I have very little AutoCAD experience and need some advice in regards to implementing AutoCAD Standard practices for our firm. I will provide the situation and goals and hopefully someone is able to layout the best tools in AutoCAD to use to meet our goals.
Situation:
1. We have increased engineers using AutoCAD from 1 to 3 and now need to implement standardization
2. We use AutoCAD solely for the purpose of creating P&IDs (we may change to AutoCAD P&ID but currently do not have the budget)
3. The drawings from project to project are very similar, so we open an old project drawing and "save-as" and revise the new drawing to new owner specifications.
Goals:
1. Template to create new drawings but with standardized settings and tools
2. Creating a library of mechanical symbols
3. Storing the libraries
4. Provide access to these libraries to all engineers
5. Creating some kind of tool pallete for easy access of symbols and blocks
6. Have "administrative only" rights on revision of the template
7. Methods of efficiently documenting all this info, keep info updated, and inform on revisions to practices
AutoCAD P&ID is nice for large projects, where the database can be leveraged to modify and extra information. For smaller projects with limited support, there are a number of lower cost P&ID programs out there that run on AutoCAD with more limited capabilities.
Edit: I should probably mention that those low cost P&ID programs either run on full AutoCAD or include an OEM version. Considering the other drawing files which freqeuently go along with P&IDs and the ability to use network licenses, moving to the full version of AutoCAD should be seriously considered.