BIM 360 to ACC: The Migration Nobody Planned For

In 2023, Autodesk announced the mandatory migration from BIM 360🔵BIM 360Legacy Autodesk construction platform (predecessor to ACC).View in glossary to Autodesk Construction Cloud🏗️ACCAutodesk's construction management platform.View in glossary. No bulk migration tooling. No permission transfer utility. No project📁ProjectContainer for folders and files within a hub.View in glossary-level export. Thousands of companies — some with hundreds of active projects — were told to migrate. Manually.

This is the story of what that actually means for the people on the ground.

The Scale of the Problem

BIM🏛️BIMIntelligent 3D model-based design for buildings.View in glossary 360 was the construction industry’s default cloud platform for years. Document management, issue tracking, RFIs, submittals, model coordination — it all lived in BIM 360. Entire enterprises built their workflows around it.

Then Autodesk replaced it with ACC: a different architecture, different APIs, a different permission model. And they made migration mandatory. BIM 360 features were deprecated on a rolling basis. There was no “stay where you are” option🚩FlagOptional parameter modifying command behavior.View in glossary.

For a small firm with five projects, this was an inconvenience. For an enterprise customer with hundreds or thousands of projects, each containing users, permissions, folder structures, documents, issues, and RFIs — this was a crisis.

No official bulk migration path was provided.

What Autodesk Provided

Autodesk shipped a web UI that migrates one project at a time. Their documentation recommended contacting support for large migrations. That was it.

Under the hood, the Admin API🔌APIInterface for software components to communicate.View in glossary technically supports both platforms — but with different endpoints, different authentication flows, and different data models. The HQ v1 API (BIM 360) and the Construction Admin v1 API (ACC) use different field names for the same concepts. Even the account ID format changed: BIM 360 used a plain UUID, ACC wraps it in a b. prefix with base64 encoding.

For any team that had built internal tooling, scripts, or integrations against BIM 360 — every single one broke on migration day.

What Actually Breaks in Migration

This is where the reality sets in. Migration is not just “move files from A to B.” It is a cascade of incompatibilities across every layer of the platform.

The RCW Problem

Revit Cloud Worksharing is the hardest piece of the migration puzzle. Revit models hosted in BIM 360 use cloud worksharing — live, multi-user collaboration on a single model file. These are not static documents. They are active working files with multiple architects and engineers editing simultaneously.

Migrating an RCW model means:

• All active users must stop working
• The model must be fully synchronized
• Cloud worksharing must be re-established on the ACC side
• All user permissions must be re-mapped
• Worksharing bookmarks and links must be updated

An Autodesk engineer identified up to 5 enterprise clients who needed bulk RCW migration. No tooling exists for it. Each client had to work with Autodesk support on a case-by-case basis.

For everyone else, it was manual. Model by model. Project by project.

How RAPS Handles Both Platforms

RAPS🌼RAPSRust CLI for Autodesk Platform Services.View in glossary was built for exactly this kind of problem. The raps-acc crate contains both the BIM 360 HQ v1 and ACC Construction Admin v1 endpoint implementations. The CLI💻CLIText-based interface for running commands.View in glossary auto-detects which platform a project lives on and uses the correct API.

# RAPS auto-detects BIM 360 vs ACC and uses the right API
raps project list --hub-id "b.account-id"

# Works for both BIM 360 HQ v1 and ACC Construction Admin v1
raps project create --name "New Project" --hub-id "b.account-id"

# Bulk user operations across mixed BIM 360 + ACC projects
raps admin user add "$ACCOUNT" "user@company.com" --role project_admin

# Export permissions from BIM 360, import to ACC
raps admin folder set-permissions "$ACCOUNT" --project "$OLD" --export perms.csv
raps admin folder set-permissions "$ACCOUNT" --project "$NEW" --import perms.csv

The key design decision: same command▶️CommandInstruction executed by a CLI tool.View in glossary interface regardless of platform version. A script that works against BIM 360 today works against ACC tomorrow without modification.

Backward Compatibility Architecture

Under the hood, this is how RAPS handles the platform split:

This means existing automation scripts survive the migration. No rewrites. No branching logic. No “if BIM 360 do X, else do Y” in your CI/CD🔁CI/CDAutomated build, test, and deployment pipelines.View in glossary pipeline⛓️PipelineAutomated sequence of build/test/deploy steps.View in glossary.

For teams running mixed environments — some projects already on ACC, some still on BIM 360 — RAPS handles both in the same pipeline run. The permission export/import workflow📈WorkflowAutomated process triggered by events.View in glossary works across platforms: export from a BIM 360 project, import into an ACC project, and RAPS handles the field mapping.

The Broader Lesson

Forced migrations without tooling are vendor-centric decisions. The vendor saves development cost by not building bulk migration utilities. The customer pays for that savings in manual labor — hundreds of hours of clicking, re-configuring, and re-testing.

This is a pattern that repeats across every major platform transition:

This is exactly the kind of gap an API User Advocate fills. The vendor will not build the migration path their enterprise customers need — because for the vendor, the migration is a feature they can ship once and move on. For the customer, it is months of operational disruption.

RAPS exists because Autodesk did not build that path.

What Comes Next

The BIM 360 to ACC migration is just the first domino. Once you have migrated your projects, you still need to manage permissions at scale, audit access across hundreds of folders, and keep user roles synchronized as your team changes.

Next in the Enterprise Scale series: Permission Management at Scale — the deep-dive on clone, export, and audit features that make migration manageable.

Related:

• The Bulk Operations Crisis — Why AEC teams waste hours on clicks
• Admin Commands Reference
• Account Admin Cookbook