How do you set-up your remote offices for AutoCAD (and/or Revit)

[Mitch Mermel]

Our inter-office connections are MPLS data circuits with T1 data connectivity (some bonded). We have Riverbed devices between the offices. Our cad workstations are Windows7, either 8 or 16 gig of ram, running at Adsk recommended specs. I've read various post that suggest things to check when you have network issues, and I've worked my way through many of them.

I'd like to hear from those of you with a successfully implemented wide area network for remote offices (success defined as no problems with the speed at which cad software operates, generates plots, no lag time with commands from tool paletttes, etc.). I'm not doing this as a poll because I'd like a bit of information about why you did what you did.

Do you have remote/redundant/mirrored servers at each site?
Do you use custom profiles at each site?
Do you store you libraries and lisp routines on remote servers or on the workstations?
Do you use Autodesk Vault so people can work on the file locally?
If you use remote servers, were you able to set up a single set of tool palettes that you could deploy to any office, or did you have to set up palettes for each office? If you were able to use a single set of tool palettes, how did you do it (yeah sort of a separate topic)?

Our inter-office connections are MPLS data circuits with T1 data connectivity (some bonded). We have Riverbed devices between the offices.

Thanks

[rkmcswain]

See interspersed answers below.



Do you have remote/redundant/mirrored servers at each site? Yes
Do you use custom profiles at each site? Not sure what you mean exactly, but the machines in each local office point to support files in that office.
Do you store you libraries and lisp routines on remote servers or on the workstations? On the local office's server
Do you use Autodesk Vault so people can work on the file locally? No.
If you use remote servers, were you able to set up a single set of tool palettes that you could deploy to any office, or did you have to set up palettes for each office? Yes. If you were able to use a single set of tool palettes, how did you do it (yeah sort of a separate topic)? Short answer, they are part of our DFS file mirroring.

Thanks