AutoCAD Services & Support

By Robert Green

In the last installment, I made the case that CAD managers are becoming increasingly responsible for the logical organization and distribution of CAD information within their organizations. As CAD drawings become an ever-richer repository of design information, it only stands to reason that more people around the enterprise will want access to that data. As CAD manager, you’re the logical point of contact for making CAD information available, and so you should have a well-developed plan to share it safely.

As promised, this month we’ll look at some ways you can gain control over your document distribution process using nothing but the tools you already have available to you.

Basic Document Management

By the term basic document management, I mean that you should:

• Always know where your drawings are.
• Know which drawing is the most recent revision of a design.
• Store your drawings in such a way that unauthorized personnel cannot inadvertently delete or alter them.

In the last installment, I strongly suggested that you establish a directory structure that provides a logical storage scheme for your CAD files. There really is no right or wrong way to create this structure; just take care to organize your files in a way that makes basic sense for your company.

For example, let’s say your company is very project driven with each project having mechanical, electrical, and pneumatic drawings. A good directory structure would then use the project name/number as the primary organizational principle and then organize CAD files by discipline, which could be mechanical, electrical, or pneumatic. Such a structure might look like this:

X:\DRAWINGS\PROJECT\DISCIPLINE

Note that I created a network X drive and placed all CAD drawings under a DRAWINGS subdirectory simply to separate CAD drawings from all other directories. You could then further break down the subdirectories for CAD drawings into design documentation, referenced images, external references, and so on. The point is that the directory structure you create should reflect the way you actually think about your project work.

Enforcement

Once your directory structure is in place, make sure that everyone respects and utilizes the standard for their document storage. Enforcing the standard requires some initial effort, but once you explain how critical it is that everything be organized effectively, compliance should soar.

To achieve maximum compliance with minimal hassle:

• Publish a draft version of your proposed directory standards for everyone to review.
• Collect all comments to your draft version and take them seriously. Make those changes that are clearly warranted, that improve your scheme.
• Schedule a feedback meeting where you introduce the newly created filing standards to all CAD personnel and allow them to register any last-minute concerns.
• Publish your final version of the directory standards after having received management’s blessing. Do not proceed without management’s blessing!
• Make it clear to all parties that they are expected to follow directory standards and that you have management’s support in enforcing them.

Throughout this process, emphasize to everyone that you’re creating standards to achieve consistency, reduce the number of lost drawings, and to save the company money. By demonstrating that you’re not trying to push your own filing standard capriciously, but rather to serve the financial needs of the company and the design needs of clients, you should overcome most of the political objections to adopting a directory standard.

Network Security

Security is essential, whatever your directory standard. Typically, two types of mistakes are made in securing and setting access permissions for the directory structure:

• Directory permissions are so wide open that anybody can delete or rename files, directories, or entire branches of directories.
• Directory permissions are so strict that people look for “end runs” around the system, up to and including copying files to their hard drives!

If I had to live with one of these mistakes, I’d settle for the first one. At least in this scenario all documents are on the network and are being backed up. This way I know where drawings should be and can restore them if they are accidentally deleted. In the second scenario, anarchy develops quickly and it becomes apparent that nobody really knows where the latest versions of documents are. (They’re probably on a C drive somewhere not being backed up!)

As you develop your directory-structure standard, begin to put personnel into two groups: those who really only need view/print access to documents and those who must have editing access to documents. Then work with your network administration group to establish these two user groups. Don’t be too strict about network permissions and you’ll end up with a perfect network security matrix that avoids the two most common security mistakes entirely. A little advanced thought on this issue can prevent most filing problems!

Sharing Local Access to Documents

Once you’ve compiled your CAD files into a standardized directory schema and have the network permissions in place to prevent accidental deletion, you can open up your CAD repository to others around the enterprise. You’ll need a viewing/printing tool for people to access the files. The Autodesk® Volo® View viewing tool provides an easy and inexpensive way (US$49 per seat) to give everyone view-level access to the Autodesk file formats used in AutoCAD®, the Autodesk Desktop packages, and Autodesk Inventor® software.

You can purchase Volo View and install it on any machine whose user has view/print access to documents. When you think about the inherent security that a viewing tool gives (full viewing and printing but no way to edit) the $49 price tag for Volo View gives great value and peace of mind for a very modest price.

Transmitting Documents

For AutoCAD 2000i, 2002, and 2004, you can use the eTransmit function (which involves answering some simple questions) to create a self-contained transmittal package for drawings you need to share electronically over the Internet or an intranet. (See Figure 1.) And eTransmit automatically includes any external reference, font, linetypes, or other subordinate files tied to the drawing set, so you don’t have to remember to do so.

With eTransmit, you can even embed your own transmittal text with the final self-extracting file (either ZIP or EXE format). You can then archive everything, using your company’s internal backup methodologies, to provide proof of transmittal as well as an archived copy of what was actually transmitted. I can’t stress how important it is to be able to prove who received what and when. Given today’s litigious business environment, you must have this proof, and eTransmit is an easy way to establish it.

Publish to Web

A more aggressive way of sharing project information is to deploy projects to CD. Or use the Publish to Web Wizard available in AutoCAD 2000i, 2002, and 2004, to save project files in the industry-standard Autodesk Design Web Format™ (extension DWF™) and publish them to your company’s intranet, the Internet, or even to local area networks. DWF converts AutoCAD drawing data into a compact vector format for use on the Web and offers a number of security features that protect your design data from unauthorized use.

Note: The process for using the Publish to Web Wizard in AutoCAD 2004 is virtually identical to that for AutoCAD 2002.

By publishing your design information in HTML format via DWF, you don’t expose your valuable DWG files for editing, thus increasing your security immeasurably.

I highly recommend that CAD managers, whether they have prior web-authoring experience or not, at least try to create a sample web page using the Publish to Web Wizard. I think you’ll find it simple to use and of great value in your document management quest.

Wrapping Up

Now that you understand how much control over your CAD files you can gain with commonly available tools your imagination becomes the only limitation to how much you can achieve. Why not resolve to make this the year when you tackle your document management problems head on?