Yes, this seems to work really well.
What I do, is to separate the acad menu from our customized menu. You
can use the menuload command to join them latter. ( I have a routine to
do this automatically). I also give users their own acad menu and put it
on their personal network drive. This enables users to customize this
when they want without effecting anyone else (eg adding their own
toolbar menus etc).
Cheers,
Glenn
-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Stachoni [mailto:stachoni@bellatlantic.net]
Sent: 07 May 2001 21:49
Posted To: cadmanager
Conversation: network menus
Subject: Re: network menus
Ray,
On Mon, 7 May 2001 10:24:02 -0700, "ray burns" wrote:
>is anyone in CAD land setting up there users workstations to pull the
>acad.mnu file off the network? i read this a while ago and it seemed
like a
>good idea.
Yep, we do this; in fact we have many menus on the network. It's a great
idea,
especially when you want to customize parts of one menu but keep things
standardized between users.
>what i would like to do is piont autocad at my server for the acad.mnu
file
>so i only have to update and deal with on menu file. i am also
wondering
>what kind of problems arise when the users start customizing their
toolbars.
First of all, you really only need a few files on the server - acad.mns,
acad.mnr, acad.mnc and acad.mnl. The .mnu file isn't really used in
customization anymore (I assume you are on something > R14)
There are all sorts of pitfalls when you have users customizing their
toolbars.
The solution is to use partial menus for users' toolbars. But making
sure each
user is set up properly can be confusing, which is why you need a
systematic
approach to get the benefits of one base menu file yet still have
limited,
directed flexibility for your users.
The basic approach we use is to identify several "types" of menus one
would use,
and implement them as follows:
acad.mns:
Base AutoCAD menu, shared, read only
comany.mns:
Company specific partial menu; read only. Holds standard company pull
downs and
toolbars which interact with applications tailored to inhouse standards
and
practices.
acetmain.mns:
Express tools menu (pull-down and some toolbars). Read only.
user.mns:
User menu with some basic toolbars as a starting point. Read-write.
The way I incorporate these menus is to have one share for the read-only
stuff,
X:\Menus, and assign read-only permissions to that folder for CAD users.
Assign
full control to CAD Admins (assuming you have an NT-based secure network
with
security groups). Alternatively, the low-rent version is just to make
the files
read-only, but that's easily overcome by anyone. I put all the standard
read-only menus in there (acad.mn*, company.mn*, acetmain.mn*).
For users' menus, you can create a share for User AutoCAD files, e.g.
X:\Users\. I strongly suggest that you use the Windows login
name as
the . You can then programmatically use environment variables
and
AutoLISP, e.g. %USERNAME% and (getvar "loginname") to point to that
folder if
needed by customization.
Then, put a basic user.mns file in the \Username folder. Allow CAD users
read-write permissions to the \Users folder.
In AutoCAD, edit the support path to put X:\Menus at the top of the
list,
followed by X:\Users\. Make sure the base menu is
x:\menus\acad.mnc,
and use MENULOAD to load the other menus. The user is now free to edit
the
user's toolbars as much as they want; they cannot make changes to the
standard
ACAD toolbars, but they can use all of the toolbar buttons as resources
to
create new custom toolbars.
Matt
mstachoni@home.com
mstachoni@beyerdesign.com
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