Notes on the philosophy of CUI

[Marc_D]

Okay. Woah. So I'm not a menu tweaker by any stretch. I make a couple of toolbar buttons here and there. I'm a keystroke guy, so the .pgp file has been my custom content up until now...

I know this is going to be WAY out of place, but I'm afraid that I can't search through 10 pages of information that is beyond me just to figure out a few simple ideas and definitions.

So...could someone take a step back and give me a bit of an overview of the structure of ribbons, pallets, partial cuix, enterprise cuix, and anything else anyone thinks might be pertinent.

To give you all context: this past summer I've become the lead engineer in a department of 4 people. Up until now our company has had some unwritten 'standards' in the drafting arena. Those seem to have gone out the window in recent years due to the volatile economy and resulting personnel turnover. I'm writing policy and procedure to be implemented through the 1st quarter of next year. I would like to give the guys a base ACAD (2010) structure of standard blocks loaded onto Tool Pallets and a few custom toolbars with some LISP routines loaded at startup. I know that none of this requires heavy custom interfacing, but to go along with the minty-fresh (now correct and organized) blocks and such on the server I would like to give the guys a clean interface including Tool Pallets to insert said blocks, and instructions on how to customize the interface. In order to be effective, I need to understand how the CUI editing works, and plainly: I don't. Not completely. So here are some specific questions:

1. Partial CUIx: are these essentially 'overlays' on top of the main cuix (acad.cuix, or whatever is set to load at startup)?
2. I keep seeing the word 'enterprise' attached to the idea. What exactly is this? A read-only server-side starting point interface?
3. How do I 'point' ACAD to a directory in which I'd like to save the 'enterprise' cuix (as I understand its definion)?

Since I'm using IE Explorer, and it keeps crashing, I'm going to leave it at that for now before I lose this post.

Thanks in advance, you crazy tweakers!