Document Management for Drawings: Overview

Note : Document Management for Drawings is not available for Archibus SaaS.

The Smart Client and the Smart Client Extension for AutoCAD offer Document Management for Drawings feature, which is accessible from the Drawing List.

Once an administrator enables these features , CAD specialists can formally check out and lock drawings to work on them on their local machines. When they are done, they check in the drawings and unlock them. The program tracks all drawing changes for review and audit purposes.

The check-out and check-in features use Web Services so that they can deliver drawings over the Internet and not just over a LAN or WAN.

When the drawing management features are enabled, the Enterprise Graphics publishing feature also uses Web Services to upload published graphics so that CAD specialists can update, over the Internet, a central server with graphics changes. That is, CAD specialists can update over the Web the CAD graphics that the rest of the enterprise uses without needing file-level access to the central servers.

Constituency	Feature or Use Case	Benefit
Enterprise deployments with remote CAD teams	Each site or remote office can manage their own drawings and changes, yet keep the drawings completely synchronized with the full drawing set stored on the central server.	Divide the responsibility for maintaining drawing sets with thousands of drawings, yet still maintain centralized control, auditing, and backup of your data and complete drawing set.
Sites with Software as a Service (SaaS) Deployments	Sites can outsource their Archibus hosting, yet still work on drawings using their own copy of AutoCAD.	Outsource IT and hardware yet still retain the flexibility, control, and rapid editing that you need to work on your CAD drawings and BIM models.
Customers with outsourced or off-shored drafting	Sites can outsource their CAD drafting to third-parties or offshore companies.	Maintain your drawings in a cost-effective manner, yet still keep the centralized data, drawing sets, and enterprise graphics under your control and up-to-date.
Architecture and A/E Firms	Architects can access a customer's drawings and work on them while remaining 100% in live synch with the customer’s standards, such as building and department names, room standards, account codes, and employee lists.	Outsource work and share data to make most effective use of CAD skills without the overhead and data duplication that is associated with manually transferring drawing files.
CAD Managers	Reduce errors and oversight of large drawing sets because Archibus Web Services perform real-time validation of entered values	CAD Managers can use the revision history tools to see which staffers or outsourced contractors changed each drawing, when they changed it, and what changes they made. CAD Managers can use the Virtual-Private Archibus features to give CAD teams visibility and access to only the drawings they are responsible for. Release the energy of your staff and your outsourced team to make changes quickly and effectively without losing central auditing, security, and backup of your drawings.
CAD Specialists	CAD Specialists can use the AutoCAD desktop tools with which they are familiar and can use the full power of the processors in their CAD workstations.	Use Archibus with a minimal CAD learning curve and without giving up editing speed and performance. Lock your drawings while editing to make certain that no one else on the large, distributed team will overwrite your work.
IT Managers	IT managers can enable CAD or BIM workstations to work with their existing software with one small plug-in – the Archibus Smart Client Extension for AutoCAD.	Use the automatic reinstall feature to update the plug-in on all workstations at once just by placing a new version on the central server. Centralize security, authentication, user permission, data storage, and backups yet allow real estate and facilities to use the professional desktop tools they demand. Eliminate the need for Citrix and remote desktop configurations for CAD, which are often hardware intensive, slow-performing, and complex to license, secure, and administrate.