A new way your content workflows with design partners!

Recently, we announced a brand new way to think about how you collaborate with outside design partners on content – Library Sharing.  Library Sharing is now officially supported for all UNIFI customers!  It’s been thrilling to see how UNIFI continues to add value to bridge information gaps and foster collaboration across the building lifecycle – first through improving how content is consumed, and now offering new ways that it can be distributed.  

Here are a few ways UNIFI’s Library Sharing is already being utilized:

Joint Venture Workflows – UNIFI has two customers engaged in a multi-billion dollar joint venture that requires a significant amount of collaboration including the sharing of BIM Execution Documents, standards and templates. Sharing content is a natural evolution in that process and UNIFI’s Library Sharing enables this to seamlessly occur.  Staff from both companies particularly enjoy being able to request content for libraries, regardless of who owns the library.

Owner ↔ Consultant – One of UNIFI’s customers is a real estate management firm that literally builds cities.  UNIFI is effectively allowing this firm to create content once, store it in the cloud and provide a single source of objects to any of their preferred design consultants.  This single source of information provides essential consistency to their entire building ecosystem, which is particularly helpful as the firm is constantly rotating through different consultants.  UNIFI is also a win for each consultant because it removes the burden of creating content.

AEC Firm ↔ UNIFI Create Services – Many design firms are increasingly turning to UNIFI to create their BIM content.  This allows firms to specialize in their core competencies – designing buildings – while efficiently meeting the cyclical demand of content creation.  A firm shares its libraries with the UNIFI Create Team, a group of seasoned experts in content creation.  Requests from the firm are easily sent through the Content Request form, providing a complete spec of the content and the content is then completed by the UNIFI team within a day or two and returned to the firm’s libraries.

“UNIFI is the bridge, allowing all of our staff, offices, consultants and clients access to critical content.”   Guy Messick – Interior Architects

These are just a few stories of how customers are currently using Library Sharing.  How will you use Library Sharing?  We’d love to hear your story!

Here’s how it works:

A company administrator can initiate sharing of a library by navigating to app.discoverunifi.com and logging in with their UNIFI credentials.   The user then should navigate to ‘Libraries’.

(Note, other areas of the portal are still in beta and may not be entirely functional.)

Then click on the link of the library to open up its page:

The library can then be shared by clicking on the ‘Share’ link:

The pop up dialog will step you through the process. You will be prompted to select the permissions level (currently, only collaborative is available), designate a recipient email address, enter a custom message and agree to the term of service.

Following this, the recipient will receive an invitation email.  If the recipient is a company admin of another company, they will be able to follow the included link, sign into the portal and accept the invitation. Note, once an invitation has been sent, any company administrator for that company may log in to the portal and accept the invitation, regardless if the invitation was sent to them.  If an invitation is sent to a non UNIFI customer, they will be given the option to try UNIFI.

Once an invitation is accepted, administrators for the company that initiated the sharing will see the shared relationship under ‘Shared History’ and any pending invitations that have been sent will appear under ‘Pending Outgoing Invites’.  Pending invitations and current sharing relationships can be canceled and revoked here on the ‘Sharing’ tab.

And that is it!  Libraries that are shared with you in UNIFI will appear like this:

Libraries that are shared with another company appear normal.

Here are some considerations:

• Library Sharing is part of the core product, there is no additional cost to use it.
• Only company administrators may set up a shared library with another company.
• Libraries can be shared with entire companies, not single individuals.  However, that company may choose to allow access with only select individuals.
• When shared with another company, that company must also be a UNIFI customer to access the library.
• When that company receives and accepts the sharing invite, the library is available to them in the same way that their own libraries are. Users and groups can be granted access to the shared library and saved searches can be created that reference that library.  In short, the consumption of content in a shared library works identically to ‘owned’ libraries.
• Content in a shared library (whether you belong to the company that owns the library or subscribing company) can be tagged, rated and favorited like any other content.
• The owner of a library may share it with an unlimited number of other companies.
• If another company has shared a library with your company, you are not able to share the library with others.
• If another company has shared a library with your company, content within that library cannot be added across to your own libraries… but only to other libraries that the same company may have already shared with your company and that you have administrator access to.

If you have any questions about Library Sharing, please contact us.  And, stay tuned for more exciting features from UNIFI.