Help needed for an old fogey.
I just moved from a 5 person firm to 5 office firm. The 5 person firm used data shortcuts and one server to share and manage data, especially on the 12 mile gas main project with sheets of nothing but profile views.
The multi office firm uses the 55 gallon barrel CAD file system, keeping everything in one base file so you can get a cup of coffee between regens.
We had a minor SD being worked on between offices. I was asked to e-mail a copy of the CAD file down to the second office while we worked on the file in our office. We then had to piece things back together.
I asked if anyone had used this drawing file in the cloud thing that our reseller always 'bragged' about at the yearly univeristy as a wonderful feature available with subscription. The CAD 'gurus' said it had been briefly discussed, but the individual users freaked out at someone else having 'control' of THEIR files. The CAD gurus seem to think this might be a good thing, but seemed unsure how to go about setting it up. I did click the cloud icon on Windows explorer and got nothing.
Does anyone know of a 'white paper' or 'idiot's guide' out there? Call reseller to get it set up?
Once the basic cloud is set up, will we be able to use data shortcuts through this cloud thing?
Solved! Go to Solution.
Solved by dgorsman. Go to Solution.
I just googled Autodesk and cloud and came up with this link:
http://www.autodesk.com/products/a360/overview.
I hit the button to watch the sales video. I e-mailed the link to my daughter studying computer animation and told her if she ever animated something like this, I would fly out to SD and slap her. I couldn't stand to watch if for 5 seconds. I cant' think of anything that would scare me away from looking into it more than this.
It is overlapping chatter saying how wonderful the cloud is with no information on what it actually is or does. INCREDIBLY IRRITATING AND INCOMPREHENSIBLE.
I then found the CADalyst video by Lyn Allen which had some useful iformation which assumed you knew how to get this cloud thing set up and what it is. She was talking about the cloud as backup.
What I want to know is if it can function as a real time 'server' and imitation 'Windows explorer' to work as real time storage between offices? Or what is the lag time?
I DO NOT WANT TO HEAR ANYTHING ABOUT FANCY RENDERINGS. I have had to deal with too many clients who object to paying for a half hour with a highlighters or markers for a meeting presentation, let alone days for fancy videos. Go work for Disney.
I don't know the product any more than you do but it seems apparent from the product pages that it is primarily a file sharing portal somewhat like an FTP site. You can put files up for viewing or downloading but I can find nothing about it serving as a cloud based "drive" such that you can work on and reference the files that are stored there. Under the support page there is a search tool. When I searched for XREF or file path I get nothing relevant.
You might need to consider a document management system such as vault or Bentley's Projectwise.
We're in a similar situation. We have about 15 offices, and our projects are becoming large enough that we need to share them among people in various locations. Up until now we've been able to use data shortcuts successfully, with careful drawing management but we have started looking at Vault again as a possible solution.
Supposedly the integration with Civil3d is good enough now that companies can use Vault successfully - we'll just have to wait and see.
Steve
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I'd start with the AutoDesk 360 boards here: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/a360-products/ct-p/200
From what I've seen any kind of live, cloud-based server replacement system is still a couple of generations off (there was mention of some BETA testing in the boards, although that may have been limited to Revit which already supports a distributed server system). The current system is still in the teething stages, with more users testing than fully adopting (there is no substitute for software being out in the wild, after all).
I'd also recommend a slighlty less confrontational approach. While it won't guarantee the results you are looking for, it will put off posters who may otherwise be willing to help. While you may not want to hear about "fancy renderings", as it isn't your desired use, the rendering system is one the key benefits of cloud processing.
I don't know but I think I'd be VERY leary of depending on a cloud server for my live/active files. What happens when the internet connection is down? Everyone stops working until it's fixed?
At my previous company, we had 6 offices: one main office in northern NJ and then 5 branch offices -- the closest distance between any two of them was about 50 miles.
We had a VPN tunnel that connected each office to the main office. And there was a software package (I don't remember the name now) that copied a mirror image of each branch office's server to the main office. It also put a mirror image of the main office server in each branch office -- it did this all on a nightly basis.
This allowed for an off-site backup of the data from each office -- which IMHO is never a bad thing.
If someone in the main office needed to reference data from a branch office's data, they could do so. Likewise if someone in a branch office needed to reference something from the main office's data, they could do so. When doing that, we had to keep in mind that we were referencing "last night's data". If we needed the "latest and greatest" of one (or a few) particular file(s) we could always request a manual sync of that data.
I suppose that if the need had ever come up, we could've created a VPN tunnel directly between two branch offices but it was never needed.
Don Ireland
Engineering Design Technician
"The cloud" (generic) is somewhat different than "The cloud" as implemented in AutoDesk products, and its best to be specific when talking about them. Even more so when dealing with point clouds, which are a whole other topic. General implementation is basic file storage, sharing, and backup ie. DropBox. For AutoDesk products it allows for users to upload and directly share AutoCAD files, as well as some of the AutoCAD workspace/profile settings. There are additional cloud products for other programs like Infraworks, ReCap, Fusion, etc. which provide a number of additional services as well as temporary storage associated with those services. It does NOT allow for multiple users to access the same file simulataneously.
Keep in mind we're "one percenters" here. When the TV or other mass media is referring to the cloud they mean movies, maybe some text documents, but overall very limited in scope and data compared to what we deal with here. Best to just ignore that for now.
I think this is what "Buzz saw is for
http://www.autodesk.com/products/buzzsaw/overview
We had this same issue...we started out as one company, then grew into three office locations. We would only add whichever project folder from the other office to our drive and have it sync over the VPN...sure you had to let the IT know specific projects...but it really cut down on bandwidth to only do the ones you needed to work on. Ours were set up to sync anytime a change was made...so things stayed up to date. It's a good system between offices...just have to stay organized while doing it, keep the communication lines open.
We have 2 offices and all of our data is shared between them via NAS appliances (replicators). Essentially we each have our own servers but they are synchronized via the NAS appliances so we are working on the same files, file paths, drives, etc. Since the servers are local there are no delays when accessing files. It only takes about 30 seconds for the servers to synchronize when files change. I think this is a good solution for operations that only require a couple of offices within a domain to be intergrated. It is not a good solution for cases where different companies and domains need to share data or when the number of offices makes the cost of the appliances prohibitive.
Have you looked at a product called Panzura?
Our multi-office firm is looking into it and it looks promising.