Sharing a single working model amongst a few designers

I’ve never been an Autocad guy, but it is my understanding that a team of people are able to easily take and release ownership of a single file or even update sections of it while another team member works on their own piece.

Have any of you guys developed an awesome system for working collectively on a single file?

Using linked blocks (which are kind of like AutoCAD XRefs) and worksessions will help with this.

As Dale says, using worksessions with linked files, and blocks for repeated geometry is what you need to look into. But do a thorough test prior to choosing this for a big project, as you might encounter hickups that are counter productive. I have not used worksessions for a while due to this, so I do not know how they have evolved over they years. I don’t say this to scare you away, only to give you a heads up, so you don’t come half way and end up frustrated just before a deadline. Hopefully it will work out perfectly for you.

Oh, Yeah, I remember one of the issues, the worksession just removed files from it’s list, if it could not find them. With out warning, or the option to relocate them. And they did not have relative paths there either, so backing up a project, or making a copy to work on-the-go or just destroyed every worksession… Nor was it possible to work on this on clouds like Dropbox as the paths were unique for every user. That blew it for me. Hopefully this has been taken seriously. Good luck,