topic Re: Managing CAD Drawings in Alfresco Archive

Managing CAD Drawings

iantidy — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:12:06 GMT

We use Bentley MicroStation for our CAD drawings and we want to store and manage the drawings in the Alfresco CIFS share. We have applied automatic versioning to Alfresco, and this is where the problem starts. MicroStation writes changes to it DGN (the drawing file) with every change in the docume

Re: Managing CAD Drawings

knixon — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 10:33:36 GMT

You might need to look at bentley projectwise startpoint as the key is to managing the links to xref drawings.

http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Community/eSeminars/ProjectWise/%28W%29+ProjectWise+StartPoint.htm

Unfortunately this would probably require you to invest in sharepoint….. unless you can use the alfresco sharepoint protocol as an alternative.

I'd love the Alfresco guys to give their views?

We're also looking at………..

http://www.organice.com/Pages/default.aspx

And if we can locate whatever happened to http://www.cadnection.com

And maybe http://www.cadtowin.com/

Karl

Re: Managing CAD Drawings

knixon — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 23:22:33 GMT

Interesting article on the topic, again only referencing sharepoint.

http://www.cadalyst.com/collaboration/file-sharing-publishing/take-cad-next-level-13456?page_id=2

Would be nice to have an Alfresco solution…..

Karl

Re: Managing CAD Drawings

mrogers — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 16:28:04 GMT

I think there's an AutoCad metadata extractor built into Alfresco now.

What do you need to do?

Re: Managing CAD Drawings

knixon — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 22:37:47 GMT

Hi mrogers.

Thanks for your reply.

The extraction of Autodesk metadata is one aspect of what we would be looking to achieve, some of the other components we are looking for in order to extend the benefits of Alfresco to CAD project teams are;

- ability to checkin/checkout files from/to Alfresco directly from within application
- ability to render a pdf version of the file with matadata extraction to Alfresco to allow comments / workflow editing
- ability to launch Autocad (or similar) applications from Alfresco directly from the saved file with check/out functionlity
- madatory requirement to maintain or manage the integrity of Xref links within CAD drawing files stored in Alfresco
- and other requirements not yet defined.

Would welcome your thoughts.

Karl

Re: Managing CAD Drawings

knixon — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 01:04:35 GMT

A description of a competitors offering……..

http://www.aecbytes.com/review/2010/CadacOrganiceExplorer2010.html

Karl