One of the challenges with working as a consultant is the inability to really dig in. Time is money. In and out, nobody gets hurt. On the flip side, you don’t get pigeonholed into what you need to learn and you get exposed to a huge range of companies, seeing a massive range of how things are done. But if you want to spend a ton of time really seeing how tools are used over a long period of time, consulting might not be the best path for that.
So, in my past career consulting, while I had dabbled in Content Catalog, I hadn’t really spent any significant time with it.
On paper, Content Catalog solves so many problems: support for spread out production teams, ease of upgrading, tags instead of folders, an approval process, not worrying about storage space… But, over the last few months I have found out that the rumors are true: sometimes it just sucks.
This is not a “this is how we fixed it!” blog post. I’m not there yet… if I ever get there. What I do have is a plan and I thought I’d let you all know my progress as it happens.
Content Catalog has been around for a while now, and the setup that I am working with was created at a pretty early adoption phase. When it was set up, not all the questions had been figured out. Not all the best practices had been shared.
Scrapping it is on the table, but before we do that I want to give it one last shot.
We’ve rounded up the recommendations for tagging, done a lot of reading, and know what is not working now. Part of our current challenge is a naming convention that tacked the Revit version year on each RFA. Part of our challenge is having dozens of collections.
Then there are the unknowns. Random disconnects or no connection to the model at all. Some days users have no problem. Other days, the dreaded spinning wheel.
So, we are starting over. That’s pretty much the whole plan. I don’t want to just toss it out: the benefits if we can get it working are great. But as some point in the very near future, we are hitting the reset button.
We’ve overhauled the naming convention (not just for CC, it was time.) We’ve designed streamlined collections. We still need to get a better plan for tagging, but that’s coming. I’ve tracked down all the URLs that need to be safelisted. We will rebuild it from the ground up, and with some key pilot users, we will track it all and see how things go.
…. maybe ….
But even if our reset solves all of our technical issues, our biggest challenge will be overcoming the bad taste in everyone’s mouth. We have had months and months of users not being able to use it consistently or successfully. That’s hard to overcome and will take quite the PR campaign. If this all works.
I’ll keep you posted.
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