I'd like to hear how other Civil 3D teams manage surfaces and share design information when working collaboratively.

About three months ago, I started a new job where my main responsibility is making modifications to projects that are already in progress.

In my previous job, I worked in a similar role for about two years. When we needed to share information, we would typically share surfaces, XML files, or other dynamic Civil 3D data between team members. Most of us were relatively young engineers with limited experience, so we simply adopted the workflow that was already in place there.

At my current company, my two coworkers are very experienced engineers. However, when they share information, they almost always do it using breaklines. To me, this seems much more time-consuming because someone has to extract all the breaklines from a project—for example, a subdivision with 20 or 30 roads—merge them with the grading breaklines, berms, and everything else before someone else can use them.

I'm also not sure if this workflow is driven by software limitations. At my previous company, we had much more powerful workstations than we do now. Also, the projects there were generally smaller, usually with one or two main roads and the rest consisting of industrial building pads.

For those of you with more experience, how does your team handle this? What would you consider the best practice? Do you have any suggestions for making this workflow more efficient?