wstewart
11th Oct 2006, 06:55 pm
Hi, I've been an IT tech for many years, but recently came to work for my first architectural firm.
It's a small business, maybe 56 people total, with 30 cad operators.
I know there's no real "standard" by which cad shops run, but from what many new people who come here tell me, we are probably quite unique in many respects. So much so that we probably have a great deal of room for improvement.
Since I have little experience in the CAD world, I was hoping someone with a few years of CAD support under thier belt advise me on just a few questions:
1. Sharing drawings - Of course we need to share stuff with consultants and clients all the time. We use an FTP site but I swear I'm spending a huge amount of time just educating others on how to connect to it. In my previous IT world, FTP was pretty transparent, but in this world it seems like it's voodoo magic. How do you share drawings? What kind of security do you demand?
2. E-mail - E-mail is used for everything, and documentation archival is priority one. Pictures, drawings, everything is an attachment, and a 30X42 .tiff is ENORMOUS. How do you limit e-mail? Do you use mail restrictions? Do you copy e-mail into file shares or use some public folder method?
3. Data archival - When I joined this firm almost 3 years ago, we were creating about 200 MB / month of data. Adding new cad folks, and expanding our marketing team has increased that to nearly 2 GB a month and the rate is increasing. We've already started using SketchUp in addition to Autocad & considering Revit.
Obviously this results in redundant data (I know it shouldn't, but it does). I've recently stopped doing full backups nightly and have started incremental backups over the course of a week to eliminate nearly 23 hours a day where the tapes are running. What are your backup methods and how much are you backing up? We have about 360GB of data live now which needs to be readily available and backed up. So we're small but obviously growing.
I could go on and on and on and on, but I will keep it to three and eagerly await any personal experience you'd be willing to share. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this!
Edit: If this isn't an appropriate place for these questions, I apologize. If you know of another forum which is more suited for IT issues in a CAD environment I would love some direction.
It's a small business, maybe 56 people total, with 30 cad operators.
I know there's no real "standard" by which cad shops run, but from what many new people who come here tell me, we are probably quite unique in many respects. So much so that we probably have a great deal of room for improvement.
Since I have little experience in the CAD world, I was hoping someone with a few years of CAD support under thier belt advise me on just a few questions:
1. Sharing drawings - Of course we need to share stuff with consultants and clients all the time. We use an FTP site but I swear I'm spending a huge amount of time just educating others on how to connect to it. In my previous IT world, FTP was pretty transparent, but in this world it seems like it's voodoo magic. How do you share drawings? What kind of security do you demand?
2. E-mail - E-mail is used for everything, and documentation archival is priority one. Pictures, drawings, everything is an attachment, and a 30X42 .tiff is ENORMOUS. How do you limit e-mail? Do you use mail restrictions? Do you copy e-mail into file shares or use some public folder method?
3. Data archival - When I joined this firm almost 3 years ago, we were creating about 200 MB / month of data. Adding new cad folks, and expanding our marketing team has increased that to nearly 2 GB a month and the rate is increasing. We've already started using SketchUp in addition to Autocad & considering Revit.
Obviously this results in redundant data (I know it shouldn't, but it does). I've recently stopped doing full backups nightly and have started incremental backups over the course of a week to eliminate nearly 23 hours a day where the tapes are running. What are your backup methods and how much are you backing up? We have about 360GB of data live now which needs to be readily available and backed up. So we're small but obviously growing.
I could go on and on and on and on, but I will keep it to three and eagerly await any personal experience you'd be willing to share. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this!
Edit: If this isn't an appropriate place for these questions, I apologize. If you know of another forum which is more suited for IT issues in a CAD environment I would love some direction.