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Who Created This Drawing?


PaulS00

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Being the CAD standards manager for my firm, I'm sick of people creating drawings without the template, which is set in CAD to automatically do anyway. Mainly it's people that have the bad habit of "SaveAs'ing."

 

When I pull up the drawing file properties, all it gives me are the date it was created and "Last saved by." Is there any software out there that allows me to view the drawing history?

 

The problem here is that people don't own up to their mistakes and tracking down drawing history of who did what (and WHY) is worse than pulling teeth around.

 

Suggestions?

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I used to run a batch file, at a previous company, it would search the entire network and record an entry into a text file,for every *.dwg that was opened. It would record the file name, the time it was opened and the person who had it open. And also when a file was closed. This ran in the background on my computer continuously checking for files opening or closing. You could then open the list in excel and sort it by user or drawing etc. This only worked on a network though. I'm pretty sure there are programs out there that do this sort of thing.

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I think informing the users of the benefits of the template is the best way to get them to use it. When they come to you with a problem with a drawing, ask them if it was created with the template. Kinda like IT asks if you rebooted,

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I downloaded from here a log program it tracks everything some does inside autocad time start time finish what commands used how many coffees etc it is loaded via Autoload in our case it was on the server so loads every time a session of autocad is started it works great, I kept it quite its really snooping on staff. Stopped using it, Productivity_Analisys_Tool.lsp if you need a copy let me know.

 

Pretty sure you can get created by will try to find.

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http://www.cadtempo.com/

 

This might be what you're after.

Thanks for the mention Tannar.

 

 

PaulS00 Here's a partial screen cap of some of the history data that CadTempo can provide. The 30 day trial may be enough to dissuade your people from not complying with your standard.

History.jpg

Edited by Patrick Hughes
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It would be pretty simple to have a startup lisp that just writes to a text file when a user opens a drawing, you can retrieve the "user id" of a pc from autocad, found it (getenv "computername") (getenv "username") you know who it was and which computer they used.

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Thanks for all the responses!

 

I think informing the users of the benefits of the template is the best way to get them to use it. When they come to you with a problem with a drawing, ask them if it was created with the template. Kinda like IT asks if you rebooted,

 

There are some people that have a bad habit of "save as 'ing" old drawings that were pre-template and those from other firms.

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Teach them to copy and paste into the template.

 

I have tried many times and I am a Nazi about it. Once I finish the company standards, each CAD user will sign an agreement that they must adhere to the company standards. Any deviation without a reasonable explanation and they'll have to fix the drawing(s) on their own time. When I proposed that a while back everyone's ears perked up real quick.

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