Summary: Allow ACAD-Electrical to create a deployment on an existing network layout and not force new installations.

Description: We have a few suggestions about revising the AutoCAD Electrical Deployment Creation menus.
When creating a network deployment for AutoCAD Electrical 2012, we need to have the ability to apply the installation onto an existing network infrastructure and not assume everyone wants to deploy a fresh new installation every year.
Our suggestion would be to add a radio button at the beginning of the deployment creation asking “NEW” or “EXISTING.” Then the appropriate information boxes could be brought forward and filled out. Similar to installing TurboTax, it asks if this program has been installed before and if so you browse to the existing file location and it pulls in the previous year’s information. Electrical needs to be able to allow an Administrator to point to various network locations where existing library data is being housed and not force only fresh installations.
Along the same lines, why must we pick a minimum of 1 parts library (like Siemens) to allow the deployment to be created. We already have the libraries installed and may have revised some of the part data to be per our company purchasing requirements to drive automated reports. I don’t want installing the next version of Electrical to wipe out the existing data with a new table. Appending new parts to the existing table would be OK, but not replace the existing table with what is thought to be a new and better one.
Later it does ask if this will have a shared symbol library and allow us to set a path, but our experience is that each time the deployment is run it will rewrite and wipeout our customized network libraries. Now think of a company with 15-20 Electrical licenses, during the year some users will quit and others hired then requiring ACAD-Electrical to be installed on a cleaned and re-imaged computer. This, as it is now, will wipe out our existing libraries every time throughout the year whenever the deployment is run.
Also during the deployment creation we have to CHECK we want the “Express Tools” installed which is easily missed. In other Autodesk products the deployment creation already has this checked. Having this defaulted YES would help more than hinder.
Allow us to attach a pre-made Electrical profile’s ARG file. There are several settings we like to push onto the profile other than the Options “Files” tab that is available in the deployment menu. In our case this step is completely ignored and once the application has been installed the existing profile is deleted and the group’s typical one is imported. It would save a lot of time if there were a browse ability to bring in the revised profile at this time.

Thank you for your time,
Brian Shick

Product & Feature: AutoCAD

Submitted: Thu, 05 Jan 2012