"Drawing Manager" Tool...

Hey guys,

This thread is sort of following up on another topic I started (here). I just wanted to enquire about the complexity of creating such a program.

Backtracking a little... Currently the drawing office I work in uses ACAD2012 with Prosteel, we are steel shop detailers and most of our jobs contain upwards of 500 individual .DWGs. Prior to us using Prosteel, we used another ACAD addon program called EasySteel - which had a very useful "Drawing Manager" tool built in.

This drawing manager was executed/initiated from with ACAD, while having the master model open for any particular job. The Drawing Manager had the ability to see all the available .DWGs within the current models 'Drawing' directory, as well as read & display attribute tag values from the drawing's title block (for example, you could see the drawings number, title, revision, scale, etc). From within the DM you could open and plot .DWGs, and also update title block values (attribute tags).

Unfortunately, Prosteel has no such drawing management tool, and at this stage we have just been using Windows Explorer (and recently Directory Opus).

Just wondering if anyone has had any experience using such a program or if anyone knows of any suggestions for programs which might be worthy substitute.

Or.... if anyone has any interest in creating such a program - I feel the limited experience I have with LISP would be no where near sufficient to even know where to begin. I am not quite at the stage of hiring anyone just yet, but I would welcome some discussion about how mammoth the task would be (and how much someone would charge for creating such a program), and if it would even be worth me perusing or if you guys think I should just keep it simple and use what I currently have.

Looking forward to hearing some feedback.