Worksharing Across Multiple Offices: Solving the Collaboration Problem 

Why the old way no longer works 

As disciplines become more specialised, the right person for a project is increasingly unlikely to be sitting in the office that needs them. Businesses are left with a narrow set of options: an expensive relocation, a fly-in-fly-out arrangement, or picking a team based on who’s geographically convenient rather than who’s actually best for the job. In a technical market, the second option quietly costs you your competitive edge. 

At the same time, expectations around flexible work haven’t gone away. People want to work from home, work flexible hours, and increasingly expect their employer to support that. If you can’t offer it, perhaps your competitor will. 

Both pressure points are leading businesses in the same direction: worksharing and flexible working need to be a genuine priority, not an afterthought, for AEC businesses right now.

Worksharing’s Achilles heel: Data 

Here’s the catch. Leveraging remote talent means moving data between offices constantly, and AEC datasets are not small. A single DWG can run upwards of a few hundred MB. A 12d Model project, several GB+. LiDAR captures,  potentially tens of GB. Whereas a full point cloud can run into terabytes! 

That scale isn’t slowing down — it’s accelerating. As reality-capture technology becomes standard on more projects, the global data centre construction market was valued at US$227.6 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach more than US$434.7 billion by 2035, a reflection of just how much digital infrastructure is now being built to store and move exactly this kind of data. [Source: Global Market Insights, via lidarmag.com]  

For a project team, the practical version of that trend is simple: your point clouds, scans and models are only going to get bigger, and your systems need to keep up. Point cloud formats like LAS are specifically built to handle massive datasets from large geographical areas, such as airborne and drone-based LiDAR — and those files can become exceptionally large, demanding enough that processing them often requires a dedicated GPU. [Source: vibimglobal.com] 

So what’s the point of worksharing if it takes an hour to move a project from Melbourne to Perth?

Watch: Managing Multiple Offices – Industry Solutions Webinar Series

The workarounds businesses default to (and why they backfire) 

Faced with that friction, many businesses fall back on band-aid fixes: 

• Copying projects onto local or portable drives to dodge network drive lag 

• Zipping projects and uploading them to consumer-grade sharing tools like Dropbox 

• Setting up a VPN and pushing data across it 

Every one of these workarounds break version control and data integrity. You end up with overwrites, duplicate versions, and expensive project merges to untangle the mess — plus the constant risk of someone working on, or issuing, the wrong file. 

A smarter way to workshare 

What multi-office teams actually need is a central repository: one place where everyone works from the latest version, with no ambiguity about which file is current. 

With 12d Synergy, your master server is that central repository. Project data is no longer siloed in one office or inaccessible to remote staff and contractors. A check-in, check-out system eliminates duplication, while enforced folder structures, design standards and naming conventions keep every office working the same way. Tasks, workflows and reports make it easy to see project progress regardless of who’s doing the work or where they’re sitting. 

Intelligent Data Transfer does the heavy lifting 

12d Synergy’s Intelligent Data Transfer solves the bandwidth problem directly — it transfers only the files (and the changes within them) that have actually changed, not the entire project every time. 

The results speak for themselves: up to 91% reduction in data transfer traffic, and data received up to 30x faster. One client saved over $43,200 on a single 12-week carpark project, with their six-person team saving more than four hours per user, per week.  

Take it further with a File Replication Server 

If you have several people in the same office all pulling the same large dataset, even Intelligent Data Transfer means everyone gets that first transfer individually. A File Replication Server (FRS) solves that by caching and pre-populating files locally, so your team isn’t all waiting on the same download at the same time. 

We go deep on exactly how this works, and when it’s worth setting up, in File Replication Servers: The Technical Engine Behind Worksharing. 

The flexible working payoff 

Get the data problem right, and worksharing delivers on its real promise: your team can work from a joint venture office, a remote site, or home, without compromising project delivery. That might mean logging off in time for dinner, then finishing a task later that evening instead of staying back at the office. It’s a small shift on paper, but it adds up to a substantially improved work life balance for the people doing the work.