Possible ACad Project 1

[RussOSU]

Hey Guys,

Quick question for everyone, I am trying to find a way to fix a problem we are having at work. Currently we are having a problem with our facility layout drawings. Currently our plants are responsible for updating the plant layouts however we have a problem with high turn over due to people using the position to get to other jobs in the company. Each time a person leaves there is a little/if not lot of knowledge that doesn't get passed down to the new employee. Most recently the person moved the files off the network drive onto their computer rather then copying them, also each plant uses a different naming format. What I am thinking of doing is creating a program in which after identifying the file through radio buttons the file is imported off the persons computer and placed on a locked up dir. When the file is imported to the dir the program automatically names it and placs it in the proper dir based on the selections and it also creates a version #. The program then updates the xrefs in the master drawing to show the new version #s. Is this something that people think would be useful or is it a lot of work for not enough payback?

- Russ

 

[TCARPENTER]

Russ,

What you are talking about is document management - and its every bit worth the pain of development - whether you buy one off the shelf, or you build it yourself. You'll probably want to do a little investigation before tackling this however. You may want to check out cadalyst's cad managers corner, if I remember right, Robert Green did a series of articles on this a while back. You may also want to check some Document management products - AutoEDMS (

http://www.autoedms.com),

smartteam - not sure of where to find them and I'm sure there are others.

HTH
Todd

 

[borgunit]

Todd is correct, a good document manager pays for itself. We tried a free document manager for a while. It works pretty well and uses your existing Explorer type of interface. It may be something you might like or at least give you some ideas.

http://www.oasys-software.com/product/dm/columbus/