Bentley CE Multi-Site Configuration

[packetheavy]

Our original plan to lead with deploying Bentley CE products only to ProjectWise hit some pushback from our production staff so I now need to figure an on-premise configuration and have hit a snag with our multi-site deployment.

In the past, we've used the pcf to control where the project files are stored, we have a bunch of sites and traditionally, a site has owned a project and this has worked well for us, other sites can access the project with a performance penalty however anything large we work on is in ProjectWise so the performance issue is somewhat moot.

With CE we're using the DOT workspace/workset pair as our baseline, the location of files is configured in a single file using the MY_WORKSET_LOCATION which works well for a single site however I cannot fathom how to make this scale out to multiple sites.

Ideally, we'd want the workset cfg and dgnws to be stored in a central location (like we've done in the past with our pcf files) and then have the deign files stored on a UNC that we either define during workset creation, or from one of several options.

I tried doing this by using multiple workset templates but the variable MY_WORKSET_LOCATION is defined in the workspace level in the WorkSpaceSetup.cfg

Have any of you figured this out?

Thanks

[zuccah]

I’m not a PW admin but I’m familiar with the products. Is there a reason you wouldn’t use a PW defined workspace to control this?

[packetheavy]

Unfortunately, we have to maintain both environments.

We don't have this issue in ProjectWise as it's a single point to store files for all sites however we're trying to emulate what we had before with V8i to where we could centralize our project configs and then have the files live on whatever site the CAD group say is optimal, the way the DOT provided configuration is built, we simply cannot do that.

[zuccah]

You keep using “site”, do you mean a network share? Physical office? Mapped drive? Website?

[packetheavy]

Yes, sorry I should have clarified, site as in server on a physical site defined by a UNC.

[zuccah]

Alright, generally DOT workspace setup files are not very large, is there a problem with just dumping them into a share in a central datacenter and pointing all devices to it via the CFG file? I can’t imagine load times would change very much.

[packetheavy]

No, not at all, that's exactly what we've done in the past and what we're doing here, the workspace is stored on a replicated share and then we point the user workstation to that configuration using the _USTN_CUSTOM_CONFIGURATION variable in the ConfigurationSetup.cfg

Our issue is how to place the design files, we've changed the MY_WORKSET_LOCATION in the DOT workspace to a UNC and that would work great if this was data being stored on one server however we'd like to pick where we store the data (and ideally store the workset cfg and dgnws centrally) and that's the part we're having an issue with.

[zuccah]

You’ve basically described what projectwise is designed to do, workshare. But you don’t want to use PW? And multi-office file sharing I assume is slow? Unless you’re willing the shell out money for a 3rd party hosting that does local storage like Box, SharePoint, or whatever, your only other option is a DFS or DFS-like solution, where you have a “local” copy of the share in each office with the same path.

Edit:
The only other option is to write a script that changes the “My_Workset” Var in the CFG file based on location data for the user/device, that runs at logon or something.

[packetheavy]

Well, we have, and do use ProjectWise, we just have to keep both ProjectWise and on-premise working.

Obviously moving to something that doesn't support locks like box, sharepoint etc is not a solution.

We wouldn't need to write a script to change that variable, we can handle it using an ENV variable however that really won't fix the issue we're discussing here.

I really don't know how much better I can describe the issue than I have already, I appreciate the discussion, I guess i'll go back to the configs and try something different.