Looking for a way to lock dwgs from certain users & log commands between saves

[kristian.pal86]

I am looking for some advice on some current issues we are having in my office.

We have mysterious unidentified people who are changing the drawings from one day to the next and we are having trouble keeping our drawings in order.  Because of this I am hoping to impliment a system which would allow us to have a folder filled with our completed sheets, and these sheets would only be accessible by certain people within the network. Also but not necessarily related, I would like to find a way where AutoCAD would log the goings-on of drawings, insofaras that it would create a notepad in a separate folder with when the drawing was opened and when it was saved and closed. If it logged the drawing commands performed during that time the drawing was open that would also be useful but not imperative. 

If anyone could point me in some direction or give me some advice as to what the best approuch to something like this would be. I am new to the community but interested in getting involved. I am an experienced Autocad user who is learning AutoLISP routines right now and am eager to continue learning in this field.

Thanks again

[doni49 · Accepted solution]

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@kristian.pal86 wrote:

I am looking for some advice on some current issues we are having in my office.

We have mysterious unidentified people who are changing the drawings from one day to the next and we are having trouble keeping our drawings in order.  Because of this I am hoping to impliment a system which would allow us to have a folder filled with our completed sheets, and these sheets would only be accessible by certain people within the network. Also but not necessarily related, I would like to find a way where AutoCAD would log the goings-on of drawings, insofaras that it would create a notepad in a separate folder with when the drawing was opened and when it was saved and closed. If it logged the drawing commands performed during that time the drawing was open that would also be useful but not imperative. 

If anyone could point me in some direction or give me some advice as to what the best approuch to something like this would be. I am new to the community but interested in getting involved. I am an experienced Autocad user who is learning AutoLISP routines right now and am eager to continue learning in this field.

Thanks again

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Access permissions is handled by the network OS.  Your IT dept can grant to (or withdraw from) specific users/groups the permissions to read/write files in specified folders.  They can even make it so that people can read but not write to a file.

If you want to log file access, that could be done via autolisp -- although it could be bypassed if the user knows what they're doing and don't want to be tracked.  But you'd be better off posting this question over in the Autolisp forum.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/visual-lisp-autolisp-and-general/bd-p/130

[kristian.pal86]

thanks for your quick reply, i will try that forum now 🙂

sent out my first kudos!

[martti.halminen]

In addition to the operating system -level administration and ad hoc logging, you might think about setting up a lightweight PDM system.

There is plenty of choice, almost every PDM system on the planet claims to be able to handle AutoCAD.

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