CADnection Fuses AutoCAD and SharePoint

CADnection unifies the strengths of AutoCAD and SharePoint by improving productivity, overall product quality and time to market for AutoCAD users of all kinds. The CADnection solution has been specifically designed to leverage SharePoint's ability to manage and ensure the integrity of drawings and reference files (XREFS), facilitate search and retrieval based on drawing content, and control access to drawing data both internally and externally.  CADnection's ability to be quickly implemented coupled with a cost effective pricing structure, ultimately offers customers a high value solution with a quick ROI. CADnection is particularly salient for firms that may already leverage SharePoint for managing other business content.

SharePoint by Microsoft is a single platform for intranet, Internet, and extranet applications that enables businesses to manage content, improve business insight and simplify internal and external collaboration.

Simon Floyd, Worldwide Industry Technology Strategist for Product Lifecycle Management, Microsoft Corp. says, "SharePoint's strength as a platform for collaboration in an industry context is exemplified by CADnection. The CAD data management needs of construction and engineering operations are well addressed with this solution, which provides the ability to manage CAD files, their dependencies and metadata in one easy-to- use environment."

AutoCAD users are able to check-out/check-in their drawings and reference files to SharePoint from directly within the AutoCAD interface. Anyone with an Internet browser can access these drawings in the same manner as any other documents managed in SharePoint.  Special features allow for a quick search, view and launch of AutoCAD projects.

Optional wizards guide the exchange processes between AutoCAD and SharePoint, including search, check-out and check-in activities, making the network easy to navigate.  Access controls and other security measures can be assigned within the SharePoint environment.

"We are excited about bringing such a powerful, yet simple solution to the market," says David Wolfe, Chief Marketing Officer for CADnection.  "CADnection is designed to allow users immediate use of the integration.  AutoCAD users can now seamlessly take advantage of SharePoint's content management and collaboration capabilities."

SharePoint delivers a full set of data management capabilities, which now perfectly complement the needs of engineering and architecture organizations, including access controls, the locking and unlocking drawings and reference files, revision management, as well as extensive collaboration and workflow capabilities.

Within the AutoCAD application, users can quickly search and retrieve drawings based on metadata and/or content via the SharePoint search engine.

Additional integration features include the ability to map AutoCAD drawing properties and attribute tags to SharePoint properties.  Information from the AutoCAD file may also be updated to SharePoint during the check-in process.  Likewise, drawing properties maintained in SharePoint can be updated and reflected back in the AutoCAD file during check-out.

CADnection utilizes the Microsoft .NET framework adopted by Autodesk.  As a result, users maintain the unique functionality and strengths of each application.