Expose drawing metadata to windows explorer

[GilesPhillips]

Long story short: My new boss wants us (all cad operators) to put revision letters/numbers in our file names, thus breaking any link with the sheet set.

I've told him its a bad idea, and so far they (management) have backed off, however their underlying desire is to have the status of a file visible within windows. 

I need to find some way for this to happen before they change their minds and then force us to change our working practices (for the worst IMO). 

Autocad can edit the drawing properties using the DWGPROP command, which allows editing of some tags that can be seen when right-clicking on a dwg-file in explorer, and selecting properties. However none of the properties shown will appear in windows 7 detail view when viewing that folder - I've trued turning on and off all the additional columns, yet none show that data.

Is there either a way of getting windows to show a Drawing version number in detail view? Either by manipulating some other metadata, or coaxing windows into showing the data we've easy access to?

Ideally I'd like this to happen without resorting to code, as we've got LT users in similar bind, but beggers can't be choosers here..

[dgorsman]

Might be time to start looking at Vault or some other document management system.  If you need to put in a bunch of work anyways, maybe its worth it to have something which will provide and manage metadata for *all* document types, not just the drawings.  Who knows, maybe they will dig the revision and access controls.

On a smaller scale, maybe build a stand-alone application which acts as a Windows Explorer type window but transparently provides the functions you are looking for.

[GilesPhillips]

Our IT boys are rolling out office 365 at the moment, though not with immediate designs on CAD files, I can see someone wanting it to happen - that's another can of worms in itself as I'm not sure that 365 plays nicely with CAD - Vault may yet be an answer if we're going over to full document management system.

I'd prefer not to have to rely on 3rd party apps or plugins at this point as my boss wants to 'keep things simple' 

Attached is the issue I'm facing - there's a comments field in the drawing properties that I can access easily enough within cad, yet it doesn't relate to the comments field shown by windows. 

[scot-65]

Did you tab over to the Custom tab?

Data entered here via DWGPROPS command, Custom tab.

???

[GilesPhillips]

As per my first post, the problem with that approach is that any data entered isn't visible to someone browsing unless they actually interrogate each file. 

What I/my boss want to see is a list of files with a list of revision numbers/statuses next to them.

It seems daft that MS can integrage a million different parameters into the browsing experience, yet Autocad can't access any of them.

[dgorsman]

Not just AutoCAD - I've been doing some digging and this is commonplace.  I think this is the point where most are moving to an EDMS type system which stores the information separately from the file and provides an interface to bring them together.

[Anonymous]

There is an app from JTB World in the app store.  I haven't tried it myself, I would be interested in feedback.

Show the DWG and DXF properties and metadata in Explorer columns.

https://apps.autodesk.com/ACD/en/Detail/Index?id=1645216219079819195&appLang=en&os=Win32_64