First, a heartfelt “Thank you!” to those of you who read my post on Carson’s allergy and replied with kind words and donations. My wife was stunned by the support from all of you.

A couple of interesting articles popped up while I was visiting MidWest Cad’s great event in Kansas City on Wednesday, and wanted to share them with you. Congratulations to Harry Ward and Reiko Lewis of Outsource Incorporated. They’ve been acquired by Carlson Software to provide training and services to Carlson clients. Harry’s been a great leader in the industry, and has written a great book on Civil 3D that approaches the program from the young engineer’s perspective. We wish he and Reiko best of luck, and look forward to working with them more in the future.

Also, our client GBA was featured in the most recent GIS Tech News from Cadalyst. Andrew Roe spent time talking to the pilot project team at GBA and briefly with me as well. I think it should be required reading for those of you getting ready to kick off a pilot. And in spite of being quoted that “Vault is a solution in search of a problem,” I’m coming around.

I had a chance to visit with Dan Philbrick yesterday regarding Vault in some detail. In a recent NG post, someone queried if Vault was here to stay. I think I can answer with a resounding, “Yes!” There continue to be issues with Vault from a user and IT perspective, but remember that from the Autodesk view, Vault IS a mature and ongoing product. They’ve had a long time perfecting the interaction with the Mechanical side of the house. We will see the same sort of refinement in the near future from the Civil side. Remember, if you don’t even try Vault, you don’t have any way to offer input! I spent a lot of time talking with Dan regarding the Civil interaction with Vault, and the Civil firms’ requirements from an IT standpoint. I honestly think that you’ll see some tremendous improvements in the C3D & Vault interaction in the next release.

While I might not have chosen Vault for my C3D project tool, I think it is a better long-term solution than shortcuts. Primarily, this is because you’re dealing with data at a project level instead of individual files. These xml files must be managed manually, and users must be aware of any changes to naming convention or if a substitution is made at a project element level. I think this will eventually bite someone, and they’ll wonder why they didn’t investigate Vault further. I’ll be posting our alternative to Danny Counts’ Vault workflow in the next week. I hope you’ll find it useful.

And a final note for those of you that have tested and reviewed our HEC-RAS tool for C3D. We’ll be releasing it next week, at a price designed to make it pay for itself the first time you use it. You can get a demo by e-mailing ras@civil3d.com.