Collection allow you to organize content in Content Catalog. Any user with rights to a specific Collection will be able to browse and search through that Collection's content, as well as place any of the content into their Revit projects.

Collections Admins can approve or reject content uploaded to that Collection and fulfill content requests that are submitted to that Collection.

You can create an unlimited number of Collections in Content Catalog, but we find that our most successful customers strive for simplicity: less is almost always more. Maintaining a streamlined Collection strategy will not only make it easier for your users to learn and use Content Catalog but also make your life as a BIM manager much simpler, as it will shorten training time for new users.

If you want an added layer of organization to your content, but still want to maintain that streamlined Collection structure, you could use tags. For example, you could tag content by project name or spec number. This prevents you from letting your number of Collections get out of control. With Tagging also comes Saved Searches for more granular collections of content.

When we introduce people to Collections, we suggest the following strategies:

The first strategy for establishing Collections is to consider how you manage content. Some points to consider are if you separate client-specific or project-specific content, or if you have different managers for different subsets of content. Your current content management plan gives you the first clue as to how to organize your Collections.

A second strategy to consider is to organize Collections by discipline (for example, Architecture, Mechanical, etc.). This makes the search much easier because it prevents content overlap.

For example, if someone searches "panel,” the desired result for an architect may be exterior cladding, while an electrical engineer is likely looking for an electrical panel. If these were separated by a discipline-specific Collection, Content Catalog could easily filter out the content of other disciplines, thus preventing users from wading through other people’s content.

Sandbox Collections allow you to store un-vetted content in Content Catalog. In this Collection, all users can have admin access to this, which allows you to accept contributions from anybody. You could also just have one Collection admin that approves content with less stringent standards. These contributions can be inserted, rated, and tagged by everybody else. This crowd-sourced method helps your team to efficiently test the acceptance of content before graduating it to other, more vetted/refined Collections.

When deciding how to organize your Collections, it is critical to consider what unique business objectives you are looking to accomplish by uploading your content to Content Catalog. For some clients, security permissions and project-level access are paramount. For others, enabling quick search is the primary objective.

Each of those goals is best accomplished by a different Collection organizational structure, and we encourage you to work closely with a Content Catalog BIM Specialist to evaluate what theme will work best for your firm.

Here are some examples of successful Collection setups:

This is a global firm with different admins for different regions of content. There’s a general company Collection, but the content is also divided based on region:

This is small to a large firm that works with both imperial and metric projects. There’s a singular content manager or a team of power users. Several users within the firm are making the content:

This is a small to large firm with multiple disciplines managing their own content and a company culture of improving content on each project with a place to collect it:

This is a small firm with no BIM manager, but there are multiple power users:

No matter what your firm’s unique requirements are, here is a list of additional recommendations every firm should keep in mind when designing the Collection strategy that will work best for your team:

Once you consider all these factors and lay the framework for your Collection structure, everything should fall into place and run more efficiently. You may want to revisit your Collection structure occasionally so ensure that it’s still working best for your firm’s workflow.