Steve Johnson’s more Autocad based blog nauseam has an interesting question today: Trusting Autodesk? Contemplating a new product. Go over and take a spin through the thought process of dealing with new offerings from Autodesk.
How many of you remember Field Survey and its joyous interactions? How many of you think these questions still apply to C3D? Fire off here or at Steve’s site.
Very good set of questions that has to make CAD Managers around the world second guess their trust in Autodesk since the release of Civil 3D.
In Steve’s introduction the point that really stands out to me is…
“Each drawing used or issued by this utility is a legal document with a potentially very long life ahead of it.” and “…we need to know that the electronic drawings produced with it are going to be fully functional in the long term.”
Based on this major, major, major need, (not a wish), I don’t think anyone has any honest “trust” in Autodesk when it comes to Civil 3D. There currently is no faith that anyone can take a drawing file from Civil 3D 2007 or 2008 and open the file up in Civil 3D 2009 or 2010 and feel confident that the file is free from any display changes or corruptions.
The only way that you can feel somewhat safe in archiving for use, years down the road, is to have 2 or 3 copies of the project files.
1. Fully dynamic and intact Civil 3D drawing files, and hope that you can open them up in the next release of Civil 3D without any problems.
2. Export all files down into the old “trusting” legacy entities so that you can at least open the files up and plot efficiently knowing that nothing has dynamically changed.
3. Export all the data to LandXML files, for keep sake, in case you have to revert back to the legacy set of drawings. This will at least allow you to import the data back in to make any changes efficiently, rather than manually drafting.
#1 from this list is the only item that should really need saved or archived to have the “trust” in my book.
Do I “trust” Autodesk will make strides every year to make this better?
Of Course!