Intranet setup

[sevenDeuce]

My company has now forced us to use their intranet file storage system for all our CAD drawings. It's basically a place on the web to store all our company files. Meaning all our offices across the country can view/work on these CAD files regardless of their local servers (no more storing files locally). Each office currently stores their files locally and we deploy a CAD setup which involves using 1) a title block file and 2) the CAD file used to draw in which XREFs the title block in (I think this is standard practice). Now that we have to use this intranet file storage system, I don't think we can use XREFs anymore...or images for that matter because there is technically no path to this intranet that can be referenced within CAD. Has anyone ever had to deal with this setup before? I guess we have to do away with XREFing the title block and using some other way to work around this as well as how to deal with referencing images.

TIA,
Alan

[Paul Munford]

I'm no expert here, so I'm as interested in the answer as you are!

It depends on how you are accessing the FTP site i.e. do you have a VPN connection or do you have to use third party software...

If you have a VPN connection You could see if your IT guys could map a drive on your local machine to match the FTP server. You would create the same folder structure on both machines. You would then copy the files locally to work on them and copy them back to the FTP server on completion. The same drive letter and folder mapping would mean that Autocad looks for files with the same path.

If you don't need to collaborate you could use E-Transmit to make sure that all your references are collected together before you upload them.

Show your IT Guys Autodesk Vault. It's free if you are on subscription and might make the process less painful.

[sevenDeuce]

Hi Paul,
Thank you very much for response. I will look into Autodesk Vault. Things were working great before they dropped this on us yesterday so this is a completely new realm I'm heading into (for me that is and everyone else at this firm for that matter). The only time we would be using a VPN is if we were working remotely, otherwise we would just log in at work and have access to the intranet that way (Sharepoint). But I like the idea of mapping a drive to the FTP server (I did not know that was possible). I can sense a huge headache in the near (and foreseeable future). But I gotta keep an open mind.

[cadtag]

Ok, Sharepoint is its own beast. Vault is a no-go with Sharepoint AFAIK. they are doing pretty much similar things, but different ways of doing it that will not interact nicely.

I take it your firm is not very CAD dependent? If it was an AE firm where CAD is bread and butter work, the IT guys who jumped onto a sharepoint repository without having a solution ready to roll and fully tested for Xref's etc, need to hit the bricks. It's too late to hit the books.

[Ed Jobe]

Hi Paul,
Thank you very much for response. I will look into Autodesk Vault. Things were working great before they dropped this on us yesterday so this is a completely new realm I'm heading into (for me that is and everyone else at this firm for that matter). The only time we would be using a VPN is if we were working remotely, otherwise we would just log in at work and have access to the intranet that way (Sharepoint). But I like the idea of mapping a drive to the FTP server (I did not know that was possible). I can sense a huge headache in the near (and foreseeable future). But I gotta keep an open mind.
You definitely need a document management system. We use Adept. But regardless, the dwgs are kept on a server and copies are sent to clients via ftp. A database keeps track of who has what and what dwgs are xref'ed into each other.

[sevenDeuce]

Ok, Sharepoint is its own beast. Vault is a no-go with Sharepoint AFAIK. they are doing pretty much similar things, but different ways of doing it that will not interact nicely.

I take it your firm is not very CAD dependent? If it was an AE firm where CAD is bread and butter work, the IT guys who jumped onto a sharepoint repository without having a solution ready to roll and fully tested for Xref's etc, need to hit the bricks. It's too late to hit the books.

Well...a brief history on this firm. Very successful nation-wide environmental/Telecom firm bought out this small 15 person A&E firm (which I was apart of) to create a new Telecom A&E division. We all came over with at least a few yeasrs experience with A&E in the Telecom business hoping to just jump right in and continue with what we were doing...only this new company would reap some of the benefits of our expertise...no problem, right.
Well, this firm that we joined uses Sharepoint for all their file sharing (mostly Word documents and such) between all the offices across the country. They now think that we can adapt our CAD system to support this way of doing business. They won't take no for an answer, but they just don't understand how CAD should work because they didn't have an A&E division here before. I'm not sure how this is going to pan out, but I certainly don't want to lose my 15 years experience with CAD/Management in order to use this Sharepoint system if that means forgetting everything I currently have setup for our standards.


You definitely need a document management system. We use Adept. But regardless, the dwgs are kept on a server and copies are sent to clients via ftp. A database keeps track of who has what and what dwgs are xref'ed into each other.

The whole reason why this firm wants us to use Sharepoint is so all the remote offices can work on & view all the CAD files without having to access all the different servers located at each individual office. There has got to be a better way for multiple offices to share CAD files. I guess, for the remote offices, it's way too slow for them to access our server here to grab and use the CAD files.

[Ed Jobe]

Well, this firm that we joined uses Sharepoint for all their file sharing (mostly Word documents and such) between all the offices across the country. They now think that we can adapt our CAD system to support this way of doing business.
"Lack of planning on your part, does not constitute an emergency on my part" Here IT didn't consult Engineering before they bought a corporate dms. Now we have 2 dms's.


The whole reason why this firm wants us to use Sharepoint is so all the remote offices can work on & view all the CAD files without having to access all the different servers located at each individual office. There has got to be a better way for multiple offices to share CAD files. I guess, for the remote offices, it's way too slow for them to access our server here to grab and use the CAD files.That's why I said you need a dms. But it has to work with AutoCAD. Those other dms's are only concerned with tracking a single document. They don't understand that cad dwg's can have interdependencies. Vault and Adept are integrated with CAD. You can use the others to store your CAD files, but you'll be doing a lot of manual work, fixing xref's etc. You could use Adept in such a way that the cad users shared cad dwgs using Adept, and then publish final dwgs to Sharepoint. It could be done automatically.

[sevenDeuce]

I take it your firm is not very CAD dependent? If it was an AE firm where CAD is bread and butter work, the IT guys who jumped onto a sharepoint repository without having a solution ready to roll and fully tested for Xref's etc, need to hit the bricks. It's too late to hit the books.

AHHHH!!! Ding, Ding, Ding!!! My thoughts exactly. The thing is we are very CAD dependent...it's just that this new firm is new to the A&E side of business so they can't grasp this concept (and won't listen to what we are telling them). And I can't get through to them that this won't work smoothly. Their thought is "the rest of the company is using this method, so we have to". But the thing is, the rest of the company doesn't use CAD, they use Word documents.

[sevenDeuce]

"Lack of planning on your part, does not constitute an emergency on my part" Here IT didn't consult Engineering before they bought a corporate dms. Now we have 2 dms's.

That's why I said you need a dms. But it has to work with AutoCAD. Those other dms's are only concerned with tracking a single document. They don't understand that cad dwg's can have interdependencies. Vault and Adept are integrated with CAD. You can use the others to store your CAD files, but you'll be doing a lot of manual work, fixing xref's etc. You could use Adept in such a way that the cad users shared cad dwgs using Adept, and then publish final dwgs to Sharepoint. It could be done automatically.

Thank you for your time, Ed. I will have to look into Adept (I'm not familiar with this program right now).

Alan

[Ed Jobe]

You can go to Autodesk.com and find partners that have document management solutions.

[Paul Munford]

I knew that there would be experts out there to help you out!

I can't help but think of the time I had to explain to the board of directors why we couldn't use Autocad and Inventor Via the £70K Citrix system they had just bought...

I still haven't persuaded them that we didn't need Citrix, we just needed a project document management system. (and I don't count QDMS as document management)

All in good time I suppose. File sharing via FTP, multiple servers and the web (the cloud) is just going to get more prevalent. Keep us posted as to how you get on.

[Ed Jobe]

Their thought is "the rest of the company is using this method, so we have to". But the thing is, the rest of the company doesn't use CAD, they use Word documents.They are thinking in terms of $ and maintenance costs of a new system. You will have to show the added costs of doing work their way vs. a properly designed system. Figure out how much time it takes you to fix one dwg and multiply that cost over a month/year.
Figure in project delays, etc. Then calculate ROI after implementing a dms.

[cadtag]

Typical Document Management systems are incapable of dealing with the nested interdependencies and complexities of CAD files. Word and Excel are easy to manage in a DMS - the worst that can happen is linked OLE objects.

With attached and overlaid reference files, images, file dependencies - CAD is a very complex beast. It's hard to really do an engineering Document Management System (EDMS) and very hard to do it well. However ---- there are options.

If the parent company is in bed with Sharepoint, then you really need to look into a Sharepoint based EDMS. Since the head office knows sharepoint, and uses it, they'd be more likely to consider something that builds upon what they already have in house. One such would be Bentley's Projectwise Startpoint. I have not used Projectwise since they began using Sharepoint, but did use it prior to that. Complex, but it did work, and while far from perfectly dealing with AutoCAD, did a reasonable job.

There may be other intersections of CAD capable EDMS packages and Sharepoint, but that's the direction you need to go if you want to keep production up, and cooperate with the new bosses.

[sevenDeuce]

Sorry for not getting back here sooner (had to take care of some Project Management duties and had to put CAD Management on hold). Thanks for all the info. on what my options are. I need to spend some time doing some research. Has anyone heard of/used CAD2WIN before? It looks like a program built for CAD and Sharepoint to work together?