Intranet setup

[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?