The room book for everyday projects

As mentioned before, I love to work with room books. They are a great way to manage information and bring the client and the whole team on the same page. There are a few prerequisites:

1. It must be accessible for everybody, not just for the architect. That's why all solutions inside a BIM modeling tool do not work. Again, they do not work because the architect does not have the time to add information from the engineers and specialists.
2. A shared database is the second solution that comes to mind. The simplest form of it is Excel on a shared drive e.g. in Teams. However, humans are not adept at working with, understanding, and finding mistakes in lists. Therefore, we need some graphical feedback, some visualization of the roombook values in the geometry, to make the process more user-friendly and intuitive.
3. In the past, I did this by setting up an Excel to SimpleBIM workflow. The problem with this was that I became the bottleneck in the process. It was not easy to change something in the list and look. People had to wait for me to do the merge. Not acceptable (moreover, that's boring work).

Therefore, for some time already, I have wanted to do a script and deploy it on a server. And now I just got the right project to do so. We are starting it up. Nobody in the project likes to discuss BIM, but coordination needs to be done in 3D due to its complexity. So it's a NON-BIM Project, and I have the job to help them set up proper workflows and ensure the deliverables' quality. One of the deliverables is a room class book and, later, a roombook.

So, I set out to create a workflow that:

• Has the Excel Roombook on Trimble Connect (TC) accessible and editable for everybody.

• A small web app to merge the IFC from the architect containing modeled and named spaces with the Excel Roombook into a new IFC file. Have a look for yourself here: Link

• BIMcollab Zoom for visualization. We could use TC as well, but nothing beats BIMcollab's Smartviews in terms of simplicity and low entry barrier! Because I'm lazy, I don't want to update the Smartviews with every new attribute/column in the Excel Roombook. Therefore, the script creates the Smartviews in parallel to the enrichment.

That's the most pragmatic workflow I could come up with so far. The next step would be a real room book application with many other challenges, especially the need to sell, implement and set it up in the project. This might work for bigger projects but not for the everyday ones most people work on.

And of course it is completly compatible with the usual abstractBIM workflow, to create all the walls, slabs, covering (and doors and windows if they are included in the original file for cost and thermal simulations.

What do you think about this workflow? How could we simplify it even more?