Thoughts on ABS

[finney13]

I currently have ABS 2006 and am about to upgrade to 2007.

The company I work for is a smaller (10 employees) MEP firm. Everyone is on base AutoCAD except for me. I was able to convince the owners to try one version of ABS so we could see if it would be a benefit.

I have been able to play with it a decent amount, but cannot convince the owners to allow me to attend an ABS training course, Autodesk University, or the like. I am trying to teach myself at this point and am getting the hang of things.

Basically, I am figuring that as with all AutoCAD, the hardest part is getting the company standards set. Once this is done, I believe things should move along much faster.

I finally have a computer at the house that has the ability to run ABS, and am thinking of installing it at home under the trial version and working on tutorials and learning more there(seeing as there is never really time to spend on it at the office).

Have most people on here running ABS taken a course to learn it, or did you have to teach yourself? Also how hard has it been to get your company to implement ABS for the rest of the users?

Thanks

[stelthorst]

It took me two years to convince management to buy two versions of ABS for my department. Now after a year of using it I think I have management convinced to buy two more seats.

As for taking classes, I've attended a couple of dog and pony shows but no actual classes. I have considered attending an actual class but don't think it would be useful since we use ABS a little different than most users. (I work for a large electrical contractor and we use ABS to draw out our conduit and cable tray routing and coordinate this routing with the other MEP trades.) From my standpoint, the ability to quickly and easily create sections and cuts greatly increases my productivity over traditional 2D drafting.

I agree with your assessment that the creation of standards and getting the drawing setup the way that you want is the greatest time factor of ABS.

Hope this helps.

[finney13]

The ability to cut sections like that really is helpful.

Good luck on getting more seats.

[david_peterson]

Before you impliment, be sure to make sure that you can still save back to 2006 format. I've heard several complaints when it comes to exporting back to 2004 format. One huge feature (or at least I think so) in 2007 is the ability to do out right walk-thrus. Stand on the floor, look up, and press the forward key. I think it's a great tool to run visual checks.