Worksets? Why? I don't really know accept that I have recently found that they are really not necessary. In fact I have found that working with a complex system of worksets actually hinders your performance because you are constantly asking for permissions.
The first two commercial projects we did were set up with worksets for each level. One of my co-workers who as used revit for sometime, was convinced that worksets would help many people work on the same project. But it just seemed like we were always asking for permission.
The current project we are working on, a large hospital type facility, was only set up with 2 worksets. 1. shared levels and grids. 2. Workset 1. These are the defaults that revit sets up. We found that working with several people was not as cumbersome in this scenario. Since revit uses a borrowing system that is element based. whenever you select an element you are effectively borrowing it. when your done, you release it. This is automatic, and doesn't require any additional work. Unlike when you set up many worksets. Because now you have to make sure that the element you create is on the correct workset. What a pain!
After doing some homework, I came to this conclusion. In older versions of Revit they didn't have element borrowing. So if you wanted to use many people on one project you had to have a lot of worksets. Since element borrowing was introduced in Revit 8 I don't think it's really necessary.
In conclusion, when we work on a project that has all the elements on one workset it goes much smoother, and you aren't constantly asking for permission. As you may have to with many worksets.
So, if anyone knows another reason why you would want a lot of worksets, I would be curious to know why because my experiencing more than just one was much more frustrating.
