Sometimes, more than one person must work on a project—maybe the project is large or the deadline is short. Either way, more than one person must have access, whether the file is divided into parts and the parts referenced, or a sharing system is set up. Whichever way, it is all about sharing information.
When you set up a file for project sharing, there is only one project file, but many working files. All of the working files feed the changes back to the project file. With project sharing, the information flows from the working files to the project file and back to the other working files. This allows a large number of users to work on the project and see the changes that the others are making.
Referencing
Referencing (external reference) can be useful for projects that can be subdivided into small self-contained parts. An example of this could be three or four office buildings on the same site where each building can be completed by one architect. Another example could be a holiday village with several small, self-contained villas. Each villa type could be drawn by one architect and then all of the villa types could be brought together on one site plan.
Managing References
You can manage referencing from the Navigation palette.
Things to watch out for: Symbols
Symbols have to be carefully controlled. You can NOT use symbols of the same name in the target file and source file. The symbols have to be different. For example, you could Workgroup Reference 3 buildings to the site plan. Each building might have a door symbol called D01. As you WorkgroupReference each building to the site plan, the door symbol D01 will be replaced by the new symbol. It works well if you want all the symbols to be identical, but it is a disaster if someone has used this symbol name for something different, say a door elevation. One way to manage this is to have clear symbol naming conventions for