TAD Designer
Initial steps
First steps into TAD
Initial steps
First steps into TAD
From Version 6.8.7.0 TAD now has a generous and cooperative collaboration system.
You could get a maximum of 75 people to collaborate together on the same project. (hmmm… actually, in some situation, you can get even more than 75! See advanced note at the end)
Note that collaboration in TAD is not real-time.
That means it is not like the real-time collaboration you see; say in Google Sheets. In Google Sheets, two or more people can work on the same Google Sheets exactly at the same time; and each person can see the changes as they are made by other person.
We thought long and hard about this; and decided that the Google Sheets kind of collaboration is not practical and usually never needed when designing architectural projects. One main reason for discarding simultaneous, synchronous collaboration is that you need to be online all the time. That may not be practical in many developing countries; where the Internet is flaky.
Instead, this is how TAD does collaboration:
Using this simple procedure; the 6 architects can easily design the entire project a lot faster than if it was to be done by just one architect.
This is a practical solution, as each architect holistically gets an idea of what everyone else is doing. At the same time, none of them need to be online at the same time (but if they want to, they can remain online too. We don't stop that either) So it is very generous in the way your Internet bandwidth is consumed.
This works on the LAN too. So the collaborating architects can work on the office LAN right there in the office itself! Just ensure that the COLLABFOLDER points to an absolute path such as m:\data\HousingCollaboration Where “m:” is the assigned disk drive letter of the shared folder on the LAN
TAD notices that the 2nd character is a “:” and so will use the actual LAN or computer path for the collaboration activities.
Collaborating across the Internet
If that colon is absent, TAD would assume that the collaboration is being done across the Internet. In such a case, TAD would expect a special code instead of a folder path for the value of COLLABFOLDER
You can get such a code from us here https://tad.in.net/collab
Notifications using Telegram
If you are using the excellent Telegram chatting application, it is now possible to send collaboration notifications of the partial saves done by collaborators; by sending you telegram messages.
Notifications and Internal Group Chat
Collaboration notifications are also sent into the Internal group chat system that is integrated right into TAD itself. So if you have setup such an internal group, then it is possibly even more convenient than Telegram; because all the collaborators can type in their own messages too.
ADVANCED NOTE
Collaboration between people on the same project can sometimes create tricky issues – for example; what happens when different collaborators happen to modify the same sub-project? You genuinely have the fear that someone may accidentally overwrite someone else's work. This is more possible when the collaborators are dispersed across the Internet. We have written a separate topic about this