardian, we just figured since a lot of folks who registered haven't seen Guardian yet and even those who have, it's always good to just revisit our vision and our mission statement.

And so you can tell us how we're doing here. This is really something that we all live and breathe by. And really our vision is to help users reach their full potential and as a Revit user myself, as the CEO and many of us on the team have been users and admins of Revit in the past, we feel very strongly about this.

It's kind of who we are as a team and really we're not like we of course try to target like the cool, fun tech that that is coming out with AI and things like that, but we're really focused on the imminent, what is needed currently and on that like 1% improvement every day.

And so we really see this as kind of an individual human-type focused product. Of course it's technology, but I think the favorite thing for us all is working with you, the users of Guardian.

If we go to the mission real quick.

And yeah, our mission is to automate consistency for that better user experience. So we like to think we're looking at Revit closely and seeing what we can do to improve it so that things overall go better.

I'll turn it over to you, Josh. Talk a little bit more about Guardian for those who are new to it.

Josh Kennedy: Yeah, thank you, Parley. Chris, if you don't mind just pulling up the different pieces of the slide here for everyone. Of course, the majority of the call today we're gonna be showing 3.3 and you're gonna see a lot of the new features, you're gonna see kind of in the background, of course, the things that have been there for a while and some improvements to some of those things.

But for those of you who might not be as familiar with kind of what we do and how we do it, Parley laid out our mission and vision well. But like he said, really everything that we do is designed to help folks get ahead of problems and especially like recurring tasks in Revit.

So when it comes to automating consistency, you'll see things like the mapping tools and Guardian Sync Properties and workset automation, really mainly like admin tools that help streamline things for the users. So someone's modeling on the wrong workset, they might not even realize that but in the background Guardian’s, making sure that everything's done right the first time.

Another part of what we do around this proactive guidance is really about helping kind of protect completed work and train people as they work. So bringing real-time training in the moment. We have some really fun updates on that side of the house today.

And then actionable insights is a big part of what we do. It is very complementary to the other things that we do. Through the past few years, we've done more and more when it comes to data, whether that's in-Revit dashboards like Project Central or our Power BI template that Kenneth's going to talk about a little later.

But all that data is designed to help you stay ahead of problems, right? Get insights into which projects might warrant more attention and where your teams could use some more training

Really everything that we do there has a proactive component high in the tool that you can use as well.

If you don't mind going to the next slide here, Chris.

So just more kind of reiterating how we do it. We're really about helping train your teams, helping everybody kind of upskill themselves as they work, being able to provide not only how it's done correctly, how something is done correctly, but why it matters so that people understand the importance of the trainings that you offer. Quickly clean your models and even eliminate some of the cleaning. And then of course protect the completed work that your team's already done.

The last thing I'll mention, Chris, if you go to the next slide here, is just a little bit about our partners. I joined the team here about 2 1/2 going on three years ago. It's been really fun to watch the company grow the past few years. These are just a handful of some of the clients we work with, but really exciting, crossed a few milestones this year.

We're working with over 330 different firms at this point, something like 25 different countries around the globe. So yeah, really exciting and excited to get y'all's feedback on the tool. So without any further ado, I'll hand it over to you, Karen.

Karen Pierce: Thanks, Josh. So right, we're going to be introducing Guardian 3.3, obviously that's why we're all here. But before we do that, we want to talk a little bit about how, how we got started. So if you could hit the next slide here, Chris.

So every firm we talk to has the same core goal, to deliver great projects without chaos, rework or surprises. But anyone, of course, who's ever managed Revit workflows knows that's much easier said than done. Standards drift, models grow, people model differently. You get the gist.

And so years ago, Guardian was born really out of a simple question. What if firms had a partner inside of every Revit session, quietly keeping things clean and guiding users? And that was the beginning of our story.

So version one was our first step, standards automation. Guardian became the invisible layer that enforced mapping rules and cleaned up content before problems spread. It wasn't glamorous, but it was certainly powerful and it made consistency possible.

And the second chapter, proactive protections. Now teams now have something that they've only dreamed about, a system that didn't just tell you when something went wrong, but it prevented it. It was like placing a seat belt in Revit. Quiet and reliable.

Now the third chapter, insights and communication. And this is where we've been the last couple years. Because of course, enforcing standards and preventing problems isn't enough. Firms need to understand how their teams work, and so we have an error of insights and communication.

Guardian started connecting people, giving them context, and really training them in the moment, also making Backstage data even more meaningful.

And with versions 3.1 and 3.2, we started adding that infrastructure for something even bigger. Sync Traffic Control, Guardian Messages, richer logs, of course, with user behavior.

These aren't just small features. They were really laying the foundation for something we've been envisioning for years.

And now we've got the big reveal. 3.3 is really the turning point. For the first time, you'll be able to really see the complete picture of how modeling is happening inside your firm. Not just where things go wrong, not just warnings or mis-steps, but how your team is actually using Revit every day, and it's giving something BIM leaders have really always needed.

Clarity, clarity about behavior, about model health, workload and also risk. And with that story in mind, the journey from automation to protection to insight and communication and now to full clarity, we'll get a look at how those ideas have come to life in 3.3.

All right, next slide if you could.

Now, before we jump into the demo, and Parley certainly touched on this with our Dev team, but before we get back into that, I really just wanted to acknowledge all of our beta participants. Your feedback shaped 3.3 in so many meaningful ways and ensured this release really reflected these real-world needs.

And of course, to our development team, I tracked about 500 different improvements and refinements across 3.2 all the way through into 3.3 and it really shows the level of care and craftsmanship behind Guardian. And I really believe it's a huge part of why 3.3 feels so strong.

And without further ado, we'll jump right into it.

Now picture this. You've got dozens, maybe even hundreds of active Revit models. Teams are spread across offices, time zones, project phases. And of course, every model is evolving, growing, shrinking, shifting direction.

So with the new Registered Projects interface, you'll see that of course it's not only got a completely new UI, but you'll be able to see data across all of your project models and we've made it as easy and clear to understand as possible.

Now this is a snapshot and I'm really showing you this snapshot as a means to kind of show you how it's really going to look within a typical customer environment. You'll of course see Registered Projects in real time in just a moment, but I really wanted to highlight the ability here to not just of course see a whole bunch of models that are of course currently active and open and more on that in just a minute.

But really highlight things like size and of course our new file size indicators here. So this big spike that you see here means the file is rapidly growing, whereas models that are more gradual, of course, signify gradual increases, and of course, models can be stable as well, which, of course, is the best stream out of all.

Now I'm going to go ahead and hop into the real-world environment. So now you can see ours is not maybe nearly as exciting, but it's going to be just as powerful here. So at a quick glance back to that status column here. Now I was currently in the model earlier.

And getting into, I'm actually kind of jumping around, so forgive me a little bit, but I was hoping to see something particular, so I've jumped ahead a little bit of myself. We've really introduced a number of new tabs here, so instead of just something like all models and templates.

I'm going to be able to see very easily with a tab that's right out-of-the-box which models are currently opened. So within this currently open tab, I'm able to actually take a look and see the model that all of our users here at Guardian are currently in. So I can also not see just who's in my model, but how long they've been in that model.

Jake's definitely been the most productive it looks like in this model today, as he's been in there the last seven hours or so. Now, what's pretty cool about the rest of these tabs here, just jumping right into it, is that overridden models have been always extremely hard to see. Once again, we've got that within just a quick tab.

Cloud models, even files that are of course assigned to you as an administrator, otherwise known as my projects here. So what really brings this to this whole dashboard to life is just really how easy it is to go ahead and take a look at all of the models across your entire ecosystem.

And that file size indicator here, sorry Chris to go ahead and pick on this one for you, but we can easily see once again by hovering what exact percentage that file size has increased. And this is based on a six week trend. So there's no more of a guessing game kind of figuring out what was my file size. Now you know that it was 41 megabytes before a quick spike hit that file.

Now these tabs are all out-of-the-box. You can of course manage them as you see fit through this add drop down here. So within manage tabs you'll be able to turn on everything we have out-of-the-box or turn it off.

You're also of course free to rename, duplicate as you need to create new and what's really exciting about creating new and I'll go ahead and just put this in, but we're going to go ahead and just turn that on and right out-of-the-box here you can see we've got everything kind of ready to go and to be configurable.

What we've got here within the filter panel is not just of course standard search here, but the filter panel offers the same type of search. So if I know I'm looking for SNS files that again, sorry to pick on somebody here, but I'm going to pick on you Jake. But these are Jake's files with which he's an administrator.

So not only do we of course support search across both our temporary search and the filter panel, but multi term search even across multiple fields. So this will really allow you guys to filter your results down in whatever way sees fit. All of these quick select filters do really allow you to go ahead and either see hey maybe you want to see SNS files that Jake, sorry once again, has gone ahead and administered. But here you're able to easily sort by particular groups, file location, Revit version, and really so much more.

Perhaps you want to create a custom dashboard, for example, to take a look at all of your files that are gradually increasing there.

Date filters. You know the sky is the limit here and what's really quite pretty cool here is that you can see maybe all the files that have been saved over the last 30 days, registered over the last 30 days, and just go ahead and save and create your own custom tabs. So really, really powerful to make registered projects whatever you see fit here.

Within this add dropdown too, this is where you can also find things like project group and label and I'm going to hold this for the second part of my discussion here. But managing labels.

So labels you can see here we already have quite a few. These are actually coming from what's known as a linked label. So I'll certainly show you how to create linked labels today, but of course these can be filtered simply by clicking on and applying the search results. And of course, once again saving them to those tabs if you'd like. And last but certainly not least here, getting into the kebab menu.

So the kebab menu is of course available on both the model level as well as on the group level where you can do actions such as unregister, archive, sending messages, opening Project Central and so on. And of course adding labels is possible here as well. So once again, I'm just going to go ahead and add a quick label here. So I want to add webinar. Clicking on that plus sign as you saw me do does open it up so I can pick a pretty color. I will choose blue here and you can choose its category. Everything comes in by uncategorized by default.

And I'll show you how to create categories as well. But for the sake of the demonstration, I'll just go ahead and click create and you can see that it's been added because I went from one more to two more and I'm just going to kind of show how easily this can be adjusted. But here's that webinar label. So very easy, very straightforward.

It has been meant to be very intuitive, but of course, if you find that's not quite the case, when Allison has her turn, you'll certainly find out that you can submit that feedback directly to our product team within some of the new features we have in the Revit ribbon.

But now on to the Label Manager here. So within the Label Manager, quick note and I'll go ahead and get there just one more time. You do have to hover a little bit here, so this will only appear for company admins. So if you don't see it, it's just because you don't have the right permissions.

But when you go ahead and open the label manager, you will not see anything by default. Actually everything will be pretty blank. So you're going to be really guided to create those label categories and labels. It is really as straightforward as creating the new label you saw me do here and I'm going to go ahead and just once again.

Enter a new category name. You can enter a description. It is optional really only because this is the only place in the UI right now that description shows. But again, more on that perhaps where you might like to see it as far as feature requests go at a later time.

But very easy to go ahead and create these categories. You can easily create new labels straight from here, or of course once again straight from here. Now something I'm going to go ahead and try to show, but I was having some technical difficulties of course right beforehand was to show you how easy it is to get these linked labels I was mentioning to you.

So linked labels are very unique and special in the fact that it does have to meet a certain number of conditions, one of which is that linking a shared parameter must be a text-based shared parameter, and secondly, it must also already be synced to your Guardian shared parameters as well.

As well, and I have one of those that is my project manager parameter here. So in going ahead and selecting that, I'm going to go ahead then and link parameter. So that's really all there is to it. And Parley while I'm going through this, would you please put in elevate as far as who the project manager is for this SNS project or Chris or whoever would like to. You'll see that this project manager parameter is already part of the project.

And that does actually let me want to touch on one last thing and that this project manager parameter is tied to the project information. So that's pretty important. So text based shared parameter sync to Guardian Cloud and tied to project information.

So all of that to be said too, just a couple little nice to haves. You can always pause a link anytime you want just with this pause button and you can choose to include empty parameter values as well. So this is great for having those parameter values being surfaced that should be filled out perhaps that aren't as.

After all that will create a label of null when that happens. So now that that's been done, I want to show you at that point. I don't know if somebody can give me a thumbs up that elevates value has been put in. I would do it, but of course guys, right before our webinar, my 2025 just had to breakdown.

Parley Burnett: For the project manager parameter, Karen.

Karen Pierce: Yes, that is correct in project information.

Parley Burnett: I'm not seeing that actually.

Karen Pierce: It would be grouped under general.

Parley Burnett: I only have three there. I probably need to synchronize. Then I'll see it. Maybe Chris, you got it.

Karen Pierce: That might be it.

Chris Shafer: Yeah, take a look at that.

Jake Martin: I can see it on my end.

Karen Pierce: Well, that is the only. OK, so you got it, Jake. So do you want to type in elevate here and see if how quick that can maybe pop up on this side?

Jake Martin: Yeah.

Karen Pierce: So even though my 2025 kind of broke down everyone, what's pretty cool with registered projects, I'm in 2024. So I was at least able to open that and really able to see the project data across not just one version of Revit, but really all versions of Revit, all of my projects that I have registered.

Here and when I was testing this earlier, what was pretty neat is that once that parameter was entered and of course somebody has to save after putting that in, but the label then automatically comes in. So this particular project here.

I can turn it over to to perhaps Parley or Chris, any one of them to sort of share, but all of this is coming from that parameter data within project information. So Parley, since you have the next section, perhaps maybe you'd like to go ahead and take over the screen share to talk about all commands and all of the protections that that entails.

Parley Burnett: Sure thing, Karen. Karen doesn't know it yet, but she's kicked off quite the conversation about food and menus.

Kabob menus, hamburger menus, amongst other things. That's fun. No great job, Karen. Great, great work presenting all of that's in the register projects dialogue.

You know, I didn't mention it at the beginning, but Karen is, prior to Allison, the most recent hire with the team and has done a lot for us on the product side and I will just yeah. Gonna give her a little hand clap here. Thank you, Karen. Well done.

So I will share my screen and.

So what we have here.

So if we go to that project information.

I of course would need to synchronize again to see what Jake put in there, but all of these fields are basically populating those labels in the registered projects. Really big effort there. We're excited to hear your feedback on that.

So I will be moving into a kind of a different area of this release, which is custom commands, so I'll be going to the project configurations.

And in here, for those of you who are new to this, you can specify kind of that end-user experience of Guardian based on the actions that they're performing. So explode CAD, import CAD, you can kind of just move it from a monitoring state to a guidance state or even a prevention state for up to I think of around 120 different default out-of-the-box commands. And that's kind of what we're talking about here with the custom commands we are basically extending that list of defaults that have been provided to you to really several 100 items that you can add yourselves.

You know, our goal as a company is to give you a really good starting point. And so when you install Guardian out-of-the-box, you're gonna have really a lot of those commands that are generally seen as best practice types of things, things we train on, et cetera, and we've provided really nice default messages for those things. But what we have found over the past couple of years is kind of some interesting like requests come in like the print command or things like that that we didn't originally expect would be kind of a common denominator of interest across all the firms we work with. So we're really trying to expand this so you have now the ability to customize this much further.

So if you are a company administrator, when you come to the Project Configurations dialogue, you will have a new button in the bottom right corner called Manage Commands. And when you click on this, this is kind of that default list of commands that are available to you to add to any of your project configurations that you have assigned to your projects. So what that is basically you can add them from this new button. This is nothing new right? If we had in the past supported a new command, you would have had to come to this interface and clicked on that command and added it to your configurations. We don't assume you want to monitor, protect anything without you actually deciding to do that, but that's basically pulling from that default list.

In managed commands for those things that are not currently in your current configuration, if that makes sense. So this is kind of the overall list, everything list, and you can actually in here do some things that you couldn't do before, things that were kind of hard-coded into Guardian, if you would.

Things like the command name. This is what shows up in your backstage dashboard. Things you're filtering down by. You can customize the title. This is what actually shows up at the top header of the dialogue. So if you are interested in changing what shows up there in that top bar, you can now modify that potentially important for those who are working in other languages.

And then to the right of this you can customize the screenshot behavior. You know the screenshot isn't going to make sense for every command and you may not want screenshots at all, and this is a good kind of global place to now control that.

But really, really cool to have like active view and you know, capture what's in their selection before the action, even after the action and change what the default message is.

Now this is where it gets even more fun. You can click this new button here and in this menu you have access to a very, very long list of pretty much most of the interface buttons of Revit, things that you can usually set a command keyboard shortcut for.

So the example I'll share is just Room boundary. Or boundary.

I think I might have already created that.

Room separator is the word I'm thinking of. Yes, I had already added that here, but basically here's what that would look like. And you can put in any command name here, any message title here, and a default message.

Once that is added to your list, you can then add it here, so you click add and then we're gonna change that to a guidance and we'll click OK, OK, click OK.

And then we'll just.

OK, this is actually a little bit of a teaser for what's coming later, but we do have warning protection to talk about today, so it actually is keeping me from doing that. But all of that data does show up in Project Central.

So I'll bring that over and I'll show you here how I had done that room separator.

OK, so supported all in Backstage and throughout.

We've done a few things as well, so hopefully that's really exciting and maybe gets the gears turning on what you might add, but we did add some new capability with this e-mail option, so in the past, you would have to choose for any commands which ones you would want to send an e-mail when the users perform that action. The thing about it is it would send an e-mail every time that action is done, which is for some people really great.

But what it didn't really capture is other commands where you have a guidance prompt, but they're putting comments in and you're not being alerted to those comments until you might look at the dashboard later. So we added a feature here, this new check box, send emails with comments.

If that's turned on now, any action where a comment is entered by the user, you'll get an e-mail. This actually, for those of you who've been around for a little bit, the idea for this came about, I believe on another webinar.

So we are listening, we're introducing things like that to improve your experience and then we've added just some general like across the board consistency, one of which is a new search capability on like the Company Settings dialog where we didn't have it before. We had it on the project configurations, but now as you toggle between these different tabs, you have that search capability as well as in these dialogues as well.

OK. I will turn it over now to Chris to talk about a few other things.

Chris Shafer: Thanks Parley. I'd say I'm incredibly excited about the all commands and hopefully, it just keeps on getting better for everyone here. Speaking of sort of small but important improvements is we made a small change or a small addition I should say to the pinning capability.

So where before we did automatically pin when importing or placing CAD, hopefully no one's importing CAD, but we've now added prompt to pin and protect after linking Revit as well. So those automatic protections pin protections be applied.

Another one here is that I actually I want to give it a little shout out to Andrew at HGA. This is your little Christmas gift Andrew. So when we start looking at a lot of our custom interactions have always been rules based.

But one of the common requests we've gotten for all of those has can we add command frequency to those? So Andrew, as requested, now you can. So as you can see, here is all of our existing rules.

Now one thing to know is that command frequency will need to be set up for all of your existing rules. In addition, we've revamped this dialogue where before it just kind of had the rule name and you had to move up and down accordingly.

Now this mimics more of the user command dialogue and so for each we can come in here and now this is at the monitor. As soon as I change this to monitor, guide or prevent, now I have that frequency and so for many of you who may be new to Guardian is this is a way of setting how frequent users will get those those command messages when executing that.

So one of the things is I especially chose hiding in view rules as we all know that there is proper and improper ways of using hide elements in view.

And sometimes, even with the improper ways, you just got to get the project out the door. And so this is a good example of where that command frequency becomes really important. You kind of remind people that very first time you may not want to use, you know, hide elements in view.

But then you let them do it just so they can again get the project out the door. Sometimes you just got to do what you need to do. So super excited about this one. And as with all of our commands that have a command frequency, these can be managed within the user overrides dialogue.

OK, shifting gears here. One of the things that Parley had given us a little primer on is the warning, the new warning tracking protections. So before I get into this, there's a couple of things I just want to share here. About 10 years ago, my team and I had put together or done a little research and put together how impactful warnings are to a given project as you can see here. And I'll be curious everyone's reactions is this something that you've seen? And again, this was like 10 years ago we did this.

And as you can see as those numbers climb and it's really doesn't take that many warnings when you start looking at models where you start seeing that performance impact. And I think one thing was really eye-opening for us is seeing that as little as 500 warnings can have a 20% performance impact on those given models.

Now, since I did that 10 years ago, I went ahead and asked ChatGPT. So we all have to take this with a little grain of salt.

And I was surprised dropping in the chat again here. I was surprised that ChatGPT had those numbers actually lower than what we did 10 years ago. So warning prevention is absolutely important to model performance.

So without further ado, getting into the new warning protections. So previously within Guardian we had warning tracking, so you were able to see when warnings were produced, you were able to have the high, medium and low priority set to these, but now we've kind of taken it one step further. So I'm going to do overlapping walls. That's one I remember seeing all the time and here we can now set the monitor, guide, and prevent for overlapping walls.

In addition, we can also set the command frequency just like with all the other new custom interactions now.

Let's talk about this for a second. What is the purpose of having these level of protections? Ultimately, one is to prevent these warnings from happening in the 1st place. So out of curiosity, raise of hands here is how many of you have just spent hours cleaning up warnings just to make sure you can access or clean, you know, have better performance, right? We all have. What is the best way to save time on that is preventing them in the 1st place. So now with guide, obviously when a user goes to execute a command in which a warning is prevented, they will have the the typical.

Let's go ahead and actually, let's just go ahead and demonstrate this now. So what I'm going to do is have this wall here.

And Revit wants to be a little slow here, so I'm just going to create similar.

And now I create my similar. Now I get that Guardian command message. At this point I have the option to go ahead and enter a comment or hit OK and proceed and generate that warning. Now if I hit cancel.

Let's demonstrate this here.

That wall is actually removed. So this is a good way of just educating people on those best practices and if need be, setting it to prevent and actually prevent people from executing those warnings. So an amazing way of ensuring the amount of warnings is minimized in a given model and two is ultimately improve your model performance as warnings really have a significant impact on that front. So with that being said, I want to hand it over to Jake and he's going to demonstrate a few more goodies.

Jake Martin: Thanks, Chris.

Show you guys my notes so you know what I'm reading from here.

Awesome. So yeah, we've got a couple more goodies in store in terms of protections. The features that I'm going to go over cover family type protections, which is long time, long time coming, as well as view template protections, and view filter protections. So quite the trio here.

Starting off with family type protections, these are all going to be in our project configurations.

You can see here we've got our rule for modifying type properties. This is going to follow suit to, you know, all the other rule-based components. You can see here we've got the modernized interface. We've got a lot of different rules here.

And we can create them from these different conditions, conditional statements.

Parley Burnett: Yes, we have a few new things here. These three view filter, view templates and type properties. Jake's talking about the types and like he said, we do support family types as well as system family types, which if you've been in Revit, you know that casts a very wide net.

Literally everything in your template boils down to a type, it seems right? Text types, dimension styles, wall types. We set these things up in our template and we hope they don't change often. Of course, there might be some like duplicate and modify things we expect, but with that core set of things we hope never changes.

Now you can do that. So typical interface for the rules. Now you can go very simple and just choose by category, but most are gonna go further than that and choose perhaps like family name or family type name, even down to user role username.

You can get very granular building these out with and and or statements. Not going to go into all that today because that's part of existing Guardian and you can choose these different modes between monitor, guide and prevent like the warnings Chris was showing, we also do support the new frequency options here as well, so if you want to gently remind users about modifying text types or something like that, but maybe once per session, that's something you can do.

So this is just a very simple example. We'll just go with doors and that's set to guide. So click OK on this and we'll just grab a door and choose to make a change here.

Maybe neither. OK, now that's the protection here. If we click cancel, it's actually going to close this dialogue and roll that change back. So no changes have been made now and this is all being captured now like the warnings, like the new custom commands in the data.

So if I go to the users here, I'm gonna see that action was canceled if I click that link and it does show the type that was modified here. So full spectrum of support across existing Guardian features.

Now that rules based interface is great, but sometimes you need a little more specific control over certain things. For example, if you have a rule based on the name of something, that name could change. The user might modify that name.

So for those kinds of concerns you can actually come into this menu into that protected types dialog and actually drill down directly to the types that you don't want to have modified and that's going to follow the family exactly. So you could even do this across your library families.

OK.

Chris Shafer: Hey Parley, if you don't, if you don't mind me adding here is testing this out for the last month, month and a half is really thinking about the sort of the best practices between the file settings dialog and the rules based.

Really anything that currently exists in your templates or your families or your starter projects, using the file settings dialog and setting this protections right there is sort of the best practice.

Then every subsequent project that's created with those will adopt those. The rules, one way to think about this is, the rules is a way of doing it for everything that happens in the future. So, file settings here and now, rules for the future.

Thanks, Parley.

Parley Burnett: Yeah. Thank you, Chris. That's an important point.

So I I just wanted to kind of move this along with time. So very similar to that we have the types being protected. Now I think our, one of the longest standing requests we have is view template protection. We've had this one being asked for quite a long time. It makes sense.

So this is actually the first time now that you can protect view templates and it works very similar, so we don't need to go into all the interfaces.

I'll just point out kind of what you have available as conditions. So this could be by discipline or more specifically the view template name, even a parameter that's saved on the view template, which is kind of cool.

And if we change, um, this is gonna be pretty much everything. I'll change it to a guidance.

That should capture any change now that I make.

And this is going to take effect whether they access it from managed view templates or through the properties palette. This is a different protection on the command level and then when we come in here and make a change.

It's gonna kick in with this protection. There's kind of an odd thing in the API, like when you check these boxes, it's actually applying that change directly in that moment, even before you click OK and cancel. So that's why the users will see prompts popping up potentially even though they haven't clicked OK or cancel.

But if we click OK on that and OK again, that's gonna show up in our data with the view name.

OK. And very similar to that, we have the view filter protection. I'm kind of jumping around so you can kind of see a similarity here with the types, view filters and view templates. They all three have kind of corresponding interfaces, rules based and then file based. so again and here you can choose like a specific view filter to guide, monitor or prevent changes to.

OK. Anything else there, Chris, that you think should be mentioned with these?

Chris Shafer: I think you covered it well. I know just looking at the traffic there in the chat, so many great, great features this time around and can't wait to start getting feedback on these. With that being said, let's hand it over to Allison.

Allison Hawes: All right, a little nervous. You know, my first webinar. I hope my screen is showing up here.

Chris Shafer: I can say I can see it.

Parley Burnett: It is.

Allison Hawes: OK, good. No snow here in Denver, unfortunately. All right, so I'm going to continue talking about some of our user interface improvements in the settings dialog. I am going to get into company settings, but before I do that.

For those of you who have been using Guardian, you may notice that Company Settings is now here at the top of this list of settings and configurations, and Workset is down here. We have now reorganized everything alphabetically, so Company Settings is at the beginning. Workset is here.

This is not just for our settings, the same is for all of our dropdown menus. So project cloud and file settings is all alphabetically sorted now.

So getting into the company settings, as Parley mentioned, we now have the search bar in the user commands. We have added six new company level commands. So we've got restore backup, show history, work, share, monitor, macro Manager, Macro Security, and Keyboard shortcuts.

So this will continue to help you shape and enforce your firm-wide standards, and these commands do apply to all user interactions regardless of the model being used. Within the same dialogue you can set the mode as well as edit your command message.

And from within the mode, once we switch from monitor to guide or prevent, that frequency setting does pop up here as well.

All right, hopping out of the settings, you may notice this new help feature here. So clicking on this will take you directly to the knowledge base on the Guardian website. Clicking here will take you to our YouTube channel.

And the support will open up your e-mail. It'll have your e-mail address already in the from and our support e-mail in the to, so you can quickly reach out for any support that you might need.

And then within the settings, if I go down to About, this will tell you which version you're in, another contact support option. But what's really exciting is now you have the option to go to our Ideas and Roadmap page.

So on this website, this is kind of a quick snapshot of, you know, some of the enhancements that are in this 3.3 version. If you click on a card, it'll have a screenshot with some text describing what the improvement is. And what's really exciting is now you can vote on the importance of this for you if it's not important, important or critical. You have that option for all of these cards here.

In addition to this, we also have our planned roadmap cards here. So again information in here that you can vote on as well as the under consideration.

So going back to planned, I am going to point out this company to company sharing has been a requested option for a while. So future update will allow firms to share Guardian configurations across your models, projects and even your ACC hubs and feel free to vote there.

So just as a quick reminder, it is under Settings and About and then click on the ideas and roadmap and you'll be able to come here.

So these are all Guardian-produced, but you are able to submit your own idea. So if you click on this button here it will ask you to register the first time, but once you have done that then you can add your own ideas here and you can even vote on the importance level there.

Alright, I think that's all I have, so I'm gonna hand it over to Kenneth.

Kenneth Gilliam: All right, let's see if mine also wants to share. So from the Backstage side, I won't take too much time as we get towards the end of this. Some of the improvements currently in the most recent version of Backstage and some improvements coming very shortly in the next couple of weeks here. One big overhaul we did optimize was the installs page.

What we added here, the initial batch of Backstage really just showed you the Guardian version everybody was on. We've gone through now and you can see the Revit versions, the desktop connector versions. We've also optimized this in the upcoming version to show users who have launched Revit even without a registered model.

In the current version you would only see users who have been inside registered models. Moving forward, you'll be able to see all users who have Guardian.

There we go. Also coming a little spoiler from Moses earlier, we will be adding labels as some of the filters into backstage. This is just a little quick snippet of it. You'll have your top level, which will be your layer category and then underneath that will be the individual labels within that category so that we can filter down your models based on labels and really start customizing how you view it or how you dish out the reports that you want to send to individual users or groups.

And then one other new feature is doing similar with the models. We will now have it grouped with your groups up top and then your models underneath. That way the organization's a little bit better. Everything's kind of in one place. You don't have to scroll up and down alphabetically looking for all of these individual spots here. Everything else falls under your one group.

And again, that way you can start filtering it down, getting your visuals snapped over to that really quick so you can export just relevant data for your stakeholders or for your project managers.

And we should be seeing that hopefully in the next, I'd say by the end of next week is what we're aiming for. We've got it all kind of built out, just waiting for the new data with everybody getting into labels to really test it and make sure that we've got it right for you guys on the next launch.

And then on that, I think I'm just passing it back over to Chris and Megan for any last comments.

Chris Shafer: OK. Thank you, Kenneth. As you can see and especially the chat's been amazing seeing everyone's reactions to all these new features. With that being said, I see that there's some questions in the Q&A. We will kind of get back to those after the fact. There has been a lot of additional questions in there, they've been coming so quickly. I think even our expanded team hasn't been able to keep up this time.

It's so great to see everyone's reactions. So with that being said, if there are any last questions, feel free to throw it in the chat. Parley, do you have any closing statements before we close out?

Parley Burnett: Not especially Chris, I'm just excited to read back through the comments. I haven't been able to keep up with everything but we do love the comments and engagement here. It's really means a lot to our team and keeps us going for the next one. We're already hard at work and got more surprises coming into the next year.

Chris Shafer: Thanks, Parley. With that being said, I want to thank everyone for attending today's webinar. So excited to hear how everything's going with everyone. Let us know. Thanks everyone and happy holidays.