My company has two offices located several hundred miles apart. The offices are relatively small in size, with 10 employees in one site, and about 15 in the other. Both sites are using the same version of AutoCAD.

Is there any product that can enable both the sites to work from a single server, or would a Distributed File System (DFS) be a better option? I'm mainly concerned about the File Locks and the Reference Files, if using the DFS solution.

Is there a Document Management product available for AutoCAD?

I have both sites currently connected by T1s and a VPN.

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks ,
Gary

Gary,

You say you have a VPN. Is that the only connection point between the two offices?

Mathew

Vault is _A_ document manager for Autodesk products, one of many. There are other choices, (Adept, Columbus, Projectwise, etc) which may have significant advantages in some environments.

In as much as Vault is not a profit center for Adesk, I'm seeing little effort being put into making it a quality EDMS for AutoCAD.

Mathew

Take a look at the Riverbed Steelhead products.

We've got Steelheads and they're good to a point, but with the advent of the new drawing format in R2007/2008 they can no longer transfer just the changed bits of a file, the way it worked with earlier AutoCAD versions. If you save or open a 2007/2008 file over the WAN that has changes, there is no acceleration. They're still good for other file optimization, email, etc.

One of our partners implemented Riverbed Steelheads some time back. They told that the product was incredibly simple to install, and demonstrated efficient bandwidth results and latency improvements.