Team Collaboration

Worknights

Having weekly worknights is key to getting team members to all focus on working on a car together. Starting the worknight with a team meeting is a great way to encourage everyone to show up on time, to have status updates, and to get everyone on the same page. Having everyone on the team see each other work together at the same time is very underrated as a motivational tool, to build trust, and have fun.

Collaboration Software

Many teams have started to use slack, Microsoft Teams, discord, or other collaboration software

CAD

GrabCAD WorkBench

Pros:

• Free
• No IT System required

Cons:

• Locking files is optional, which can result in conflicting versions.
  
• Encourages syncing of all local files, even if the user didn't intend to make a change to the vault version, which can cause accidental changes and unnecessary revision conflicts.
  

SolidWorks PDM

Pros:

• Seamless integration into SolidWorks
• Requires users to lock out files to work on them to prevent conflicting versions and accidental changes.Cons:
• Complicated IT system required

Google Drive / Dropbox

Pros:

• Free
• Most teams are already comfortable with these platforms for document sharing.

Cons:

• No SolidWorks integration
  
• No ability to lock out files
• File references can become problematic

Inventor Vault

Available for teams who use AutoDesk Inventor as their primary CAD software.

Subversion (SVN)

SVN is a version control system developed for software before git. While git is a distributed system, SVN has one central vault, which users can lock out files for editing. There are hosts for SVN servers, or you can create your own SVN server using software like SVNEdge. All the users would use software like tortoiseSVN to sync files.

Pros:

• Locking out files is optional.

Cons:

• No SolidWorks integration (yet).
• IT knowledge required to set up own server.

Git and Github

Git is primarily used for software development. It is built upon the ability for two people to simultaneously edit a text file, and then for git to be able to merge these two files. Because of this, users are not able to "lock" so only one user can edit at a time. Unfortunately because merging is not possible with CAD files, Git is a poor option for anything other than text files.